Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) - "Fight Fiercely Harvard"

Tom Lehrer, who died yesterday at 97, began writing songs when he was a student at Harvard College, majoring in math, in the 1940s. One of his earliest efforts, "Fight Fiercely Harvard," in the clip above, was a fey take on college football fight songs. The presence of "albeit" in the lyrics tells us we're not exactly on the scrimmage line. Unfortunately, current events have made the song timely, though not in a way related to football.

Though he enjoyed success as a songwriter and performer, for Lehrer music was an avocation. He had a long career as an academic mathematician and scientist, a pursuit that inspired several of his songs, including Lobachevsky (this and the next two linked songs are from live performances and begin with some, I think, amusing chatter). Many of his songs, like We Will All Go Together When We Go ("When the air becomes uraneous/We will all go simultaneous"), had dark, sardonic lyrics set to lively, happy tunes. He was a fan of the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Victorian London's precursor to Broadway, and used the tune of "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,"from The Pirates of Penzance, for The Elements, another math and science inspired song. Although he was on the Harvard and MIT faculties for many years, in his later ones he taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Life in California inspired him to write (I'm Spending) Hannukah in Santa Monica. 

Despite his talent, popularity, and wisdom in many fields, Tom Lehrer was a humble man. At the beginning of his website, Tom Lehrer Songs, he released all his works to the public domain. He had a good. long life, but will be missed.

Box of Rain (2013 Remaster); remembering Phil Lesh (1940-2024)

Sometime in the mid to late '70s -- why this sticks in my mind I don't know -- I saw a large piece of graffiti, simply "PHIL LESH," on the side of a building. I remember thinking he was part of the Grateful Dead, but wasn't sure what part he played. Whatever it was, I thought, it must be important to justify such a tribute.

Now that he has died, I know from his New York Times obituary that he played bass, sang harmony, and occasionally did lead vocals. His vocal is the lead in "Box of Rain" (video above), a song he co-wrote with frequent Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, as a tribute to Lesh's father, who was dying of cancer at the time.

Lesh's father, a piano player, encouraged his son to take up music. Lesh is part of that small set of rockers, like Elton John and the Van Halen brothers, who can be described as "classically trained." His early training included learning to play classical pieces on violin and trumpet, and later he studied under the contemporary Italian composer Luciano Berio. Lesh was also fond of big band and be-bop jazz. These influences showed in his performance as the Dead's bassist. As New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles put it in this piece, 

Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.

As Pareles also noted:

His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.

The reference to bluegrass, a style of music I've long enjoyed, intrigued me. According to the Times obituary, Lesh first met Jerry Garcia when Garcia was playing bluegrass banjo at local East Bay nightclubs. The obituary quotes Lesh on hearing Garcia on banjo:

That was my first intimation that music with that kind of directness and simplicity could deliver an aesthetic and emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operatic or symphonic works.

Lesh told Garcia he wanted to learn to play bass. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Thomas Curtiss, Jr., 1941-2023

The photo is of one of the the last times Tom Curtiss and I were together, some years ago, when he and his husband, Charles Neeley, visited New York from L.A., and Martha and I had lunch with them at a Midtown restauruant.

Tom and I were classmates at Harvard Law School from 1967 to 1970.  He stood out in the photo book given to entering students because he was wearing a dress Marine Corps officer's uniform. It showed his home as Novelty, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. We didn't have much contact during our first or second years. The third year we both joined a club for law students called Lincoln's Inn, named for one of the London Inns of Court. After we had been together there during meals and parties, he invited me to join a group that met in his large corner dorm room on Friday evenings to drink beer or cheap Scotch, socialize, and listen to tapes on his Akai reel-to-reel deck. These included Joan Baez's Farewell Angelina, Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home,and a collection of Wagner orchestral pieces, including the overture to Die Meistersinger.

The gatherings at "Club 222," as we called it after Tom's dorm room number, were typically all male. Tom was known to date women from time to time. One, a fellow Clevelander, became known by the sobriquet "Long Suffering Kate." There was a proposal to open membership in Lincoln's Inn, which had been male only, to women. I was in favor. Tom said, "A woman should be a date on your arm, not a competitor for a seat at a table." Tom lost; women were admitted. 

Tom had the sort of background that, before I arrived in Cambridge, I feared most of my classmates would have, and that would make them consider me, a public school and state university graduate from the South, something of a yokel. He was a corporate executive's son with impeccable prep and Ivy credentials: Exeter and Yale. The friends he chose for Club 222 didn't conform to those specifications.  They were more like our class as a whole, except for the absence of women or Blacks, both of which groups were under-represented in our class.  They were almost all non-Ivy graduates, about half from state schools, and from middle class families with homes in various parts of the country.

As Tom and I spent more time together we found common interests beyond drinking and music. I was from a military family, and was in Army ROTC during law school as draft deferments for graduate students had ended the year I entered. Tom had deferred law school to join the Marines. He told me he had been accepted by both the Harvard and University of Virginia law schools during his senior year at Yale. When his four year Marine Corps tour of duty was almost over, he wrote to both schools, noting that he had been accepted before going on active duty, and asking if he could now attend. Virginia turned him down, saying their admission standards had increased, but Harvard said he was still welcome. Tom gave me some advice on what to expect during my active duty term. We also found a common passion in running. One time, after the party at 222 went later than usual, I collapsed on his couch. In the morning he said he was going for a run and invited me to join him. We ran down to the Cambridge bank of the Charles River, went about half a mile downstream, crossed to the Boston side, then ran back. We repeated this several times before graduation. 

I found a law firm in New York that was willing to take me on knowing I would have to leave for a possible two year Army commitment a year after graduation. Tom chose a firm in Los Angeles, a city he had come to love during his active duty Marine years. In October of 1970 I took my first vacation from my law firm and visited Tom in L.A., a city with which I was then unfamiliar. Tom was sharing an apartment with Joe, another Marine, Tom told me there's no such thing as an "ex-Marine"; one is a Marine for life. He suggested dinner at a Mexican restaurant. We got in his car and went a mile or so on the freeway, exited, and found the restaurant closed. He said, "There's another not too far away." We got back on the freeway and went what seemed like three or four miles in the direction opposite from which we'd come. We had a delicious Mexican meal, and I gained an appreciation of what "not too far" means in L.A. terms.

The rest of our short visit Tom showed me the Santa Monica Pier and some things off the usual tourist trail. One of these was a sprawling outdoor farmers' market. Several years later he told me he had walked by a live poultry stand and spotted an unusual looking rooster. Intrigued, Tom bought him and took him to the backyard of the house he'd bought on Micheltorena Street, where he made a coop. Hearing his staccato crowing the next morning, Tom gave him the ironic name Chanticleer.

Over the succeeding years Tom and I got together in L.A. and New York several times, and once at a Law School reunion. After a succession of housemates, Charles Neeley became a constant. I began to suspect that Charles was more than a housemate when Tom called and said both of them would be staying in New York for a few days before leaving on a trip to Europe.  During that visit Martha had a commitment one afternoon, so Tom, Charles, and I took Cordelia (then known as Liz) in her stroller on a tour of SoHo and the Village. Martha developed an immediate liking for both Tom and Charles.

Their last visit to New York was about fifteen years ago. They went with Martha, Cordelia, and me to mass at Grace Church, and after to brunch at Jack the Horse Tavern, a favorite neighborhood spot named for a lake in Minnesota, the owner's native state. During brunch, I asked Tom if, during our law school years, he'd been so far in the closet he didn't know he was there. He said , "No"; he had known he was gay since his teens. He also said he'd had a discreet affair with one of the Club 222 members.

After brunch I invited Tom and Charles to join me on a walk down to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Tom regretted that he couldn't; he was bothred by neuropathy. After that his health went into decline, and our communications became, apart from Christmas cards, exclusively electronic. It came as no surprise when Charles announced his death on December 23.

Tom's and my friendship lasted over fifty years. We came from different backgrounds and had some differing views, but it was a friendship from which I believe we both benefited. I will miss him.

Sir George Martin (1926-2016), Brian Wilson, and "God Only Knows".

I wanted to do a TBT about Sir George Martin, who died last week, but responsibilities to work, family, and the Brooklyn Heights Blog got in the way. My natural first impulse was to use something he'd done with the Beatles, since his career was so intertwined with theirs. In the Rolling Stone piece linked above, Sir George is quoted as saying he had initial doubts about the four Liverpudlian lads, but that one of the things that impressed him was that "there was more than one person singing." There were harmony vocals in doo-wop and girl group pop at the time, but straight ahead rock, with the exception of the Everly Brothers, was dominated by solo singers.

