The CD Reissues are Wonderful.

The only real negative to the "worst" side is that this prevents us from supporting local businesses, and the whole experience of flipping through the bins to find what we want. At least shopping for used records or CDs still gives us that option. I do not go for the Record Store Day hype, but I do appreciate the boost it gives independent record stores.
 
Back in the 70’s, a good friend worked in a record store. She used to alert me when the really good stuff was coming in. We used to go hang out in the back room with the black lights, posters, and incense. Of course we bought records too, so the owner tolerated us. (The days of $4.95 for an album.) Sigh...
 
Those were the days...I recall buying a few records on my allowance that were $4.95 from E.J. Korvette's, a few miles from the house. The last new records I bought at $4.95 were at Sam's Jams in the early 80s. They would run these as "loss leaders" to get you into the store. Earth Wind & Fire's Powerlight was one of those, I distinctly remember. I was already a regular, so this was just an added bonus for shopping there.
 
Those were the days...I recall buying a few records on my allowance that were $4.95 from E.J. Korvette's, a few miles from the house. The last new records I bought at $4.95 were at Sam's Jams in the early 80s. They would run these as "loss leaders" to get you into the store. Earth Wind & Fire's Powerlight was one of those, I distinctly remember. I was already a regular, so this was just an added bonus for shopping there.
I remember one of the last new Record purchases I made back in the 80s was when the old payless drug store ( now known as Rite Aid) sometimes had big overstocks of vinyl and sold them anywhere from 99cents to $4.99 and I remember walking out of there with a nice stack of wax sealed and I would take the shortest way home so I could play them right away Those were the days indeed. There will Never Be Deals Like That anymore.
 
We are 100 miles from Billings, the biggest city in the state, so I was always keen to beat the stores there on prices whenever I could. I remember when Frampton Comes Alive came out.... the distributor had a tremendous deal on it, if you bought a box-lot. (Probably 20 pieces.) I think we had that album for $7.49 or something like that, when most of the other stores were at $10.99 or more for it. I believe the list price was $11.98.

We used to buy box lots of quite a few albums - I remember doing Foreigner's first album for $4.79 -- this is when the suggested list price of single LPs was $6.98.
 
We are 100 miles from Billings, the biggest city in the state, so I was always keen to beat the stores there on prices whenever I could. I remember when Frampton Comes Alive came out.... the distributor had a tremendous deal on it, if you bought a box-lot. (Probably 20 pieces.) I think we had that album for $7.49 or something like that, when most of the other stores were at $10.99 or more for it. I believe the list price was $11.98.

We used to buy box lots of quite a few albums - I remember doing Foreigner's first album for $4.79 -- this is when the suggested list price of single LPs was $6.98.
Your store would have been dangerous for me back then. :D
 
And a pox on people who laid their records on the rug! :laugh:
We are 100 miles from Billings, the biggest city in the state, so I was always keen to beat the stores there on prices whenever I could. I remember when Frampton Comes Alive came out.... the distributor had a tremendous deal on it, if you bought a box-lot. (Probably 20 pieces.) I think we had that album for $7.49 or something like that, when most of the other stores were at $10.99 or more for it. I believe the list price was $11.98.

We used to buy box lots of quite a few albums - I remember doing Foreigner's first album for $4.79 -- this is when the suggested list price of single LPs was $6.98.
DeeInKy you are spot on . And Mike If I would have Shopped at your store I can say Like Rudy I Too Would Be Dangerous.and you Would have saved me More Money .
 
Rudy, of the six CDs I'm going to be getting in the next few days, Warm will be the only one I have ever heard, and that so long ago that I don't really remember much about it at all. Had the record when I was a kid. Still do, actually, but it's been years and it's been out exposed to the air, so I doubt it would work anymore.

In terms of Herb's A&M solo recordings, I've heard Rise, obviously, since Shout Factory reissued it. I never did find a copy of the Shout Factory version of Fandango, though, so the only other A&M solo albums I've heard are Beyond and Keep Your Eye On Me because I found tapes of those two in thrift stores a few years back. Don't really listen to tapes much, though. As such, I can't say that any of the solo albums I'm missing are "favorites", so that wouldn't be a consideration. As to which ones were more or less popular, I'll admit, I have zero clue. Right off hand, I'd guess Fandango and Keep Your Eye On Me were the two next-most popular after Rise since they're the other two represented on Definitive Hits, but even that's a guess.
 
The popularity of Herb's most popular solo albums was tied directly to the hit singles on them. Rise had the #1 title track, of course, and all the TV exposure it got, plus "Rotation" was a hit as well, so I'm pretty sure that's the best seller of the solo albums. Keep Your Eye On Me had the #2 hit, "Diamonds" (which was more like a Janet Jackson record featuring Herb), plus they released a couple other singles from that as well, so it's most likely second place. It also benefited from the Jam & Lewis connection -- they produced four tracks. Fandango had "Route 101" as a chart record, but it wasn't as big a hit as the others so it's probably in third place. I think it picked up some steam just from the fact that it was a damn good album and it played to Herb's core TJB audience more than some of the other solo records did.

The rest of the solo albums would all have had much lower sales due to not containing any "big hits."
 
I'm still filling in some things, so I just ordered 2 more CDs. Got to get them while they're still here...
I sure can relate to that I remember the many times I was filling in those missing gaps to my collections over the years you are truly experiencing the Joys of Collecting. I wish you Happy Hunting and Happier Listening. I Share in Your joy.
 
Well, my package arrived yesterday. I'm hoping to get a chance to listen to at least some of them over the weekend. Not The Christmas Wish, though, obviously, since it's barely December.
 
Okay, I listened to Volume 2 (I'm going to go chronologically). First off, I understand why this album did so poorly. It sounds like Herb was trying to copy the sound of The Lonely Bull as closely as he could and went overboard in his effort. It's not a "bad" album by any means, but, uh, what's the word I'm looking for, derivative? Is that the right word?

One other question. "Winds of Barcelona" sounded familiar, but I know I've never heard that song on any of my compilations. Where am I recognizing it from? It sounds familiar, but slightly different. Unless he redid it on one of his recent solo albums and I'm forgetting about that.
 
When you get to the next chronological album (South of the Border) you will have the answer to your question about "Winds of Barcelona."
 
I had actually meant I was going to go through the new ones chronologically, not go back and listen to all of them chronologically, though I may do that at some point. Now that you mention it, though, I think those two are the same song. Wonder how that happened. Did Herb have a short memory, or did he just think he could do better after the first effort, so he changed the name and tried again? He seems to have done that quite a bit through his career, though usually without changing the name of the song.

In other news, I've gotten through Warm, The Brass Are Comin', and Summertime. The latter two seemed to be typical TJB fare, which is good. Not sure what to think of Warm. I recognized a lot of the songs better than I'd expected to after all of these years, but the sound just felt different compared to what came before and after it. Not bad, mind you, just different. Is it possible that the different sound on Warm is the reason the TJB's popularity plummeted after Beat of the Brass?
 
I think it was more a function of changing tastes in society that caused the Brass' popularity to plummet. Every band has a sales peak and theirs was in the mid-'60s... by the early '70s, it was all rock'n'roll and singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Carole King, etc.

Warm is kind of a strange animal because nobody knows for sure if it was the TJB musicians who played on it, or if it was more like a solo album. We know there was some TJB-related involvement at least (John Pisano, Sol Lake, Julius Wechter) but a lot of the songs do indeed sound quite different from the TJB sound.

Given the TJB were an instrumental band, it's pretty surprising they sustained their popularity as long as they did, given the fact that the British Invasion came along and rolled over the top of everything else.

As to your question about El Presidente vs. Winds of Barcelona, I think it was that Herb felt like he could do a better version. Remember this is when he switched to Gold Star Studios, and he was moving away from trying to make everything sound Mexican (song titles notwithstanding). He was going for a more American pop feel starting with the South of the Border album. He probably changed the title since it was only one album later than the original version.
 
"El Presidente" was also meant as a tribute to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
 
Mr. Blakesley, I'm too young to have direct knowledge, but didn't the British Invasion start in 1964 with the arrival of The Beatles in America? That would place the beginning of the British Invasion BEFORE the beginning of the TJB's period of dominance, which didn't start until Whipped Cream and Other Delights in 1965, if I'm remembering my history correctly. Yes, South of the Border was a chart album, but the TJB was only emerging at that point, or re-emerging after the sales flop of Volume 2 if you want to count The Lonely Bull as their first emergence. I'm more inclined to count The Lonely Bull as a fluke, though, and consider South of the Border as the beginning of their emergence into significance.
 
