‘This Guy’s in Love With You’: Herb Alpert’s “one-take” chart-topper
For people born after the 1980s, Herb Alpert is something of a bizarre, almost mythological figure, simultaneously obscure and ubiquitous.
As both a recording artist and label exec, Alpert is among the most successful and unashamedly mainstream dudes to ever do it. Loads of his instrumental records with the Tijuana Brass somehow managed to top the US charts even in the middle of Beatlemania, and as the co-founder of A&M Records, he’s at least partially responsible for the success of everyone from Yusuf/Cat Stevens and The Carpenters to Janet Jackson and The Police.
The average millennial usually learned about Herb, however, by observing the crates of old vinyl records at their local charity shop, which would almost always reveal at least one copy of the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, the chart-topping 1965 record instantly recognisable for its provocative cover art of a woman in a whipped-cream ‘dress’. 60 years later, that record, the biggest seller of Alpert’s career as a trumpeter and bandleader, still titillates passersby thanks to that sleeve; something Herb was never thrilled about.
“I told them I didn’t want to use it,” a now 90-year-old Alpert recently told The Guardian in 2023, “but they wanted something a little flash and I acquiesced. I thought it was a little too risqué, frankly, but, in retrospect, it seems kinda tame when you look at what’s going on now.”
By 1968, the success of Whipped Cream and four additional US Billboard number one albums (Going Places, What Now My Love, Sounds Like…, and The Beat of the Brass) had Herb Alpert sitting at the absolute apex of American popular music, despite rarely ever setting down his trumpet to sing a more radio-typical pop song.
This changed, for a brief moment anyway, when he took part in a television special that year as a tie-in with his latest record. The programme, also called The Beat of the Brass, included some stage performances and pre-recorded music video segments, one of which featured the debut of a new love song by the already esteemed writing team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, called ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’.
“Burt and I were dear friends,” Alpert told The Guardian, looking back on his decision to tackle the lead vocal on the song that became his first number one single, explaining, “When I was doing this TV special with the Tijuana Brass in 1968, the director, Jack Haley Jr, said, ‘I’m tired of filming you with a trumpet in your mouth, why don’t you try singing a song?’”
Alpert reached out to Bacharach to see if he could help him out with this assignment, who sent him a song he’d recently recorded with Dionne Warwick but hadn’t released yet, called ‘This Girl’s In Love With You.’ “I loved the feeling of the song and changed the gender,” Alpert recalled, “Burt played piano, and I did a rough vocal to see if my voice would fit. Burt and the musicians walked into the control room and said, ‘That’s it! Don’t touch what you just did’. So it was one take.”
Herb proceeded to lip-sync to his original one-take vocal in the TV special, in which he is seen wooing a young lady, a hippie girl with fringe and heavy mascara, somewhere in a forest: a very 1968 sort of thing. The terrific Bacharach composition, combined with that imagery and the novelty of Alpert singing, helped the release of the seven-inch single of ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’ race up the charts. Not only was it Alpert’s first number one song, it was also surprisingly the first for Bacharach and the A&M label.
