The song that jump-started Alpert's performing career was originally titled "Twinkle Star", written by Sol Lake (who was to write many Tijuana Brass songs over the next decade). Alpert was dissatisfied with his first efforts to record the song, then took a break to visit a bullfight in
Tijuana,
Mexico. As Alpert later recounted, "That's when it hit me! 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 adapted the tune to the trumpet style,
mixed in crowd cheers and other noises for ambience, and renamed the song "
The Lonely Bull". He personally funded the production of the record as a single, and it spread through
radio DJs until it caught on and became a top-10 hit in the fall of 1962. He followed up quickly with his debut album,
The Lonely Bull by "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass". Originally, the Tijuana Brass was just Alpert overdubbing his own trumpet, slightly out of sync. It was A&M's first album (with the original release number being 101), although it was recorded for Conway Records. The title cut reached number six on the
Billboard pop chart. For this album and subsequent releases, Alpert recorded with the group of Los Angeles session musicians known as
the Wrecking Crew, whom he holds in high regard. Alpert's 1965 album
Whipped Cream & Other Delights proved so popular — it was the number-one album of 1966, outselling
The Beatles,
Frank Sinatra, and
the Rolling Stones — that Alpert had to turn the Tijuana Brass into an actual touring ensemble rather than a studio band. Some of that popularity might be attributable to the album's notoriously racy cover, which featured model
Dolores Erickson seemingly clothed only in whipped cream. In a chat with the audience during his concert in Milwaukee on 6 October 2025, Mr. Alpert confirmed "it was shaving cream, not whipped cream". As writer Bruce Handy wrote in a
Billboard article, though, two other Tijuana Brass albums,
Going Places (1965) and
What Now My Love (1966), "held the third and fifth spots on the 1966 year-end chart despite pleasant yet far more anodyne covers." Another measure of the band's popularity is that a number of Tijuana Brass songs were used as theme music for years by the
ABC TV game show
The Dating Game. In 1966, a short animated film by
John and
Faith Hubley called "
A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature" was released; it won the
Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1967. The film featured two songs by the band, "
Tijuana Taxi" and "
Spanish Flea". Also in 1967, the Tijuana Brass performed
Burt Bacharach's title cut to the first movie version of
Casino Royale. Alpert's only number-one single during this period, and the first number-one hit for his A&M label, was a solo effort: "
This Guy's in Love with You", written by Burt Bacharach and
Hal David, featuring a rare vocal. Alpert sang it to his first wife in a 1968
CBS Television special titled
Beat of the Brass. The sequence was filmed on the beach in
Malibu. The song was not intended to be released, but after it was used in the television special, allegedly thousands of telephone calls to
CBS asking about it convinced Alpert to release it as a single, two days after the show aired. Although Alpert's vocal skills and range were limited, the song's technical demands suited him. After years of success, Alpert had a personal crisis in 1969, declaring "the trumpet is my enemy." He disbanded the Tijuana Brass, and stopped performing in public. Eventually, he sought out teacher
Carmine Caruso, "who never played trumpet a day in his life, (but) he was a great trumpet teacher." "What I found," Alpert told
The New York Times, "is that the thing in my hands is just a piece of plumbing. The real instrument is me, the emotions, not my lip, not my technique, but feelings I learned to stuff away—as a kid who came from a very unvocal household. Since then, I've been continually working it out, practicing religiously and now, playing better than ever." ==Post-Brass musical career and "Rise"==