My Son, The History Lesson

On his debut album Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening recorded in July of 2009, comedian Aziz Ansari presents a veritable torrent of pop culture references throughout the hour-long routine. He jokes about harassing his cousin Harris on Facebook, pokes fun at Cold Stone Creamery, CVS Pharmacy and Craigslist and then finishes with two big pre-encore bits involving Kanye West and R. Kelly, including an extended impression of R&B singer Kelly both in concert and then getting lapdances at the after-party. He even makes fun of himself for being tongue-tied around M.I.A.

It’s a great album from a very funny comic who, given his ongoing role in Parks & Recreation, his hosting this past summer of the MTV Movie Awards and parts in movies like Get Him to the Greek, Funny People and the upcoming 30 Minutes or Less (which will be his first real starring role), Ansari looks to become part of the comedy landscape for some time to come. But with just so much topical humor, one wonders what kind of shelf-life

Intimate Moments might enjoy once Craigslist, R. Kelly and Cold Stone Creamery are things of the past. How many teens today when presented with Richard Pryor’s Wanted: Live In Concert are necessarily going to get the joke in the extended routines involving former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown or heavyweight Leon Spinks? On that same album, however, are woven in far more universal bits about drug abuse, self-aggrandizing ministers, the experience of having heart attack and commiserating about the death of a family pet with a neighbor’s dog who wanted to devour said pet which makes the album hold up even now over thirty years later, something Ansari aggressively avoids by making his comedy very much of the moment.

At the time, (respectful) jokes about the Brown’s image of being deadly serious and incredibly tough got big laughs from Pryor’s audience just as Ansari’s (respectful) jokes about the occasionally enigmatic and unpredictable personality of West do from his. But in thirty years, chances are good that while West’s music may be remembered, the context of his celebrity may be semi-forgotten lessening the impact of the jokes. It could be considered akin to what happened with Vaughn Meader’s comedy album, The First Family, which sent up the intimate goings-on in the Kennedy White House. At the time, couldn’t have been more popular, but now it is little more than a historical curiosity.

But with the re-release this week of the great song parodist Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Celebrity on CD for the first time (as well as seven other of his albums from Warner Brothers Records’ Collectors’ Choice label), we see that with even the most specific topical material sometimes the opposite can happen. Sherman, whose biggest hit was the novelty song, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp),” was a game show producer who created the long-running I Know a Secret for CBS in 1952 and then followed that up with What’s Going On?

and Your Surprise Package which he worked on for the rest of the decade. But Sherman’s passion seems to have been focused on creating song parodies, one of which he first recorded in 1951 entitled “A Satchel and a Seck” to the tune of Guys and Dolls’ “A Bushel and a Peck.” When this song failed to take off, a decade passed with no new recordings as Sherman became more of a garage tinkerer creating parodies only to amuse his neighbors as he continued work as a television producer. When those neighbors include Harpo Marx and Harpo’s friend, George Burns, eventually he amused just enough of the right people and landed a new record deal ten years after “Satchel” was pressed. My Son, the Folk Singer, released in 1962, was the fastest selling record in history up to that point and eventually sold over a million copies. A great album in its own right, Folk Singer still holds up and is worth a listen as an introduction to Sherman’s work, but it is the follow-up recording, My Son, the Celebrity, which is the focus of this article.

Beginning with its title, you understand that Sherman is ready to make fun of his newfound fame (above the title on Folk Singer, it reads “Allan Sherman’s Mother Presents…” whereas on The Celebrity it reads “This Time Allan Sherman’s Mother Proudly Presents…”,), but then the cover and the liner notes go on to further send up his allegedly nouveau riche status. The cover finds Allan playing a guitar at an elaborate picnic and behind him is his actual family with his wife wearing a fur coat and tiara, his son holding a polo mallet and his daughter wearing a riding outfit. Beside them is their maid also wearing a fur and a tiara and then behind them is a luxury car complete with a chauffeur both of whom Allan makes sure in the liner notes to say are his actual maid and driver.

Though it has been criticized for being written and recorded very quickly to cash in on Folk Singer’s success and did indeed go to number one on the Billboard charts a mere one year after his debut album, it is this very fact that makes it an interesting historical piece. Whereas Folk Singer seems to be culled from years of fooling around with this song and that, Celebrity uses a lot more topical humor that feels grabbed from that day’s newspaper headlines. These tunes include digs at AT&T’s decision to switch to from alphanumeric telephone numbers to our current ten-digit number (“The Let’s All Call Up AT&T And Protest to the President March”), the drivel on television which turns couples into couch potatoes (“Al ‘N Yetta”), the then-current Billie Sol Estes farm subsidy fraud scandal (one part of “Shticks of One and a Half a Dozen of the Other”), naked, Sammy Glick-esque careerism (“When I Was a Lad”), and then what is arguably the album’s greatest achievement, a song about the overriding prevalence of abbreviations and acronyms a young couple finds themselves interacting with as they fall in love, marry, shop, build careers, have children and seek success (“Harvey and Sheila”).