I was delighted to discover the clip below, which documents a meeting of Sir George and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Sir George credits the Beach Boys as an influence on the Beatles; surely there was a complementary one in the opposite direction. The Beach Boys' early work was built on Chuck Berry riffs and vocal harmonies from quartets like The Four Freshmen, whose music today would be classified as "easy listening". The Beatles were influenced by Berry (they covered "Roll Over Beethoven") and other American rock and rockabilly stars, but also by skiffle--the Beatles grew out of a skiffle group led by John Lennon called the Quarrymen--and by something that didn't come to the fore until Sgt. Pepper, the British music hall tradition.
. In the video, Brian begins the conversation by talking about songwriting; about how songs seem to burst from his chest. Then they repair from the piano to the mixing board, where Sir George plays with the knobs, first reducing the song "God Only Knows" to its bare essential: Brian's vocal. Sir George then plays with the knobs some more, adding bits back in and changing the balance, until he creates a mix that Brian credits as better than the one that was used on the Beach Boys' most critically acclaimed album, Pet Sounds.

Oh, and I do love Sir George's early 1960s red Caddy convertible.

Photo: By Adamsharp (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

TBT: The Grateful Dead, "Cumberland Blues."

I am not now, nor was I ever, a Deadhead. I will confess--it is a confession, as I have some friends among the rock cognoscenti who make hatred of the Grateful Dead a kind of verbal secret handshake--that I do like, indeed like very much, some of their stuff. Since they officially disbanded last week, this seems a good time to acknowledge that.

Workingman's Dead is an album I love. All right, I love it mostly because it was the first music I heard after a terrifying ride, helmetless, on the back of a friend's motorcycle along California's coast and cliff hugging Highway One for about twenty miles ("How fast were we going?" "Oh, about eighty on the straights.") in October of 1970. After we re-crossed the Coast Range and headed back into Palo Alto, we stopped at the house of a friend of my friend, who greeted us warmly and invited us in where his wife provided a bottle of liebfraumilch and a pipe filled with Mexico's finest.  Our host asked if we'd heard the new Dead album. We shook our heads "no,"and he put it on. Well the first days are the hardest days, don't you worry anymore.... Yeah! I'm alive!


After I got the album and listened to it a few times, I decided that "Cumberland Blues," with its bluegrass accents, was my favorite. Hear it above.

Poster image: Brooklyn Museum; Wes Wilson.

TBT: The Kingston Trio, "South Coast"

I've written before about the Kingston Trio, who were favorites of mine in my youth, and whose music I still enjoy. Back when they were at the peak of their popularity, in the late 1950s through the mid '60s, folk music purists derided them as button-down shirt wearing poseurs; rich white guys getting richer off poor people's music. There was some truth to this, and today they would be censured, and rightly so, for their fake "Speedy Gonzalez" accents in songs like "Coplas" and "En El Agua." But the majority of their work was, in my opinion, quite good, and some of it superb. They can, I think be credited with introducing American audiences to what came to be called "world music."


"South Coast" is a song I've long liked, but I wondered if, as the Trio claim in their introduction to it during their performance at San Francisco's "Hungry i" club in 1958, which was recorded for their first live album, that it was "written 150 years ago." It wasn't; the lyrics were written by Lillian Bos Ross (1898-1959), author of The Stranger in Big Sur, with music by Sam Eskin and Rich Dehr. This isn't the only error in the Trio's intro; they also refer to "the Big Sur area of the Monterey Peninsula." The Big Sur is south of the Monterey Peninsula. Enjoy the song anyway.

The CalTex Series

With both the Phillies and Rays eliminated, I lost both teams I could have a strong reason (Tampa is my old home town; Pennsylvania my native state) to support in this year's World Series. With the Yankees out, I also lost the one team I loathe (actually, in the interest of boosting the local economy, I was rooting for the Yanks to win the AL championship, then lose the Series in seven games to either the Giants or Phils). So, I'm left to decide between the Giants and the Rangers, or simply to sit back and watch without taking sides. 


Reasons for supporting the Giants: (1) they are the representative of the Real Baseball League, as opposed to the Designated Hitter League; (2) my maternal grandfather was born and raised in California, so I'm one of those odd people who can claim roots there without ever having been a resdient; (3) my earliest baseball memory is of Willie Mays making a spectacular catch in the 1954 Series (New York Giants vs. Cleveland Indians); and (4) I love San Francisco.


Reasons for supporting the Rangers: (1) they're scrappy, low-salary underdogs; and (2) I love Texas (really; scroll down to the addendum to the linked post).

