Alpert, Herb

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Herb Alpert

Trumpeter, composer, producer, record company executive

Trumpeter Herb Alpert was messing around in the makeshift recording studio in his garage one day in 1962 when he happened on something interesting; he discovered that he could add a new dimension to his sound by recording a second trumpet part directly on top of the original, a process known as overdubbing. When the two parts were combined slightly out of synchronization, another effect was produced, which he called a “Spanish flair.”

At 25, Alpert was already a Los Angeles music industry veteran with a track record of peaks and valleys. Among the former was a songwriting collaboration with friend Lou Adler and seminal soul singer Sam Cooke that had produced several chart entries, among them the oft-covered “Wonderful World.” With Adler, Alpert had also produced and managed Jan & Dean in their pre-surf-music days, which had yielded a Top Ten hit in “Baby Talk.” Having recently dissolved his partnership with Adler, Alpert was wondering what his next move should be.

The answer came to him a couple of months later in Tijuana, Mexico, during his first visit to a bullfight. Soaking up the atmosphere, he suddenly realized how to utilize that “Spanish flair.” He recorded the thunderous chants of the bullfight crowd and, back in his garage studio, he added them to his “flaired” recording of a friend’s instrumental composition called “Twinkle Star,” which he then retitled “The Lonely Bull.”

In October of 1962, Alpert and his partner Jerry Moss put up $200 to press copies of the song, which was credited to the Tijuana Brass featuring Herb Alpert. A&M Records (for Alpert & Moss), with a home address of Alpert’s garage, was thus in business. And what business—by the following February, “The Lonely Bull” had muscled its way into the Top Ten and had sold close to a million copies.

Outsold the Beatles

The sound Alpert devised—an easy-to-digest blend of mariachi bounce, Dixieland charm, and the barest hint of rock rhythms—was dubbed “Ameriachi,” and it caught on immediately. “The Tijuana Brass,” opined Time, “is basically just a good old-fashioned melody band that makes no pretensions toward the new. No soul-searching Thelonious Monk stuff, no revolutionary developments—just pleasant music that is as universal in its way as Bob Hope is in his.”

The clearest explanation of the appeal of the Tijuana Brass in a world then being swept by Beatlemania came from an unlikely music critic; “Best live entertainment

For the Record…

Born March 31, 1937, in Los Angeles, CA; married Lani Hall (a former singer), c. 1968.

Began trumpet study, c. 1944; actor, 1956-58; formed partnership with record producer Lou Adler, 1958; wrote with singer Sam Cooke, 1958; became staff producer for Dore Records, 1959; with Adler, produced and managed Jan & Dean, 1959-62; recorded as vocalist Dore Alpert for RCA, 1960; formed A&M Records with business partner Jerry Moss and released first single, “The Lonely Bull,” 1962; recorded 32 albums as solo artist and with Tijuana Brass, 1963-93; co-owner and executive, A&M Records, 1962-89; founded Herb Alpert Foundation, c. 1985; co-owner and executive, Rondor Records, 1993—. Military; service: U.S. Army.

Awards: Numerous gold and platinum records. Seven Grammy awards, including record of the year, 1965, and best non-jazz instrumental, 1965, for “A Taste of Honey”; best non-jazz instrumental, 1966, for “What Now My Love”; and best pop instrumental performance, 1979, for “Rise.”

Addresses: Office —Rondor Music, 360 North La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048.

I’ve seen in years,” enthused former Postmaster General J. Edward Day to Newsweek after catching the Alpert group’s command performance at the 1966 White House Correspondents Dinner. “I wish there were more like them and fewer of those weird and kooky groups.”

Alpert reached out to this older, more traditional—and at the time largely disenfranchised—pop audience with a relentless schedule of concert dates and television appearances. It worked. The Top Ten hit “A Taste of Honey” propelled three Tijuana Brass albums onto the charts simultaneously in 1965, but Alpert topped even that the following year; in April of 1966, his fifth album, Going Places, resided at Number One, while the four discs previously released crowded the rest of the Top Twenty. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass had five of the Top Twenty albums—and were outselling the Beatles.

