‘Slick, suave and a little sexy’: Herb Alpert

You could see Alpert’s popularity as a last hurrah for the sort of jazz-inflected easy listening that ruled the airwaves in the pre-Elvis era. But there was clearly something in these breezy instrumentals that captured the mid-60s zeitgeist, too. “I played A Taste of Honey in Seattle, Washington, and people went crazy over it,” Alpert recalls. “I would play it twice. Sometimes in a row.”

Jerry Moss saw the track as a B-side, but his partner pushed him to reverse the running order. “I said, ‘I’m telling you, there’s a focus group up here [in Seattle], and every time I play that song, it connects.’ He turned it over, and it took about two months for it to really take off, and when it did, it got me on all the major shows, all the exposure I could ever ask for.”

This wasn’t music for teen rebels or young proto-hippies. It was a grown-up sound for swinging sophisticates, made to accompany cocktail parties and carousing in conversation pits. Slick, suave and a little bit sexy. Album sleeves featured Alpert, handsome and plausibly Latin-adjacent, alongside a suitably groovy female co-star.

For the fourth record, loosely themed (at Moss’s suggestion) around the concept of taste, Alpert didn’t appear at all. Instead, he ceded the cover to model Dolores Erickson seemingly wearing nothing but a dress made of cream. It’s an infamous, iconic bit of album art, stranger than mere cheesecake, and inspired countless parodies and tributes over the years. In the short term, it helped ensure that Whipped Cream & Other Delights found its way to bachelor pad record shelves across the US. 

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Television was another cross-cultural factor in Alpert’s ascent. Several Tijuana Brass tracks soundtracked new game show The Dating Game, which debuted at the end of 1965. A version of Mexican Shuffle became the long-running advertising jingle for chewing gum brand Clark’s Teaberry. The 10th Tijuana Brass album, The Beat of the Brass, was promoted by a CBS TV special.