Drummer Boy with a Horn

Everybody remembers the name of the fellow who played Moses in the 1956 film remake of The Ten Commandments. Right. Charlton Heston. But who was that fellow with his bare back to the camera who played the drum while Charlton strode down the mountain with the tablets? He was a little nobody, a movie extra who just happened to have the kind of graceful dorsal muscles and shoulder blades the director was looking for. Herb Alpert has since become considerably more than a name that everybody remembers, or a man who hires his own drummers. He is a major sound system.

As leading man with his own Tijuana Brass, Alpert has just wound up a U.S. tour that established the group as one of the top handful of pop road shows around. It is equaled only by the likes of Sinatra, Streisand and the Beatles when it comes to filling big halls. Just three years ago, the seven-man troupe was playing in small clubs like Manhattan's Basin Street East. This time, only the Yale Bowl, the Boston Garden, San Antonio's HemisFair Arena and other massive coliseums would do; at Madison Square Garden, for example, they drew a crowd of 20,000. In Detroit's Cobo Hall, squealing teeny-boppers and grown women ran up and down the aisles, setting off a blitz of lights with their Instamatic cameras. In Laramie, Wyo., a woman clearly in her 80s came down the aisle and shouted, "Sock it to me, Herbie!"

Twin Trumpets. What seems to please the crowds most is that Herb doesn't sock it at all. He silks it. The Tijuana Brass is basically just a good old-fashioned melody band that makes no pretensions toward the new. No soulsearching Thelonious Monk stuff, no revolutionary developments--just pleasant music that is as universal in its way as Bob Hope is in his. Alpert's rhythms have a pulse all their own. "I can take any tune, take anyone's tracks, and record the Brass over it and make it sound like the Tijuana Brass," he boasts. The melodies are invariably simple affairs tootled forth in short staccato bursts by twin trumpets. The crackling, joyous blend of mariachi, Dixieland and cool rock--often called Ameriachi, but Mexiland or cucaracha-rock will do just as well--appeals to the oldsters as much as Lawrence Welk does. But it is infinitely less square than Welk, and the kids dance to its classic 4/4 beat with no complaints.

Until 1965, the Tijuana Brass only made records--with Alpert dubbing both trumpets and sometimes dubbing piano too. That was for Alpert's A & M Records (the M stands for Jerry Moss, Alpert's nonplaying partner), which had been launched in Alpert's garage three years before. Now A & M is set up on Charlie Chaplin's old movie lot in Hollywood, and Alpert is busy plowing profits from such million-seller albums as Whipped Cream, What Now My Love and Goin' Places into modernizing the old silent-film workshop.

Clacking Royalties. A & M records the Tijuana Brass and other groups, among them Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 and the Baja Marimba Band. In addition, Alpert's new A & M Productions tapes his TV specials and is getting ready for a planned expansion into films. And in a new two-story office building, an IBM 360 computer spends the day clacking out royalties and other profits that will yield Alpert's various ventures a combined gross of $30 million this year. His six fellow performers will each earn between $50,000 and $100,000, making them most likely the highest-paid sidemen of all time.

Alpert, 33, still writes all of his own arrangements, except the one for his first vocal single, the intimate, oh-so-cuddly This Guy's in Love with You, composed and arranged for him three months ago by Hit Maker Burt Bacharach (Alfie). It shot quickly to the No. 1 spot on the pop charts and was still there last week. Next? Perhaps an Alpert movie production called The Return of the Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston. But who will play the drummer?

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