HA&TJ: "South Of The Border"

Originally Released on LP A&M 108 
(US, December 1964)

Produced by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss

Arranged by Herb Alpert

Engineered by Larry Levine

Recorded at Gold Star Studios, LA

Album Designed by Apple Graphics
Billboard peak album chart position: 6 (debuted 12/18/65)
Weeks in Top 40 album chart: 52
RIAA certified Gold (5/9/66)

South of the Border is not a place. It’s a state of mind, a mythical landscape that everyone North of the Border needs in order to know who we are. It’s a region populated by outlaws and criminals, romantics and bohemians, military men and frat boys, dreamers and travelers, dropouts and writers. It’s a destination never actually reached; people don’t live there, they “head” there or “run” there or hide there, or look for love there, with no guarantee of ever finfing it. When it was time for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to head back into Gold Star Recording Studios to record their third album in 1964, they moved the song from the Texas border to the California border and turned it into an entire album. The song’s ay yay yay tale of falling in love under a Mexican sky full of stars had a new leading man. On the cover Alpert wore a burnt orange mariachi jacket and clutched a trumpet, with a beautiful woman by his side, while three mariachis in big sombreros waited in the shadows under and old Spanish arch.

This Tijuana’s third album begins to highlight more of Alpert's fine arranging talents. From standards ("South Of The Border"), to Bossa Nova ("The Girl From Ipanema") or to The Beatles ("All My Lovin'") and Broadway ("Hello Dolly!"), all bases are covered. The clincher is the hit that brought more attention to the Tijuana Brass: "Mexican Shuffle", first heard on a Teaberry commercial, started to get more airplay and the public then knew that the Brass had not faded away. Says Herb: «I asked songwriter Sol Lake to try and compose a song that would fit into a shuffle rhythm, and he came up with “Mexican Shuffle”. It opened a new door for me. At that point I felt that I just needed to find songs with strong melodies and put them in an interesting and honest setting. “Hello Dolly!” was a tongue-in-cheek version sung by me and some of the maintenance people at Gold Star Recording Studios, where I did most of the Tijuana Brass recordings. I worked with Larry Levine, a great sound engineer who also had a wonderful perspective on the songs I chose to record from an audience point of view. And I also listened to my partner, Jerry Moss, who had and still has wonderful musical instincts. Here again composer Sol Lake contributed “El Presidente”, “Salud, Amor Y Dinero” and “Adios, Mi Corazon”. When recording recognizable songs, my goal has always been to do them in a way that is different than the original recording and to always try and express the song through the trumpet as if I were singing the lyric.» This is the album that would crack the ice for the phenomenal breakthrough that would follow. It jumped into the Top 10, and by February of 1965 it reached #6. This was the biggest of Alpert’s successes yet and when “Mexican Shuffle” was showed up on a TV commercial for Clark’s Teaberry Gum The Tijuana Brass gained mass audiences the size Alpert had never dreamed of. Soon The Tijuana Brass turned on a permanent lineup of musicians who would go on to become one of the top live draws in the world, selling millions of albums to a remarkable generation-spanning fan base that included teenagers as much as their 50-something parents.