I'm (Not) Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica

But I did spend far too much time researching the origin of this late-career Tom Lehrer song.

Dear TCL Readers,

And now for something a little different. Chanukah (That’s how I spell it unless I’m among Yiddishists, and then it’s khanike — more on that later) has been something of a bummer because of recent events, but also a holiday that I’ve decided to take more seriously than in the past. Turns out lighting candles for eight nights actually has some personal spiritual significance! But mostly it’s spurred me to seek out joyful experiences and some degree of irreverence.

Which brings me to Tom Lehrer, long a favorite around these parts, still (?! better not jinx this) alive at the age of ninety-five, outlasting scores of less funny and more damaging people, a Harvard math guy who became an improbable star in the late 1950s writing comedy songs, many of them rather murder-y, with extra-level-sophisticated rhyme schemes. (One of my favorite Lehrer facts: he and Stephen Sondheim, two years his junior, attended the same summer camp when they were kids.)

He stopped touring in the early 1960s, and mostly gave up recording by the end of the decade. There was a songwriting gig for The Electric Company, and a handful more performances (including this gem from 1998!), but Lehrer was basically done by 1973, around the time he said Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize made political satire obsolete. (It didn’t vault him into retirement, though the legend persists.)

All of Lehrer’s work is in the public domain now, and freely available to listen to, re-arrange, and mut(il)ate according to one’s wish. All the recordings are on his website, too, which gave me hours of listening pleasure recently — including the pithy and extremely delightful “Hanukkah in Santa Monica”. For some reason I’d had the impression Lehrer wrote it around the mid-1960s, when he was hired as a songwriter by the short-lived TV show This Was the Week that Was, leading to his last full-length album, This Was the Year That Was, in 1965.

But I was wrong. The origin story and post-release life of “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” is weirder and woollier than I expected.

**

It’s a catchy title and an easy rhyme. But Tom Lehrer wasn’t the first to come up with “Hanukkah in Santa Monica.” It might have been the great comedian Mickey Katz, the clarinetist and Spike Jones alum (and yes, Joel Grey’s father and Jennifer Grey’s grandfather) who fronted a band doing comic, Yiddish-inflected tunes like “Heym Afn Range,” “The Barber and Schlemiel,” and “Duvid Crockett” on several albums and at many, many gigs, sometimes under the heading of Borscht Capades, Farfel Follies, and Halevai Hilarities. But my guess, also because he claimed credit on multiple occasions in later interviews, is that the producer of Katz’s shows, Hal Zeiger, came up with the moniker.

Zeiger (whose surname was often misspelled as “Zieger”) had a colorful professional life, too. Aside from managing Katz’s career, he also became one of the earliest rock promoters and distributors. Ray Charles was one of Zeiger’s clients. Later he produced the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. But Mickey Katz is the performer that Zeiger is most closely associated with, because they did work together on shows for more than two decades.

“Chanukah in Santa Monica” debuted at the end of December 1962 and was held, fittingly, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Katz was the headliner, of course, and as he and Zieger had for the prior fourteen years, assembled a merry band of singers, performers, and other pranksters for this Yiddish-English review. For the 1962 show they included Henny Youngman, Rickie Layne and the puppet Velvel, and Dave Barry (no, not that one.) The show would become an annual end-of-year fixture in Santa Monica well into the 1970s, even as Katz and Zeiger also created revues like “Hello, Solly” and “The Man From Y.A.N.K.E.L.”

Zeiger died in 1982 of a heart attack. Katz died three years later of kidney failure. And a few years later, “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” comes back into consciousness thanks to a once-popular, now-sort-of-cancelled humorist named Garrison Keillor.

**

(Tom Lehrer, 1997)

Keillor’s radio variety program Prairie Home Companion first aired on Saturday nights from 1974 through 1987. He ended it to focus on other projects, but was by no means done with radio. Two years later, Keillor premiered the American Radio Company of the Air, which only really differed from PHC in terms of where it aired (New York, not Minneapolis.) It also needed original material.

From one humorist to another, Keillor convinced Tom Lehrer to come out of semi-retirement. Though apparently the convincing wasn’t too difficult: Keillor’s music director, Rob Fisher, had worked on Tomfoolery, the Cameron Mackintosh-produced revue of Lehrer songs from the early 1980s that played 120 performances off-Broadway, a stint in DC, and extended time in the UK. Fisher and Lehrer remained friends, and so the former could easily call on the latter for song possibilities.

Lehrer wrote three songs for American Radio Company: one was a “Post-Thanksgiving Hymn” (to the traditional tune “We Gather Together”); the second, set to Irving Berlin’s early ragtime hit “Everybody Step”, was called “Everybody Eat.” The final one was “Hanukkah in Santa Monica”, which Keillor commissioned to make a point: there were, at the time, no popular Chanukah songs because no Gentile songwriters had written any, and the Jewish songwriters (like Berlin) were too busy writing Christmas fare. As Lehrer noted about a decade later, “There was thus a deplorable lacuna in the repertoire, which this song, a sort of answer to `White Christmas’ was intended to remedy.”

American Radio Company premiered on November 25, 1989. Keillor’s return merited positive reviews; Lehrer’s songs got a more mixed reception. The Washington Post felt the “pair of Tom Lehrer satires fell flat.” Lehrer gave a short interview with KCRW’s Bob Claster a week after the broadcast in which he was pretty dismissive of his songs (“they’re just parodies”) and joked “they aren’t good enough to record, but they are good enough for public radio.”) Eventually ARC changed its name back to Prairie Home Companion and Keillor moved the whole operation back to Minnesota. Lehrer’s songs still aired, but they didn’t really have staying power. At least not for a few more years.

