For this post, you can blame Chuck Miller, who wrote about Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in late May 2015. It reminded me of my history collecting TJB.
I owned at least 7 of the first eight albums by the band, starting with Lonely Bull, which was the very first album released on A&M Records, LP-101. This is not surprising since Alpert was the A in A&M. I suspect I got them through the Capitol Record Club.
Unfortunately, almost all my albums, alphabetically A, B, much of S and all of T-Z were stolen from my grandmother’s house in the Great LP Theft of 1972.
Subsequently, I bought, again, the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights from a used record store. As it turned out, the LP inside was actually the TJB album Going Places. Oddly, I did not mind.
The album cover was legendary. It featured model Dolores Erickson, who was three months pregnant when they photographed her. She was actually covered mostly in shaving cream because whipped cream melts under the hot photography lights.
Listen to Whipped Cream & Other Delights, an album that spent 185 weeks on the US Billboard album charts starting in 1965, including eight weeks at #1.
Right before I started blogging back in 2005, my friend/blogging guru Fred Hembeck wrote a blog post on March 31. It celebrated both Herb Alpert, who had turned 70 that day, so he’s now 80; and that album cover, which is now 50 years old, with the model now 78.
A few days later, Fred shared a fascinating find of mine: Album covers spoofing album covers. Back then, the album was pictured #14, with #15-18 as goofs on the theme. A decade later, the page is still going. Now, the original cover of Whipped Cream & Other Delights is at #79, as of this writing, with the parodies, such as the one here, following.