Sung to the tune of the “Hava Nagila,” “Harvey and Sheila” traces the rise of the titular couple (an irony as “Hava Nagila” is a standard song at many a Jewish wedding reception) by labeling all those things by which people at the time measured success. Lyrics go: “Harvey and Sheila/Married in the spring/She shopped at A&P/He bought a used MG/They sat and watched TV/On their RCA/Borrowed from HFC/Bought some AT&T/And on election day, worked for JFK.” Later on in the song, this continues with: “Harvey and Sheila/Flew TWA/They bought a house one day/Financed by FHA/It had a swimming pool, full of H20/Traded their used MG/For a new XKE/Switched to the GOP/That’s the way things go/Oh that Harvey he was really smart/He used his noodle/Sheila bought a white French poodle/Went to Europe with a visa/Harvey’s rich, they say he’s a/VIP/This could be/Only in the USA.”

Earlier in the song, we had learned that Harvey was a CPA who worked for IBM after going to MIT where he got his PhD. Sheila worked at B.B.D.& O. (the kind of ad agency Mad Men takes place in and one that is actually mentioned on the show from time to time), but is hardly a Peggy Olson as she “works the PBX,” the company’s switchboard. The pair meets in an elevator one day and falls in love.

So what does this song tell us about the American dream circa 1963? The man gets the education and the good job and the woman works an entry-level job just long enough to land a husband and get married (they have two children: “One named Bea/One named Kay/Soon they joined the PTA”). Sheila does the shopping while Harvey works his way up the corporate ladder. They get a loan and buy a house, are liberals and work for the Kennedys when they’re young and invest well. They get rich, buy a pool, trade their used starter-car for a new Jaguar, go to Europe on vacation and switch to the Republican Party.

The song paints a picture better than any history book. The acronyms and abbreviations don’t simply denote cultural reference, but also point out the conformity that Harvey and Sheila are striving towards which goes right down to the children who are “Twin baby girls/Both with dimples/Both with curls.” A sort of counterpoint to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” that came out only three years later in 1966, both songs are about as evocative as they come in capturing a sense of America in the sixties. You want to achieve status to elevate yourself over others, but everybody wants the exact same thing, so you’re still striving to shed any sense of individuality. The use of the traditional “Hava Nagila” (“let’s rejoice”) which is so ubiquitous that it can almost lose its meaning just adds another layer to the frenzied calamity of the song.

The other songs on Celebrity are mostly just as good. “Al ‘N Yetta,” sung to the French Canadian children’s song “Alouette,” is similar to Harvey and Sheila in looking at a married couple, but this one details the television shows they watch every night with which they have replaced any form of social life. The lyrics “Al ‘N Yetta/Couldn’t have it betta/Their TV set has remote control/So they both can stay in bed/With Frankenstein and Mister Ed” and then later “Al ‘N Yetta/Fans of Art Linkletta/And they love to sing along with Mitch/They just found in TV Guide/Reruns of December Bride/They’re big fans of Gunsmoke and Bonanza/And Ben Casey and Doctor Jim Kildaire/And third reruns of Millionaire/Yogi Bear,” etc., make the listener recognize, again, the conformity in this couple’s life as the shows all run together. They’re as happy to watch The Untouchables as an operetta hosted by Leonard Bernstein. They’ll watch What’s My Line, then College Bowl, then Meet the Press, then Huntley-Brinkley, then The Real McCoys. They don’t care. They’ll watch anything. This is their life, glued to the set which allows them to enjoy something together without ever having to have a conversation.

“When I Was a Lad” is a stinging parody of the song with the same title from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, but with new lyrics by Sherman who updates the striver’s tale by following him from kissing ass as Yale (“I polished up the apple for the professor/I polished up the apple so frequently/That soon I had a Phi Beta Kappa key”) to doing the same at an advertising agency (“And for my first job I did apply/At a job in an advertising agency/Sharpening the pencils of a big VP/I sharpened all the pencils so pointedly/That now I am a partner in the agency”). Unlike “Harvey and Sheila,” this is a story of person who doesn’t deserve his success as not only does he get it by kissing ass, the song ends with him informing us that of all the things he thanks for getting him to where he now sits, most of all he has to thank his “father who was Chairman of the Board.” So, not only is he an ass-kissing weasel, he’s also the boss’s son. Every line of lyrics, another reason to hate this guy.