But Alpert did not fare especially well during the dawn of the psychedelic era. He charted nine singles in 1966 and 1967, but none even approached the Top Ten. Then he teamed with superproducer Burt Bacharach to record a rare vocal effort called “This Guy’s in Love With You.” Alpert had been signed briefly to RCA Records as a vocalist in 1960—it was there, in fact, that he’d first met Jerry Moss—but all the Tijuana Brass records had been trumpet-driven instrumentals.

Vocal “Comeback”

Something about Alpert’s soft, reticent voice suited the song and struck a sympathetic chord with listeners everywhere. “This Guy” shot to Number One and became one of the biggest records of 1968. Perhaps even more remarkably, the record represented a number of firsts for three artists already at the pinnacle of the recording industry: it was the first Number One single for Alpert and his first million-selling single, and it was the first Number One for producer Bacharach, as well as the first Number One for the distinguished songwriting team of Bacharach and Hal David. According to a Time profile, Alpert grossed $30 million in 1968 and paid his Tijuana Brass sidemen base salaries of $100,000 each. Both were considered astronomical sums in the economic context of the day. Alpert’s “comeback” had taken him to a whole new level.

A&M Records, meanwhile, had become a thriving concern. Fewer than five years after launching their business out of Alpert’s garage, Alpert and Moss acquired and moved their operation onto the old Charlie Chaplin movie studio lot near the corner of Sunset and La Brea in Hollywood. Their roles would blur somewhat over the years, but Moss generally handled distribution and sales while Alpert looked after the creative side.

Initially the label was stocked with close musical relatives of the Tijuana Brass such as the Baja Marimba Band and Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. The success of these acts in addition to Alpert’s phenomenal sales enabled him and Moss to make A&M whatever kind of company they chose. They took this opportunity seriously, and A&M grew into not only the most successful independent record label of all time, but also one of the most respected.

Michael Goldberg of Rolling Stone called A&M “a company that became known as one of the classiest in the business... where music really did come first. It was a company known for its commitment to its artists.” Over the years A&M developed multi-platinum careers for acts like the Carpenters, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Captain and Tennille, Peter Frampton, Quincy Jones, Bryan Adams, the Police, Amy Grant, Sting, and Janet Jackson. But the real strength of A&M was in its diversity; it welcomed and nurtured left-field talent like Joe Cocker, Procol Harum, Captain Beefheart, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Tubes, Joe Jackson, Suzanne Vega, John Hiatt, and the Neville Brothers, to name but a few.

Renaissance Man

Even as he presided over the mushrooming of his company, Alpert maintained a sporadic recording career of his own. In 1978 he released a highly regarded album collaboration with South African trumpeter Hugh Masakela. The following year his disco-inflected single “Rise” rose all the way to Number One, sold a million copies, and won the 1979 Grammy Award for best pop instrumental performance. In 1987 Alpert enlisted the help of hot dance producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to concoct the Top Ten hit “Diamonds,” which also featured a guest vocal by Janet Jackson.

Somehow Alpert also found the time to branch out into other fields. A talented painter, he began showing his quarter century of work publicly in 1989. That same year, he introduced a fragrance for women called Listen. Since the mid-1980s he has directed the activities of the Herb Alpert Foundation, the charitable works of which benefit worthy music, education, and humanitarian projects throughout the country.

After 27 years of running their company as an independent entity, Alpert and Moss sold A&M to the PolyGram Corporation in June of 1989. By that time their little operation had grown to include recording studios, a thriving song publishing arm, the bustling Chaplin Soundstage, and a successful film and television production company. Retaining only the publishing company Rondor Music, the partners sold everything else to PolyGram for close to half a billion dollars.

In June of 1993 Alpert and Moss departed the management posts they had retained at A&M/PolyGram. By the fall of that year, Rondor Music was well on its way to spinning off a full-fledged label. Herb Alpert had come a long, long way from the garage.