Just in my view of things, the "Lonely Bull" single was almost like a novelty record of sorts, yet it was Sol Lake's melody that made it memorable. The whole bullfight motif was just one of the hooks that helped make it a hit. The album actually stretched quite a bit musically though, as it has a few different styles going there. But as you can guess, the bullfight/mariachi idea would wear thin and Volume 2 kind of suffered from that. Not that it was bad, but the idea was kind of leading nowhere. Not sustainable in the long run.

The TJB otherwise is hard to categorize once you get to South of the Border and beyond. Yes, it was instrumental, but it borrowed a lot from pop music of the day, including some of the musicians who made hit records elsewhere, and they covered a lot of pop songs in something other than the typical "Muzak" style that many earlier instrumental records featured. They owed a lot to the Phil Spector production style--heck, they used Spector's engineer (Larry Levine) and recorded at Gold Star! In a sense they skated both instrumental and pop and came up with a formula that appealed to fans of both. Also, they didn't sound dated. Were they everyone's cup of tea? No. But that didn't stop them from placing four LPs in the top ten of the Billboard album chart. I'm sure a few British Invasion followers were also fans of the group, but not everyone was into the Invasion either. That left a lot of listeners who would be open to something like the TJB.
 
didn't the British Invasion start in 1964 with the arrival of The Beatles in America?

Yes, but the real "dominance" of British (and American) rock'n'roll on the charts didn't push most of the the older artists out until the second half of the '60s. Herb kind of straddled both sides of the fence -- he got pigeonholed into the older artist "easy listening" slot because his band was instrumental, but he was definitely a pop/rock artist in my book.

I remember selling a couple of CDs to a local bar/grill many years ago -- they came in wanting some "easy listening" for the lunch crowd. One of the CDs I gave them was a Herb Alpert one. (Classics Vol. 1, if I remember correctly.) They brought it back, saying the trumpet was "too loud." They were looking for Ray Conniff-type stuff, I guess.
 
Yes, but the real "dominance" of British (and American) rock'n'roll on the charts didn't push most of the the older artists out until the second half of the '60s. Herb kind of straddled both sides of the fence -- he got pigeonholed into the older artist "easy listening" slot because his band was instrumental, but he was definitely a pop/rock artist in my book.

I remember selling a couple of CDs to a local bar/grill many years ago -- they came in wanting some "easy listening" for the lunch crowd. One of the CDs I gave them was a Herb Alpert one. (Classics Vol. 1, if I remember correctly.) They brought it back, saying the trumpet was "too loud." They were looking for Ray Conniff-type stuff, I guess.
"TOO LOUD???? " oh Please. They obviously wanted the faint quiet stuff like Ray Conniff or Lawrence Well or Dare I say it The Even quieter Radio Muzak ( which was the custom instrumentals that nobody could buy until the mid/late 2000s when the owners of the recordings began releasing them to the public) to fully appreciate Easy Listening you have to have a little bit of everything and There is Much more variety in the genre than ever you would be surprised what gets played on the few easy listening stations that exist that stream online. I've done my homework because I specialize in it because I play a good mellow mix of music on my weekly radio show
 
I remember selling a couple of CDs to a local bar/grill many years ago -- they came in wanting some "easy listening" for the lunch crowd. One of the CDs I gave them was a Herb Alpert one. (Classics Vol. 1, if I remember correctly.) They brought it back, saying the trumpet was "too loud." They were looking for Ray Conniff-type stuff, I guess.
What's humorous about this is that today, you won't find any bar, grille or restaurant playing any instrumental music such as this. Many use a satellite service for music now, as the royalties are rolled up into their monthly cost.

As for "too loud," I wish I had not been working afternoons at the office back in the early 80s. One of the local easy listening stations (and this one was a real snoozer) had changed over to a hard rock format overnight. I would loved to have seen the secretary's face when she turned the radio on that morning. :D
 
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