A&M 4146
Producers: Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss
Track listing: Monday, Monday / A Beautiful Friend / Cabaret / Panama / Belz Mein Shtetele Belz (My Home Town) / Talk to the Animals / Slick / She Touched Me / Thanks for the Memory / The Robin / This Guy’s in Love with You
July 26, 1968
2 weeks
By 1968, Herb Alpert had accomplished several notable achievements. He and his partner Jerry Moss had established a successful recording company with the 1962 launch of A&M Records. He also was a successful recording artist, with four Number One albums to his credit. Yet one thing Alpert and A&M had yet to do was score a Number One single. Also, since establishing the Tijuana Brass, all of Alpert’s recordings had been instrumentals. That all changed with The the Beat of the Brass.
“In the real early days, under name of Dore Alpert, I recorded a few vocals,” Alpert says of the period in 1959 when he was signed to Dot Records as a vocalist and recorded the song “Tell It to the Birds.” Alpert’s vocals would make a dramatic return when the trumpet player went to work on his own television special for CBS in 1968. “The producer asked me if I would consider singing a song,” Alpert says. “So I called Burt Bacharach and asked him if he had a wonderful song tucked away in his drawer that he finds himself whistling every now and then. He sent over a song called ‘This Boy Is in Love with You.’ I was just crazy about the melody and the feeling of the song, so I met with Hal David and he changed some of the lyrics for the TV show.”
During the show, which was broadcast on April 22, 1968, Alpert sang the show to his then-wife Sharon on the beach in Malibu. “It wasn’t recorded to be a single, it was just part of the show,” he says. “But when the show was aired, we got an enormous response to it.”
In much the same way Alpert recorded his trumpet tracks, his vocal on “This Guy’s in Love with You” was recorded in a single take. “The vocal group that backed me on it was in the studio when I recorded it,” he says. “We did the track and then I put my voice on it. I got a lot of encouragement, but I didn’t know if they were just stroking me or if they were really impressed. They liked it a heck of a lot more than I did.”
Yet after several listens to the demo tape at home, Alpert began to like the track. “I realized it had something. There was a certain unpretentious quality I brought to it that worked.” The American public agreed — on June 22, 1968, the song become the first Number One single for Alpert, A&M, and writers Bacharach and David.
None of the other tracks on the album fared nearly as well, but there were a few other noteworthy songs, particularly Alpert’s version of the Mamas and the Papas “Monday, Monday” and covers of “Cabaret” and “Thanks for the Memory,” which served as the theme of The Bob Hope Show. The album hit the summit of the Top LP’s chart in its 12th week on the chart, primarily based on the strength of “This Guy’s in Love with You.” It was Alpert’s fifth and final Number One album as an artist, but his label would go on to score several more.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of July 26, 1968
1. The Beat of the Brass, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass
2. Wheels of Fire, Cream
3. Bookends, Simon & Garfunkel
4. A Tramp Shining, Richard Harris
5. The Graduate, Soundtrack