Yes! Herb Alpert (b. 1935) lives!
Over the course of my moderately long life, I have done a complete 180 about-face on my feelings about Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. When I was a kid in the ’70s, his music was regarded as straight-up kitsch, mostly I think because of its heavy use on The Dating Game (1965-1973). Those bright, chirpy horns sounded like Muzak, a game show sound track. It wasn’t that it was brass per se. Who doesn’t love Louis Armstrong, for example? All three of my older brothers had played the trumpet during boyhood. The oldest was the most into it, and kept at the instrument into adulthood as a member of marching bands. He was very much an Alpert fan, had all his records. There was a 20 year age difference between us, though. Cool horns to me sounded like K.C. and the Sunshine Band. But even in his own time, Herb Alpert was for squares. In the sixties, it had been establishment music, somewhere at the opposite end of the spectrum from Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane.
But time is the great rehabilitator. Younger generations came up without the same hang-ups and associations, and I was able to rediscover the music through their ears. The music went from kitsch to camp to merely fun and then simply objectively enjoyable. The guy deserves a lot of respect for what he accomplished, and that includes the music itself. If you’re feeling bummed out and want something to lift you out of your funk, I highly recommend his greatest hits. That gift is not to be sneezed at.
The most astounding thing you will ever learn about Herb Alpert (or perhaps not) is that he is not Mexican. He’s the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania who grew up in Southern California. He’d been in marching bands at USC and in the army, and even had a bit role as a drummer boy in the movie The Ten Commandments (1956). His first success in the music business was as a songwriter. Among the tunes he co-authored were “Baby Talk” (1959) by Jan and Dean, and “Wonderful World” (1960) by Sam Cooke (co-written by Lou Adler).
In 1962 he founded A & M Records with Jerry Moss, the second most astounding thing you will learn about Alpert, if you didn’t already know it. That label was a major factor in the music business for decades, the most successful independent label of all time — and I never had any idea that the “A” stood for Alpert.
Herb Alpert came to fame playing faux mariachi music only because he attended a bullfight in Tijuana and got inspired to experiment with the style. The result, “The Lonely Bull” went to #6 on the pop charts and was A & M’s first single. (Interesting timing: at this writing, Mexico City has just banned bullfighting to the death as a sport.) Amusingly, when the song was released, the Tijuana Brass didn’t exist yet, he had simply multitracked himself on the record and added sound effects. The success of the record obliged him to form an actual performing ensemble, and then to stick with the sound he’d created for a number of years. His LPs were top sellers throughout the decade. The best known of them of course was this one:
Not just because of the naughty nude chick on the cover and the implied perversity that attaches to mixing sex with dessert toppings…but also, who releases a song called “Whipped Cream”? This one came out in 1965. Many of his chart topping songs were movie themes, most notably the Burt Bacharach composed theme to the James Bond parody Casino Royale (1967), but he also hit with covers of “A Taste of Honey”, “Zorba the Greek” and “The Third Man Theme”. About half of the songs he recorded were covers of well known pop tunes, the other half were variations on his overall gimmick. “Spanish Flea” and “Tijuana Taxi” were among the most popular, others included “Struttin’ with Maria”, “Mexican Corn”, “Mexican Drummer Man”, “The Mexican Shuffle”, “Marching Through Madrid”, “El Presidente”, “South of the Border”, “Carmen”, “Surfin’ Señorita”, and “Winds of Barcelona”. Some, like “Spanish Harlem” and “The Girl from Ipanema” straddled both worlds. Also distinctively Alpertian were numbers named after treats, not just “Whipped Cream”, but also “Peanuts”, “Popcorn”, “Ladyfingers”, and “Lollipops and Roses”.
At his peak, Alpert was a frequent sight and sound on television, appearing on the variety shows of Andy Williams, Danny Kaye, Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, Kraft Music Hall, The Hollywood Palace, and several of his own tv specials.
For a while in the mid ’60s, the craze was so great, that there were copy cats. For example, Chet Baker stooped to releasing a record called The Taste of Tequila in 1966 with “The Mariachi Brass”, featuring a repertoire that included “Tequila”, “La Bamba”, “Mexico”, “El Paso”, and “Speedy Gonzalez”. Around the same time, Sergio Leone released his “Dollars” trilogy of bordertown westerns, much imitated throughout the years afterward. It seems to me part of the same cultural trend of interest in Mexico, if only through the lens of stereotype.
Gradually, Alpert was able to break out of the hot box he’d created for himself. In 1968, he had a #1 with the jazzy Burt Barcharach-Hal David song “This Guy’s In Love With You”, on which he actually sang the lead vocal! A decade later he surprised everybody by hitting #1 again with the disco instrumental “Rise”. We are delighted to observe that in between those two high water marks (1974) he released a single and an LP called Coney Island, which clearly sought to evoke the rinky-tink sound of ragtime, Dixieland, and old school show biz.
Meanwhile, A & M records gradually worked its way from a roster of Latin, faux Latin, and easy listening acts, to more mainstream ones like The Carpenters, Paul Williams, Stealers Wheel, Billy Preston, Captain and Tennille, Cat Stevens, Joe Cocker, Procol Harum, Nazareth, The Tubes, Styx, Squeeze, Supertramp, Peter Frampton, Chuck Mangione (no surprise there), The Police (and Sting as a solo act); The Go-Gos, Bryan Adams, Soundgarden, etc.
And Alpert continued to release albums of his own music throughout the entire period. His most recent one was in 2024. Take a bow, Toreador!
Herb is celebrating his birthday with a concert at Lincoln Center tonight! And they’ve added a second one for tomorrow. Tickets are here.
For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety