David Lida

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Brass

Anyone out there old enough to remember the cover of this album, which sold six million copies in 1965? Or the band? Herb Alpert came from fairly close to Tijuana -- Los Angeles -- but, hardly Mexican, was a young man of Jewish Rumanian descent when he recorded a song called "The Lonely Bull," which was inspired by the brass section of a mariachi band he had heard on a trip across the border. His band, the Tijuana Brass, included no Mexicans either. According to the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass web site, the model on the album cover, Dolores Erickson, was pregnant at the time of the shoot. And that is not whipped cream. It's shaving cream. Alpert and the band sold over 72 million records, mostly in the 1960s. He also has been a recording executive and a philanthropist, and today leads a band which features his wife, singer Lani Hall. You want to see the video of the album's biggest hit? It was made fifteen years before MTV.