By a score of 4-2, the Giants win my loyalty.


Update: So far, so good. Giants dodge one Cliff Lee bullet.

Second update: Giants "Cain" rangers, 9-0 to take 2-0 Series lead.

Paulina Sinaga: a Polish siren in Ontario.

Ontario, California, that is. Back in 1983, low-budget movie genius Mark Pirro gave us A Polish Vampire in Burbank, which included, among its highlights, this delightful Sonny and Cher cover by brother-sister duo Steve and Bobbi Dorsch:


Today, in Ontario, not too far from Burbank, there lives a Polish singer and ukulele strummer par excellence named Paulina Sinaga, who my friend Michael Simmons has dubbed "The First Great Star of the 21st Century." Here she is doing her cover of Weezer's "Island in the Sun", accompanying herself on both uke and kazoo, with supporting action by her cat, Pom Pom:


You can read about, and see and hear more of, the lovely Paulina on her MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube pages.

California wildlife.

Seals, sea lions, and cormorants; Monterey Bay.

Pelicans, Monterey Bay.

Sea otter, Montery Bay.

Whale spout, Fort Funston.

Whale (humpback?) breaking surface, Fort Funston.

Black-tailed deer, Point Reyes.

Californians enjoying the outdoors.

Surfer, near Cliff House, San Francisco.

Hang glider at Fort Funston.

Closer view of hang glider.

On the beach, Fort Funston.

Another Fort Funston beach scene. Note the container ship (inbound, decks stacked with containers, probably loaded with Asian-made goods) and tanker (outbound, in ballast, probably headed to Alaska to load crude for East Bay refineries) passing in the background.

It's all San Andreas' Fault

On a visit to the Point Reyes National Seashore, we began by walking the Earthquake Trail. The displacement between the sections of fence in the photo above (lower to the left, upper to the right) shows the extent to which the land was shifted by the great 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco.

The three posts marking a line going toward the fence in the background show the approximate alignment of the San Andreas Fault. The Fault roughly marks the boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates. So, I can say that, when I took this photo, I was standing on the Pacific Plate, to the west of the Fault, looking at the North American Plate, to the east (and right) of the line extending through the posts.

Fortunately for me, the earth did not move during my visit to this very excitable spot. I'm told that Northern California experienced a small earthquake a few days after we left.

Transcontinental

This is the beginning of the story of a journey and visit, which I'll be posting in pieces from time to time in the next week or so. In my typical bass-ackwards way, I'm starting with the return trip. Herewith the photo log of American Airlines Flight 16, SFO to JFK, on Sunday, August 31, 2008.

San Francisco, with the Bay and Golden Gate bridges, and the Marin Headlands and Pacific Ocean in the background.

Another view of The City, with the financial district and Embarcadero in the foreground, Nob Hill on the near right, and Chinatown and North Beach (home of the Beats in the 1950s) just beyond that. The green swatch on the right is the Presidio, and that on the left is Golden Gate Park. The thin green rectangle extending below that is the Panhandle; to the left of that is Haight-Ashbury, famed as the hippie neighborhood of the late 1960s.


Circular agricultural fields created by center-pivot irrigation systems in a Nevada desert valley.

The northern end of the Great Salt Lake. From the plane, the water near the shore of the Lake looked reddish.

A fertile valley with mountains (the Uintas?) to the east.

Unfortunately,the clouds seen in this photo became a solid overcast (from my point of view, undercast) that hid the Tetons and the Snowy Range from sight as we crossed Wyoming.


Sand hills of western Nebraska.


A typical Great Plains scene: small town with grain elevators and landscape divided into square homestead grant sections.


Confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers, at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.


Milwaukee. Wisconsin is one of three states (the others are South Dakota and Oregon) in which I've never set foot. At least now I have a couple of photos from the air.

New York's Finger Lakes district. From bottom to top: Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga and (very faintly in the background) Owasco lakes.


Hudson River and George Washington Bridge. New Jersey is in the foreground, Manhattan in the center, and the Bronx in the background, separated from Manhattan by the Harlem River, which is here obscured by bluffs on the east side of Manhattan.


Whitestone (foreground) and Throg's Neck bridges, both connecting Queens (on the right) to the Bronx, with the western end of Long Island Sound beyond.


At dusk we were approaching JFK Airport from the south, over the Atlantic. Brooklyn (my home!) is in the background.