BY JIM MELLOAN | My parents picked up Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s two 1965 albums, “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” and “Going Places,” sometime in the first year after their release. I would have been 10 years old. But I don’t recall being, shall we say, intrigued by their covers, especially “Whipped Cream,” until after I turned 11 in September of 1966 and we moved to London in November of that year.
Then, the stimulation of pubescent hormones, combined with swinging England and its ads for burlesque shows in the back of “What’s On in London” — and skirt lengths shortening at a rate of approximately an inch per month — contributed to significant fascination with this album cover featuring model Delores Erickson wearing seemingly nothing but a pile of whipped cream, with a bit of it in her hair, and taking a lick off her finger.
The cover was so iconic that Alpert used to tell the audience in concerts, “Sorry, we can’t play the cover for you.”
“Going Places,” with the girl in a kind of Hispanic maid costume showing some fishnetted leg, wasn’t bad either. The liner notes for “Whipped Cream” were my first encounter with the word “hippie.” At the Brass’s first concert, “The teens were there, but so were the ‘hippies’ and the ‘squares,’ the ‘little old ladies’ and the screen starlets, the celebrities and those who make them celebrities.”
Fifty years ago this week, “A Taste of Honey,” from “Whipped Cream” peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The band’s popularity began to soar. In 1966, they sold more than 13 million recordings — more than The Beatles. In April of that year, four of their albums were in the Top 10, a feat last achieved by The Kingston Trio in 1959.
Not one of the Tijuana Brass was Hispanic. Alpert used to say that his group had “four lasagnas, two bagels, and an American cheese.” Alpert was one of the bagels — his family were Jews from Ukraine and Romania. But he was born and grew up in the predominantly Mexican-American Boyle Heights section of Eastside Los Angeles.
Before the Brass existed, Alpert had success as a songwriter in the late ’50s, co-writing “Wonderful World,” (first performed by Sam Cooke and later by Herman’s Hermits, and Art Garfunkel with Paul Simon and James Taylor), and “Alley Oop,” by the Hollywood Argyles. In the early ’60s, a pre-Beatles Ringo Starr was belting out “Alley Oop” in the special vocal spotlight his band Rory Storm and the Hurricanes gave him called “Starr Time” at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the UK.
Getting back to short skirts and other sexy delights, the Brass will be forever associated with “The Dating Game,” which used a few of its songs, in particular “Whipped Cream,” “Spanish Flea,” and “Lollipops and Roses,” as incidental music throughout the show.
In 1967, the band performed the Burt Bacharach-penned theme to the James Bond spoof “Casino Royale,” a bouncy and infectious earworm if ever there was one. My friend Jerry has said he would like this one to be played at his funeral.
In the late ’60s, still in England, it became a favorite game for my sister and I to put on some Tijuana Brass and look out the window at pedestrians walking by. We would select one, and as the person walked down the street, we would imagine that this person was the star of his or her own TV show, and we were watching the credits and this was the theme song. We found this hilarious, and I bet it still is. If you live in a place where you can look out the window and see pedestrians walking by, I suggest you try it now.
Herb’s only No. 1 hit in the ’60s featured him as a vocalist, with the Bacharach-David tune “This Guy’s In Love With You,” a favorite of my cousin Samia’s. The song was perfect for Alpert’s limited vocal range, and audiences fell in love with it. This was part of a 1968 CBS special called “Beat of the Brass,” in a paradisiacal sequence shot in Malibu in which he sings to his then-wife. It was not intended for release as a record, but CBS was flooded with thousands of calls asking about it, so it came out and spent four weeks at No. 1.
The Brass split up in 1969, but reformed a few times and released records in the ’70s and ’80s. Alpert had a No. 1 hit with “Rise,” in 1979, and released the album “Keep Your Eye on Me” in 1987, which had two hits: “Diamonds,” featuring Janet Jackson, and “Making Love in the Rain,” featuring Lisa Keith with backup vocals by Janet Jackson. The title track was not a hit, but for whatever reason it’s the one I remember. The videos for both that and “Diamonds,” in a sign of the times, both slipped in “say no to drugs” messages.
Alpert turned 80 this past March. In September he released “Come Fly With Me,” which went to No. 7 on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums chart. Pretty good work for an old bagel from East LA.
Jim Melloan is a writer, actor, musician, and editor. His radio show “50 Years Ago This Week” airs Tuesdays from 8–10 p.m. on RadioFreeBrooklyn.com.
