November 29, 2005

I've been talking here about the new 6-CD Allan Sherman collection — My Son, the Box — and about how interesting it is for me to re-visit these songs I loved so in my teen years. Not only am I hearing lyrics I'd never understood before but I'm noting things that bother me now that didn't bother me then. As I've become a connoisseur of the great lyric writers, I've come to wince at near-rhymes, like when someone thinks "moon" rhymes with "room" or "unsatisfactory" with "factory." Sherman has some nice joke rhymes in his writing, coupling "home in" with "abdomen" and "belt, sir" with "seltzer" but he also has a lot more of those awkward near-rhymes than I'd remembered. The two I cited are both on his albums. They didn't bother me then but they bother me (a little) now.

It's also struck me, listening to his work in roughly chronological work, that Sherman ran out of steam on his later albums. Every one has some gems but the last few records have a quite a few tunes that suggest a certain paucity of ideas, especially when he gets into the "laundry list" songs that just itemize food items or states or parts of the body. Even some of these are rather pleasant because the arrangements are good and Sherman sings with great enthusiasm and warmth, but he sure seems to run out of creative steam here and there. Once upon a time, the notion of a new Allan Sherman record was such a happy thing that the drop-off in quality didn't bother me a lot. Again, it does now...though not so much that I won't be playing all six CDs over and over for quite a while.

The boxed set contains excellent liner notes by Mark Cohen and they deserve better presentation (like, a larger font) than they get here. Cohen wrote me that he is considering a full-scale biography of the man and I hope he goes ahead with it. It's way overdue and it should be done before any more Sherman associates pass away, uninterviewed.

The set also includes Sherman's previously-unreleased parody of My Fair Lady. At the time Lerner and Loewe refused him permission to spoof their classic Broadway show, he probably thought it was a bad break but it was the best thing that ever happened to Allan Sherman's career. For one thing, it isn't all that wonderful. For another, it has those kind of "inside" Jewish references that would have gotten him typed as a comedian catering mainly to the Catskills crowd, a la the kind of material Myron Cohen did when he wasn't on The Ed Sullivan Show. One of the selling points of Sherman's breakthrough album, My Son, the Folk Singer, was that it was Jewish but not too Jewish. You could laugh at it without knowing what a pupik was, and Warner Brothers Records managed to get it into stores in non-Jewish neighborhoods, which didn't happen much with Mickey Katz records.

Someone at the company was also smart enough to lead off Side One with "The Ballad of Harry Lewis" and not "The Streets of Miami," which was the first number Sherman performed at the recording session/party. They also wisely put "Sarah Jackman" as the first song on Side Two. Back in the days of vinyl albums, the first song on each side was all some buyers and radio people played. Both songs were funny. Neither played mainly to the Jews in the audience.

It probably also helped that Allan Sherman's name wasn't Izzy Schwartz or something of the sort; not that Anti-Semitism per se would have been a factor but some people would have figured, "Oh, that'll be full of Jewish references I won't get." I'm Jewish and even I could never understand a couple of Jackie Mason's early bits. I remember once having to ask my Aunt what a shidach was. (It's an arranged marriage, and Mason was catering to people who knew that. By the way, pupik is Yiddish for navel.) Sherman made Jewish humor accessible to folks who lived in...I don't know. Name some state without a lot of Jews at the time. His records sold there, too. That was why he was able to move so many of them.

One other thing that occurred to me about Allan Sherman: In 1965, he wrote a very funny autobiography called A Gift of Laughter, which is long outta-print but which I highly recommend as a joy to read. You'd especially love the last chapter, which is about a show he did with Harpo Marx which turned out to be Harpo's final performance. (Here's an online scan of an abridged version that ran in Reader's Digest. It's better in the actual book.)

I don't necessarily recommend the book as actual history, however. You may have seen me mention my high school buddy, Bruce Reznick, who occasionally sends in items I post on this weblog. Bruce's father is the great comedy writer, Sidney Reznick, and he was a featured player in one anecdote in A Gift of Laughter. Sidney says it ain't so. A number of other Sherman friends and co-workers I've encountered have suggested that what he wrote is not exactly what they remembered...and notably, Sherman omits one key verifiable fact from his life story. He tells the rags-to-riches tale of how he went from unemployed, unemployable TV producer to Big Comedy Star practically overnight...but fails to mention that My Son, the Folk Singer was his second record. He had previously done a much less successful — perhaps because it was "too Jewish" — single of "Jake's Song" and "A Satchel and a Seck." I guess it would have cluttered his life story and made it seem less exciting to know that he wasn't a smash hit with his first attempt at a comedy record.

This is not uncommon in autobiographies. When Moss Hart wrote Act One, he told the tale of his maiden success as a playwright, making Once in a Lifetime sound like his first work to make it to Broadway. It wasn't. His friend, Alan Jay Lerner, also left some early failures out of his autobiography, The Street Where I Live. There are many other examples. What's odd (and oddly endearing) about Sherman's book is that it's filled with flops and humiliations as a comedy writer and producer. He owns up to an awful lot of them but pretends like when he finally tried recording song parodies, he struck gold his first time out. I don't fault him for that. I just think it's...well, kind of strange. It doesn't make me love his work any less, though.