Herb Alpert – Tangerine
For many people who were raised in the 1960s, like myself, the real sound of the era wasn’t the British Invasion. It wasn’t the throbbing underground garage scene that buried the seeds for punk a decade before they sprouted. It wasn’t folk rock or surf music or psychedelic acid rock or sitar music or any of the threads that are usually used to tie up the decade. The real music of the 60s came flowing out of the polished trumpet of Herb Alpert.
A sometime actor and musician, Alpert was fooling around with his horn in his garage one day, playing a tune a friend had written called Twinkle Star, when he discovered the song worked well in a mariachi style. Growing up in LA, he had often been south of the border to bullfights and loved the mariachi sound. This traditional Mexican music hadn’t been updated for years, and Alpert thought it would be a perfect new sound to pursue. He also felt a void in the popular music industry of the time. As the optimism of the early 60s gave way to the angry, sometimes violent pessimism of the Vietnam era, the music took on a darker edge. Confrontational, political, and often very loud and abrasive, popular music had become a weapon in the culture wars, ammunition for the battle of the generation gap. Alpert was dismayed that all the fun seemed to have disappeared, and wanted to make music that was easy to listen to, that brought a smile to the lips and a tap to the toes. He retooled Twinkle Star into The Lonely Bull, attributed it to The Tijuana Brass (a completely fabricated group, which was created for real on the success of the single) and released it on a label he started with business partner Jerry Moss and ran from his garage. The Lonely Bull became the first hit record for fledgling A&M (get it?) Records, and started a dynasty that grew into the most successful artist-owned label in history.
Although ridiculed by the hip youth of the day for being hopelessly square and inconsequential (the songs don’t even have words, man), the records flew off the shelves and into parents’ dens all across the country – outselling the Beatles 2-to-1 at one point. With his patented “Ameriachi” sound, Alpert and his Tijuana Brass stormed the country, and ended up all over the media – from TV commercials to the theme of The Dating Game.
It took me a long time to even be able to listen to Herb Alpert with anything like an open mind. It isn’t that I didn’t like it, it’s just that the textures and timbres were so ingrained in my head growing up during the late 60s that I literally couldn’t even hear it when it came on. It was like musical water off the duck’s back of my mind. When I finally did get around to listening, I was captivated, and instantly understood why it was so popular. The seductive, downplayed rhythms, and smooth, glossy trumpet melodies were the perfect antidote to the increasingly heavy sounds of concurrent rock and roll. Whipped Cream and Other Delights went better with a joint and a glass of sangria than did the acid-fueled psychedelia that was turning the hippy dream of love, peace, and understanding into a post-Altamont, pre-Manson psychotic nightmare. It was slightly exotic, but still safe as the back yard, and was the perfect backdrop for swinging singles to mix and mingle.
Ameriachi proved to be quite a durable and adaptable form, and a surprising range of material looks good in really big hats and brightly colored shirts with poofy sleeves, from the Theme from the Third Man to Zorba the Greek to this track, Tangerine, a big band staple from the 1940s. So completely does Alpert inhabit this version, with the sweetly suspended groove and appropriately 60s wordless humming behind it, that it’s difficult to imagine in its original form after hearing this tequila-soaked version.
Meanwhile, A&M became one of the biggest labels in the country by largely ignoring the tumultuous times and signing avowedly middle-of-the-road artists that weren’t going to be leading anybody into revolution. Even the most radical revolutionary has parents, and they were all too happy to snap up The Carpenters, Cat Stevens, and Sergio Mendez. Later A&M was able to expand its market clout by signing some more vitally important artists like Joan Armitrading, Squeeze and Sting, but the classy aura of timeless and non-threatening pop for adults which had started the company remained as a principle through virtually all their acts (although Cheech & Chong were big earners for them in the 1970s).
Alpert himself continued to record, even though his Ameriachi had fallen out of favor. Sticking close to his instrumental guns, he had a resurgence of popularity at the end of the 70s and has continued to reinvent himself and stay musically interesting, if not always critically or publicly popular. He’s worked with such headliners as Janet Jackson and, on a wonderful recent collaboration with Will Calhoun (Living Colour) and Doug Wimbish (Tackhead, et al) called Colors, finds a niche that could be described as Brian Eno producing Miles Davis in Massive Attack’s studio.
In 1990, he and partner Moss sold A&M for a cool half billion, and then turned around and created Almo (get it?) Sounds and promptly signed some of the 90s more interesting and vital (not to mention reasonably popular) acts, like Garbage and Gillian Welch and Ozomatli, proving that, while he is an accomplished musician and a talented marketer, Herb Alpert’s true genius may be as a record label executive.