Alpert was aware of it then, as he is now: "In the real early days, I didn't want to feel like we were stepping on anyone's toes. Some of the PR at the time suggested I was a direct offshoot of mariachi music. I didn't want to be perceived as a phony." But he is untroubled by it. "When you come right down to it, it's all in the music," he says. "I think people just liked the music. It was upbeat for the most part. I never thought it was frivolous or corny. I put as much of my heart into it as I could."
He pauses a beat and reflects, "Art is timing. You're in the right place at the right time and the door creaks open for you. We came at the right moment."
"My kids say a new generation will discover this, but I don't know," says Herb Alpert, 70. "I will say it's upbeat and positive music. There's so much dark music out there now."
(Maryanne Bilham Blacksun)
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In fact, Alpert eventually got some validation even in Mexico. When the Brass went on tour in the mid-1960s, they played several dates there, and the audiences were as large and appreciative as any north of the border.
Although his dark good looks enabled him to pass for Latino, Alpert is actually the son of a Jewish tailor from Kiev and a Hungarian immigrant mother; he grew up in Los Angeles' heavily Jewish Fairfax district. Alpert began playing at the age of 8 after he picked out a trumpet from among the instruments on a table at his elementary school's music-appreciation day. By 16, he was playing in a local party band and thinking of becoming a professional musician. He eventually played so many gigs, he says, that at one time he knew some 2,000 songs from memory.
He also had a brief stint as a movie actor; in his one uncredited role, he played the drums as Charlton Heston descended from Mount Sinai in "The Ten Commandments."
Alpert's early musical career was a hodgepodge of performing, producing and songwriting. He played trumpet during a two-year stint with the 6th Army Band in the 1950s, and later with the University of Southern California marching band while a student. With partner Lou Adler, later a famed record producer in his own right, Alpert wrote songs for Sam Cooke, including "Only Sixteen" and "Wonderful World" ("Don't know much about history . . . "). Alpert and Adler also produced a hit for Jan & Dean ("Baby Talk").
These experiences provided Alpert with a street-level PhD in almost every major aspect of the music business and gave him the confidence to handle most creative aspects on his own albums. He was producer, songwriter, arranger and lead musician.
To be sure, some of the commercial polish on the TJB sound also came from Moss, who was a co-producer on the classic Brass records. As Moss recalls, "Herbie did all the playing and arranging, of course, but some of the ideas in the studio came from me. I was a promo man. I knew what would get played on the radio."
The success of the records, says Moss, was a reflection of the "warmth" of Alpert's sound. "It was the kind of thing you hear and feel good about," he says. "That part is as fresh to me now as it ever was."
It's debatable, however, whether one of Alpert's most commercially successful albums owed more to its cover art than to its music. "Whipped Cream & Other Delights," released in 1965, was certainly high concept -- all of its songs were named after foods -- but its most memorable feature may have been the cover photo of a beautiful, dark-eyed and apparently naked model covered in white cream.
The picture occupied a not insignificant piece of real estate in the psyches of adolescent boys of that era, who are men of this one. As Esquire put it in 1989, "We bought this album for the album cover. For here is what lust looked like in 1966."
When art director Peter Whorf presented his cover idea to Alpert and Moss, Alpert says, "We thought it was pushing the envelope too much. You've got to remember this is 1965. Now it's nothing."
They went ahead anyway, hiring a friend of the A&M founders, a Ford Agency model named Dolores Erickson, then 25. Whorf spent most of the daylong photo session slathering Erickson with shaving cream, which held up better under the hot studio lights than whipped cream (although whipped cream was used on Erickson's head and hand). All that shaving cream covered up the fact that she was three months pregnant at the time.
The resulting image reveals far less of Erickson than the average low-cut dress, but the overall effect was electrifying. "People have told me that it's the innocence of the look," says Erickson, now 65, retired and living in Washington state. "It's what you can't see" that adds to its allure. "I understand it was very suggestive to men, but I never thought of it like that."