If you’re getting the idea that the picture Allan Sherman is painting of the sixties is actually darker than you might expect, then that is why My Son, the Celebrity is certainly worth a listen. On Mad Men, time and time again we the modern audience are meant to be shocked (albeit in a darkly comic way) by what we are told are commonplace images of the early sixties whether they be pregnant women smoking, picnic trash being littered down the side of a picturesque river bank, or drunken execs blithely shagging their secretaries who understand that they are to say nothing about such things. But with My Son, the Celebrity, you already have a humorist sending up ad agencies, Pete Campbell-esque careerists who have no problem with nepotism and then the TV-watching zombies who go along with whatever they’re being shown. Don’t be a striver like the fellow in “When I Was a Lad,” but work hard and you’ll get the trappings of wealth like the couple in “Harvey and Sheila” and not end up like “Al ‘N Yetta.”

But beyond merely the lyrics, the music Sherman and his collaborator, the conductor/arranger Lou Busch, choose on My Son, the Celebrity is another window in to a bygone era. “The Bronx Bird Watcher” is set to “On a Tree, by a River (Willow, Tit-Willow)” another song from Gilbert and Sullivan, this time from The Mikado. “Me” is from a once-popular Neapolitan song, “Torna a Surriento” a lush ballad written in 1902 that has been sung by performers as varied as Elvis and Dean Martin to Placido Domingo and Meat Loaf and would’ve been familiar to anyone listening to “Me” on the record. “Won’t You Come Home, Disraeli” is set to the Dixieland number “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey” also written in 1902, but which had been recently made a hit by Della Reese in 1961. The medley of “Barry is the Baby’s Name,” “Horowitz” and “Get on the Garden Freeway” uses three George M. Cohan songs, “Mary is a Grand Old Name,” “Harrigan” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” as their basis. Whereas a modern parodist like “Weird Al” Yankovic took from popular radio songs like Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Extreme’s “More Than Words” (creating a song in “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” that holds up far better than the song he was parodying as is often the case with the talented Yankovic), Sherman’s choices indicate what people would find most familiar then: operettas, soapy ballads and the works of one of America’s greatest songwriters who has all but been forgotten by the mainstream.

Following My Son, The Celebrity, Sherman continued to pump out albums including My Son, The Nut, which featured his most remembered hit, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (Greetings From Camp),” but is not the biting historical document that is Celebrity. Following Nut, Sherman abandoned the “My Son, The…” title format and released in 1965, My Name Is Allan featuring parodies of Oscar-nominated songs with a cover that sent up Barbra Streisand’s then-immensely popular My Name Is Barbra. But it’s an album of diminishing returns. The following albums, including Allan in Wonderland, For Swingin’ Livers Only and the genuinely forgettable Togetherness have some songs or phrases to recommend them, but hold up nowhere near as well as the three My Son albums.

After Togetherness, Sherman lost his record deal, but continued to find work including writing songs for an extremely short-lived Broadway show (Fig Leaves Are Falling – which only lasted four performances, a humiliation for its director, the legendary George Abbott), voicing the Cat in the Hat for the 1971 musical TV special of the same name and then writing the humorous, but somewhat controversial The Rape of the A.P.E. (“American Puritan Ethic”) for Putnam that detailed in a comical way the history of sexual repression in America. Though hardly a bestseller upon release, the book remains a cult favorite as it has been kept alive by many of its original readers who found something profound in its pages. Unfortunately, Sherman died soon after the book came out at the age of 48 in 1973, a heavy smoker and drinker for much of his life who also struggled with diabetes and obesity.

There are probably many who would relegate Allan Sherman to the annals of one more one-hit wonders or novelty song composer for “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” which remains in the public consciousness on some level or other even today. But with the re-release of these eight albums (My Son, the Folk Singer, My Son, the Celebrity, My Son, the Nut, My Name is Allan, Allan in Wonderland, For Swingin’ Livers Only, Live! (Hoping You Are the Same) and Togetherness), a new generation may discover something of real value to be in Sherman’s musical output beyond the comedic turn-of-phrase and biting wit; instead, a keenly-observed and often poetic window in to the American mindset leading up to one of its most turbulent eras.

–Mark Wheaton

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