Then Rhino Records, once the kings of comedy CD reissues, decided to release all of Lehrer’s albums in a single box set. It also included some rarities, like four songs from The Electric Company recorded between 1971 and 1972, and three never-before-recorded songs in a session from 1999, overseen by the man who already knew “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” fairly well: Rob Fisher.

Fisher had, a few years earlier, founded Encores!, the New York City Center program that revived forgotten Broadway shows in concert performances. After Tomfoolery, Fisher picked up extensive conducting and music direction gigs, including four years with Keillor’s American Radio Company. Fisher led the program’s house band, the Coffee Club Orchestra. So when it came time to record these “new” Lehrer songs with a band, Rhino brought in Fisher, who brought in many of his Coffee Club Orchestra personnel.

They included Seymour “Red” Press, the legendary saxophonist who was a decades-long Broadway fixture as the go-to musician contractor for Broadway shows until his death last year at age ninety-eight. (Press also contracted the band for the Lehrer sessions, and played clarinet and flute on the tracks.) They also included trumpeter John Frosk — originally from Manitoba and an alum of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey’s bands — trombonist Jack Gale, guitarist Jay Berliner, clarinetist Lawrence Feldman, drummer Arnold Kinsella, bassist Dick Sarpola, and violinist (and saxophonist) Andy Stein.

The Remains of Tom Lehrer came out in the summer of 2000, and Lehrer gave quite a number of interviews about the box set — to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the AV Club, Australia’s The Music Show, to other venues that aren’t accessible anymore. But “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” didn’t get much attention, beyond being one of the newer tracks. How did it get to the point where it is today, a holiday staple, arranged for choirs, orchestras, and more?

The answer, as best as I can tell, is because of Michael Feinstein, himself a staple of the Manhattan nightclub scene. But in 2000, he wasn’t quite the fixture he would become, though he’d recently opened his own club, Feinstein’s, hosted at the Regency Hotel. (It closed in 2012, reopened at 54 Below in 2015, and left last year.) He did a holiday engagement at his eponymous club and didn’t want to limit himself to Christmas songs — and here was this recently issued song by Tom Lehrer basically falling into his lap. From then on, as Feinstein told Broadway World last year, he’s sung “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” every year “because I did it one time a few years ago as a lark, and now people will always yell it out if I don't sing it.”

The gossip columnist Liz Smith was a massive fan of Feinstein’s, and of his rendition of the song — going so far to reprint the complete lyrics of “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” in one of her columns. When the composer Marvin Hamlisch died in the summer of 2012, Smith revealed that Lehrer’s song “used to throw [Hamlisch] into fits of laughter” when some of his friends would start singing it at their annual Christmas party. One of the party’s hosts? Nora Ephron, who had died six weeks before Hamlisch.

**

It’s quite a journey, from Mickey Katz to Garrison Keillor to Michael Feinstein to Marvin Hamlisch, for one minor holiday novelty song by a lyricist who, if made aware, would probably be as baffled by the entire trajectory as I am. But then, Tom Lehrer, born and raised on the Upper East Side, didn’t really have much attachment to Judaism beyond the cultural, saying more than once that he often quoted one line from James Taylor’s ‘Sweet Baby James’: “Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep.” Recently I found myself irrationally upset when Lehrer was mistakenly referred to, with respect to a compilation album of songs by Jewish songwriters, as “the token goy.”

Lehrer’s musical taste (best embodied in this amazing 1980 Desert Island Discs BBC episode) does make me wonder what, if any, influence Mickey Katz had on his work. I suspect (since efforts to reach him, unsurprisingly, went nowhere) he may have harbored the same suspicion many more intellectually-minded Jews of a certain age did: that Katz was making fun of them for assimilating, that he was too crude, too overt a reminder of what they professed to leave behind. As Samuel Ashworth wrote in his 2018 essay on Katz, “It’s easy to see these songs as presenting to Jews of the ’50s—Jews who wanted more than anything to be accepted as white Americans—a clownish version of themselves that they could pretend they were better than.”

But looking down on Katz misses so much about what made his songs work so well. Craft and musicianship was everything to him; you don’t write a song like “Duvid Crockett” if you don’t have an innate understanding of wordplay, let alone in two languages (Yiddish and English), and as the clarinetist Don Byron, who once recorded an entire album of Katz tunes, once said, “A lot of people thought that Mickey Katz couldn't play,'' he said, ''but there are things he played I couldn't even finger, so that can't be right.”

Katz songs don’t have the sophisticated lyrical palette of a Lehrer song because they don’t have to, but they accomplish similar things: reward multiple listens, provoke delight, discomfort, and sometimes, offense, and move past cynicism to its true roots, disappointed idealism. I mean, a rhyme like “I’m spending Shavuos in East Saint Louis” feels like a Katz riff. So maybe he and Lehrer were closer lyrical kin after all.

**

This essay’s already plenty long so let me close with what I believe fuses Mickey Katz and Tom Lehrer, bringing us more into the present while staying rooted in the past: “khanike in Santa Monica”, Mikhl Yashinsky & Annie Cohen’s Yiddish translation published last year:

Wishing you all a happy Chanukah, a frelekhn likhtikn khanike. Regular crime-oriented programming resumes next week, and then again after the New Year.

Until next time, I remain,

The Crime Lady