In 1966, the No. 1 album on Billboard’s year-end chart wasn’t by the Beatles or Frank Sinatra. It was Whipped Cream & Other Delights, an instrumental record by a trumpeter from Los Angeles called Herb Alpert and a band called the Tijuana Brass.
Two more of his albums, Going Places and What Now My Love, finished that year at No. 3 and No. 5. At one point in 1966 the Tijuana Brass had four albums in the Billboard Top 10 at the same time, and TIME later summed the year up simply: they were selling more records than even the Beatles.
All of it came out on A&M, the label Alpert had started four years earlier with a promotion man named Jerry Moss, working out of his garage.
Thirteen years later, with the Tijuana Brass years behind him, Alpert went back to No. 1 with a slowed-down disco record and set a chart record nobody has matched since. That story is at the end.
A bullfight in Tijuana and an office in the garage
Alpert started out as a songwriter and studio trumpeter. A trip to the bullfights in Tijuana, and the mariachi music he heard there, gave him the idea for a record.
He and Moss put in $100 each to start a label called Carnival Records, according to the Associated Press, then found the name was already taken and renamed it A&M, after their initials. NPR’s Mandalit del Barco described it as a company started out of Alpert’s garage in West Hollywood.
“The Lonely Bull” came out in 1962 and became a top-10 hit, the label’s first. There was no real band behind it. As Billboard tells it, the early Tijuana Brass was a loose group of studio musicians, mostly members of the Wrecking Crew, with Alpert overdubbing his own trumpet on top so one player sounded like a section.
Three months pregnant, under cans of shaving cream
The cover that sold Whipped Cream & Other Delights was shot by Peter Whorf, later A&M’s art director, in his own home studio, a converted garage. His model was Dolores Erickson, who was three months pregnant at the time.
She looks as if she’s wrapped in whipped cream. According to Billboard in 2016, it was mostly shaving cream over a base of cotton wadding, because the real thing melted and soured under the studio lamps. Only the dab on her head and the finger at her lips were actual cream.
Alpert’s first reaction was that it was “too racy”. They went with it anyway.
The music behind the cover won too. The Whipped Cream & Other Delights version of “A Taste of Honey”, with its stop-start bass drum intro and Alpert’s bright, clipped trumpet line, won three Grammys, including Record of the Year. In total Alpert has won eight Grammys, according to the Recording Academy.
Four albums in the Top 10 at once
In 1966, Alpert’s earlier albums were selling again on the back of the new one. “At one moment I had five albums on the top 20 on Billboard,” Alpert told TIME in 2016.
The records also turned the Tijuana Brass into a real touring band, and a big one. In 1968 TIME wrote that the group was “equaled only by the likes of Sinatra, Streisand and the Beatles when it comes to filling big halls.”
That success came from tunes most listeners could hum after one play, and from a trumpet sound with none of the bite of a bebop player. If you’ve wondered why so many 1960s pop records reached for a trumpet, we trace that story in our guide to trumpet solos in pop music.
Herb Alpert sings a leftover Bacharach song to his wife on TV
Alpert had a habit of asking songwriters whether they had anything left in the drawer. Burt Bacharach and Hal David had one they weren’t using, “This Guy’s in Love with You”, and Bacharach gave it to him.
Alpert sang it himself, which he hardly ever did, at the end of his 1968 CBS special The Beat of the Brass, in a filmed sequence addressed to his wife at the time, Sharon. He hadn’t planned a single, but enough viewers called CBS asking for one that A&M put it out. In June 1968 it went to No. 1 and stayed there for four weeks.
Listen to how little he does with his voice: a soft, almost conversational delivery over Bacharach’s shifting chords. It’s worth hearing as the single, “This Guy’s in Love with You”.
A disco record, slowed to 100 beats per minute
By the late 1970s, the Tijuana Brass were behind him. Alpert’s nephew Randy, who went by Randy “Badazz” Alpert, co-wrote a new tune with Andy Armer called “Rise”. It started out as an uptempo disco track, and in the studio it was slowed to around 100 beats per minute, leaving a slinky, half-speed groove for Alpert’s trumpet to float over.
The soap opera General Hospital used it in a notorious 1979 scene, and on 20 October 1979, “Rise” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, where it stayed for two weeks.
That made Alpert, as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan puts it, “the only artist ever to hit #1 as both a singer and an instrumentalist.” Eighteen years later Sean Combs built the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” on the same groove, and that went to No. 1 as well. For more records in that late-night vein, see our countdown of the smoothest smooth jazz songs.
For a modern take on the 1966 sound, try Whipped Cream & Other Delights Rewhipped (2006). Remixers including Thievery Corporation and Medeski, Martin & Wood rework the original tracks, with new solos from Alpert on several of them. Listen to “El Garbanzo” and “Lemon Tree” to hear the old horn lines over new grooves.
Herb Alpert, from a $100 label to the Royal Albert Hall
Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss started A&M in 1962 with $100 each and an office in a garage. Four years later, Whipped Cream & Other Delights topped Billboard’s 1966 year-end chart, ahead of the Beatles, with two more Tijuana Brass albums in the top five. In 1968 he reached No. 1 as a singer, and in 1979 as an instrumentalist with “Rise”. In 1989 he and Moss sold A&M to PolyGram for a reported $500 million.
He hasn’t stopped playing. Now in his nineties, Alpert has a new Tijuana Brass on the road, with UK dates in May 2027 ending at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
For the records themselves, from The Lonely Bull to Rise, read our guide to Herb Alpert albums. We also include “This Guy’s in Love with You” in our pick of Burt Bacharach songs, and our guide to jazz in Los Angeles covers the Bel Air supper club he started, Vibrato Grill Jazz.
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If you owned a copy of Whipped Cream & Other Delights, was it the music or the cover that sold you?
