Friday, April 7, 2017

Bradley Mason Hamlin writes

Love & Sadistic Dharma

zee …

film rolls
like gentle surf as
Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass
serenade “The Lonely Bull”

in the dark room
white ghosts fade in and out

the rain
falling, blowing
dropping, splashing outside

someone whispers
you’re not crazy, but who
to believe …

the wine ran dry
over forty days & nights ago
lost in the valley

red fingernails
drew blood sometimes

the sun
never breaking through
the clouds

the old camera
took good pictures
in the night of it all

shadow spirits
inside mirrored gloom

like strawberry jam
and peanut butter
Jiff or Skippy
not that gooey hard hippy shit

time traveling …

hypnotized by her big
sexy eyes
round melancholy
like sad songs

the trumpet playing
as she unbuttons her clothes.

The Acrobat's Ideas -- Rene Magritte


  1. Herb Alpert's parents had immigrated to the US from Ukraine and Romania, and the whole family played musical instruments. Herb began trumpet lessons at eight and became a songwriter for Keen Records at 22, penning hit songs such as Jan and Dean's "Baby Talk" and Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World," and (as Dore Alpert) began singing in 1960 before forming Carnival Records with Jerry Moss, which they soon renamed A&M Records. Setting up a small studio in his garage, he began overdubbing "Twinkle Star" by Sol Lake. After attending a bullfight in nearby Tijuana, Mexico, he decided to develop a mariachi sound for the song and renamed it "The Lonely Bull (El Solo Toro)." Calling himself "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass," he recorded and promoted his label's first single, which reached #6 on the charts in 1962 and funded the production of an album, also called "The Lonely Bull." For the album and subsequent releases (one or two albums a year throughout the 1960s), he hired the loose-knit group of session musicians eventually known as "The Wrecking Crew" (or the Clique, the First Call Gang, or the Phil Spector Wall of Sound Orchestra) to perform as the Tijuana Brass (the Wrecking Crew were usually uncredited but, in various combinations, played on hundreds of records and sometimes were actually "ghost players" on recordings credited to others such as the Byrds on Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," the first two albums by the Monkees, and the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds"). A seven-piece touring band, consisting of other session musicians, was formed in 1965. Between 16 October 1965 and 29 April 1967 the group had at least one album in the Top 10; in 1966 it had five albums simultaneously in the Top 20 (four of them in the top 10 in the first week of April) and sold over 13 million records. In 1968, during a "Beat of the Brass" TV special on the Columbia Broadcasting System, Alpert sang a Burt Bacharach/Hal David tune, "This Guy's in Love with You;" it was not intended to be released but the response was so strong that two days later he decided to cut it as a solo single, becoming his only #1 song during the existence of the Brass, and staying there for four weeks. After winning six Grammy Awards, Alpert disbanded the Tijuana Brass in 1969 but released another album by them in 1971. In 1973 he formed Herb Alpert and the T.J.B., consisting of some original and some new players, which released two albums and toured. In 1979, as a solo instrumentalist, his recording of "Rise" (by his nephew Randy Badazz Alpert and Andy Armer) went to #1, making him the only artist to achieve that position as both a vocalist and an instrumentlist. In 1984 he reconvened a third version of the band. Either as a solo act or as part of the Brass, he sold 72 million records, charted 28 times on the Billboard Album charts (including 5 #1 albums), and won 9 Grammys, including Best Pop Instrumental Album for "Steppin' Out" in 2014. Alpert and Moss sold A&M Records to PolyGram Records for $500 million in 1987 but continued to manage the label until 1993; that year he won a Tony Award for his production of Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," which also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1998 Alpert and Moss sued PolyGram for breaching the integrity clause of their contract and settled for an additional $200 million.

  2. Peanut butter was patented in 1884 by Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec; he milled roasted peanuts until they reached "a fluid or semi-fluid state" with "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment," then added sugar to harden its consistency. In 1998 John Harvey Kellogg received another patent for a process that used boiled peanuts. In 1903 Dr. Ambrose Straub and a Kellogg employee Joseph Lambert patented a machine that made peanut butter. In 1922 chemist Joseph Rosefield invented a process for making smooth peanut butter by using partially hydrogenated oil to keep the oil from separating (the older varieties, the ones without emulsifiers to bind the peanut oils with the peanut paste, are what Bradley calls "that gooey hard hippy shit"); in 1928 he licensed the process to the Derby Foods subsidary of Swift & Company, which had been making E. K. Pond peanut butter since 1920; using Rosefield's new process, they changed their product's name to Peter Pan peanut butter (named after the The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up created by J. M. Barrie in 1904). But in 1932 Rosefield Packing Co. began producing its own Skippy peanut butter, named after a popular comic strip character created by Percy Crosby in 1923. In addition to his success as a cartoon, Skippy also had his own toys, a radio show, and a 1931 movie which garnered Norman Taurog an Academy Award for Best Director. Crosby took Rosefield to court and had the trademark temporarily invalidated in 1934, but Rosefield regained it under the provisions of the 1946 Lanham (Trademark) Act.In 1949, after a failed suicide attempt, Crosby was institutionalized until his death in 1964 on his 73rd birthday, though his family continued to litigate over the use of Skippy's name into the 21st century. In 1955 Rosefield sold the brand to Best Foods, and eventually it passed on to Unilever and, 1in 2013,to Hormel Foods. The only peanut butter band that has more sales worldwide is Jif. In 1955, the same year Best Foods acquired Skippy, Procter & Gamble bought William T. Young Foods, which had been making Big Top peanut butter since 1946. (Young used his money to go into horse breeding; his Tabasco Cat won the Preakness and Belmont Stakes races in 1994, and his Grindstone won the Kentucky Derby, the other part of the triple Crowns series, in 1996). Proctor & Gamble renamed the product Jiffy and reformulated it by adding sugar, molasses, and oils other than peanut oil in its hydrogenation process. In 1958 the Creamy and Crunchy styles debuted, and in 1974, Extra Crunchy Jif was introduced. Since 1981 Jif has been the leading peanut butter brand in the US. In 1991 Simply Jif, with less sodium and sugar, came out, and Reduced Fat Jif three years later. The J.M. Smucker Co. purchased the brand from Procter & Gamble in 2001 and released the first whipped peanut butter, Jif Whips, in 2014; that year, in association with Kellogg's, it introduced a peanut butter-flavored breakfast cereal.


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