Herb Alpert: Encyclopedia II - Herb Alpert - The Tijuana Brass Years

Herb Alpert - The Tijuana Brass Years

Shortly after A&M's founding, Alpert formed a new group, one with a Latin flavor: the Tijuana Brass. In 1962, Alpert and the Brass released their debut album, The Lonely Bull (the title cut became a Top Ten hit). This was literally A&M's first album (the original number was 101), and was recorded in a converted garage. It was Alpert's groundbreaking musical flavor created by this album that catapulted Latino-style pop into the public eye.

The Tijuana Brass's success helped spawn other Latin acts, notably Julius Wechter (initially a session player in The Lonely Bull) and his Baja Marimba Band. Ironically, no one in Alpert's band (or Wechter's either) was actually Hispanic. Alpert used to tell his audiences that his group (as of the late 60s) consisted of "Three pastramis, two bagels, and an American cheese": John Pisano (electric guitar); Lou Pagani (piano); Nick Ceroli (drums); Pat Senatore (bass guitar); Tonni Kalash (trumpet); Herb Alpert (trumpet and vocal); Bob Edmondson (trombone).

Subsequent albums followed the tradition of the first, Whipped Cream and Other Delights, for example. The album cover of Whipped Cream featured a seductive-looking young woman (Dolores Erickson) wearing a generous quantity of whipped cream... and apparently nothing else. In concerts, when about to play the song, Alpert would tell the audience, "Sorry, we can't play the cover for you!" The famous cover was eventually parodied by the alternative group Soul Asylum. Other albums followed, such as S.R.O., and even a brassy interpretation of classical music, Herb Alpert's Ninth.

But it was 1965's Going Places that really propelled Alpert and the Brass to stardom. The seminal album, what music critics have called his greatest work, yielded the hit singles "Tijuana Taxi", "Spanish Flea", "Third Man Theme", and "Zorba the Greek".

Much of the music from Whipped Cream and Going Places received a great deal of airplay, and still do at least on the Game Show Network due to their frequent use as incidental music in The Dating Game, notably Whipped Cream, Spanish Flea and Lollipops and Roses.

With the Tijuana Brass, Alpert won six Grammy awards, and of their albums fifteen have gone gold and fourteen platinum. At one point his music outsold that of The Beatles by two to one. That statistic is compelling, because it is a nearly-forgotten fact that The Brass were, in modern parlance, "huge" in the 1960s, kind of a middle-of-the-road parallel to the Beatles; they even formed and broke up initially around the same time that the Fab Four did. In 1966, Alpert was recognized (with the Brass) in the Guinness Book of World Records for having five albums in the Top 20 of the Billboard album charts simultaneously, an unprecedented feat. In April of that year, four of those albums were in the Top 10 simultaneously.

His only Number One song with the Brass was "This Guy's in Love With You", featuring a rare vocal turn by Alpert himself. Alpert's vocal skills were limited, but this song also had a limited range, and it worked for him. The song debuted in June 1968, and topped the charts for four weeks. Other artists soon covered it, a sure sign of its viability as a song.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Tijuana Brass Years", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki