Allan Sherman's career had lost much of its momentum by the time
My Name Is Allan was released in the fall of 1965, and the album was hardly strong enough to revive his sagging fortunes. While
Sherman's previous long-player,
For Swingin' Livers Only, found him still sounding game, this time out most of the songs sounded like they would never have made the cut on his first three sets -- "The Laarge Daark Aardvark Song" may be the worst tune he recorded for commercial release (significantly recorded without the presence of a live audience), and "The Painless Dentist Song," "That Old Back Scratcher," and the homage to name-dropping, "Call Me," don't fare much better. On the upside,
Sherman has fun with the shifting mores of the country in the mid-'60s on "Peyton Place U.S.A." and "It's a Most Unusual Play," both of which anticipated the themes from his later book The Rape of the A.P.E., and though they've dated more than a bit they display a bite missing from most of the set.
Sherman's fascination with the English language gets another workout on "Chim Chim Cheree," and on "The Drinking Man's Diet" he revels in two of his great obsessions, booze and losing weight (both of which would ironically lead to his premature death).
Sherman parted ways with longtime musical collaborator
Lou Busch after
For Swingin' Livers Only, and though
Ralph Carmichael's arrangements are polished and professional, they lack the élan of
Busch's work and sound like soundtrack music for some unproduced television special. There are scattered laughs to be had on
My Name Is Allan (and the cover is a very funny parody of
Barbra Streisand's similarly titled album of the same year), but it's a pale shadow of
Sherman's glory days of only two years before. ~ Mark Deming