Song of the Day 6/28: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, “The Mexican Shuffle”

I’m so old I remember when Mexicans weren’t reviled — in fact, they were considered fun and exotic. Case in point: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Though best-known now for founding of A&M Records with Jerry Moss, Boomers will remember Alpert as a trumpeter whose Latin-sounding instrumentals were everywhere in the early to mid-60s. In 1966 Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass sold 17 million records, more than the Beatles, and at one point had five LPs among Billboard’s Top 20 albums.

Trumpet instrumentals were popular back then — Al Hirt charted lots of singles in those years, too — but it wasn’t the music alone that sold all those records. Alpert leaned hard on the Mexican angle, to the point that many people thought the darkly handsome musician with the crooked smile was Latino, and he didn’t rush to correct the impression. In truth, Alpert is about as Mexican as Leonard Bernstein. He was born and raised in Los Angeles to Jewish immigrant parents.

He started out in the music business as a songwriter — he co-wrote Sam Cooke’s 1960 hit “Wonderful World — and released some tracks as a vocalist under the name Dore Alpert. He broke through in 1962, when he switched to the trumpet and recorded an instrumental originally called “Twinkle Star.” During a break in the sessions he visited a bullfight in Tijuana. He later recalled, “Something in the excitement of the crowd, the traditional mariachi music, the trumpet call heralding the start of the fight, the yelling, the snorting of the bulls, it all clicked.”

Alpert retitled the tune “The Lonely Bull” and added crowd noises to the final mix. He pushed the self-financed record to Los Angeles disc jockeys himself until the song clicked. It eventually rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Mexico frequently featured in the string of singles that followed — “South of the Border,” “Mexican Corn” and “The Mexican Shuffle” among them — but the “Tijuana Brass” was just Alpert overdubbing himself until his growing popularity necessitated live performances. His singles scored high on the Adult Contemporary charts, but it was the albums that sold in the millions and put A&M Records on the map. “The Mexican Shuffle” only reached No. 85, but listeners of a certain age will recognize the tune.

Many of Alpert’s instrumentals had long afterlives as theme music for shows like “The Dating Game.” “The Mexican Shuffle,” for example, was licensed by a chewing gum brand and rerecorded as the “Teaberry Shuffle” for a series of TV commercials.

Alpert ended the Tijuana Brass in 1969 and withdrew from public performances for several years, reemerging in the late ’70s in a jazzier format. He and Moss sold A&M for $500 million in 1989, and Alpert, now 88, turned his attention to painting and sculpture.