Why no love for Whipped Cream's BUTTERBALL?

S.J. Hoover

Member
One of the few tracks with Hal Blaine's backbeat I've, actually, always liked the stomping groove (as well as "Dixieland" middle-eight-part) to.
Compared to the way a track such as LADYFINGERS seems to drag on and, literally, sounds like a cat dying...the '68 reel to reel of W.C.&O.D. shuffles the playing order around so that Butterball follows it to close side 1. I think, this works much better than how the record is programmed; because: it's suddenly in a more prominent place and no longer seems like a foregone afterthought from (alternately) being relegated three-quarters down side 2.
Who was "Mike Henderson" (the writer of the song) and who were "The Bluebloods" (the name of a group Henderson, supposedly?, had)? Is there an original recording of Butterball by them?
I don't mind it at all being on W.C.&O.D. because: it's got a swinging, "happy-go-lucky"/uptempo sound (kinda like the way Five Minutes More on W.N.M.L.? becomes Herb's equivalent of a rocker) one just feels like crankin' up when it starts.:bnb:

What my poor phone could only sum to mono without (excessively) overloading (but you'll get the gist:exactly:)
 
Count me in the minority but I love Herbs reading of "Butterball" it was one of the first I heard when I was little and I loved it and I enjoy it even more now it wouldn't be truly WCAOD without it it would be incomplete
 
That song falls into the category of songs I don't hate. but don't like that much either. It's OK, but I'd never put it on a best-of-TJB compilation. I can't really say why, it just doesn't float my boat.

For me, the TJB was still "finding its groove" at the time of this album. I didn't like much of anything on The Lonely Bull, except the first and last songs; I liked about half of the tracks on Volume 2, about the same number on South of the Border, and maybe about two thirds of the songs on Whipped Cream. By the time of Going Places they'd settled into their sound, put together the live band and I liked all of the songs on that album.

When I say I didn't "like" something, that doesn't necessarily mean I hated it though. Just didn't like it as much as the others.

For the record, my favorite cut on the ReWhipped album is "Bittersweet Samba" which is also one of my faves on the original album.
 
I also have always liked Butterball.

I have always liked what I will call the "non-hit" songs that are contained as "inside tracks" on all the TJB albums...with one exception, and that is Talk to the Animals on Beat of the Brass.

I also would not include Butterball on anything like a compilation or greatest hits collection. But I do like it as a song and I like the sound and the arrangement.

I became a Herb Alpert/TJB fan when I got the Going Places album when it was first released. I think that was 1965. The later albums had yet to be recorded and released at that time. The next thing I got a little later on was the Longines Symphonette Society box set, which contained the contents of first four TJB albums and a Baja Marimba album. Then, I started collecting the rest of the albums when they were released as the 1960s moved on.

I spent a lot of time listening to the Longines Symphonette collection. So for quite a while, my early listening to the TJB was based on Going Places and the first four albums in that Longines box set.

I guess my point is that I grew to like the non-hit tracks of all the albums. I think that is probably because I listened to those songs and got to know and appreciate them as much as anything that was contained on Going Places with the signature TJB hits from that album, and the albums thereafter (including the previously released Taste of Honey and Lonely Bull). So, when a new album was released, I followed the same habits, and gave the non-hit songs, or perhaps the ones that did not receive the radio airplay as much just as much attention. I came to appreciate the entire album, song by song, in addition to the ones that become more well-known.

With the exception of Talk to the Animals....:blah:
 
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