If there’s one thing all record collectors have in common, it’s the experience of running into Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass innumerable times…. like literally, every time you go into a record store you haven’t been to already. If you’re flipping through the A rack or the H rack (different stores do it different ways), then at some point you’re quite likely to flip past the familiar green image of a comely lass (Dolores Erickson is her name) wearing nothing but an impossible quantity of a cream-like substance (it was actually shaving cream, and she was pregnant at the time).

Released in 1965, Whipped Cream & Other Delights was the fourth album Alpert put out, and it was one of the most massive successes of pop music history—which explains its ubiquity in today’s used wax market—everybody’s parents had the fucking thing. (Knowledgeable music fans will know that it appeared on A&M Records, primarily because the “A” in A&M Records stands for “Alpert.”)

According to Wikipedia, more than 6 million copies of the album were sold, and unlike later eras there was no question about what format it appeared in—for many years it was vinyl or nothing…. It’s the National Geographic of albums, every record store owner comes across it all the time. Hell, even Maude in The Big Lebowski owns a copy.
 

 
Last week Dave Taylor, who runs Weirdsville Records in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, on the northern edge of Detroit, pulled a funny kind of prank when he decided to switch up the visual look of his store for an hour or two. You can see the results above and below—a full wall of Whipped Cream & Other Delights and Whipped Cream & Other Delights fronting every bin! (Yes, in case you were wondering, the unseen albums in the bins are not all Alpert’s masterpiece, they’re just regular albums.)

Anyone who would name his store Weirdsville and would transform it into a shrine to Herb Alpert is OK by me. I reached out to Taylor and got him to discuss the stunt. His amusing opening salvo went like this: “Every day we get records in. There will be AT LEAST 2 of these in every stack! 9 out of 10 households had this record! It’s a great record and who can’t love this cover?”

One of the most interesting aspects of the display is that Taylor went out of his way to make sure customers understood that the copies are not for sale. Taylor says that he has about 75 copies of the album, and sheepishly admitted that he is “stockpiling the Herb.” A couple years ago DM introduced readers to Rutherford Chang, who is quixotically trying to corner the market in the Beatles’ White Album, and Taylor has seemingly cemented his status as one of the world’s leading Whipped Cream & Other Delights collector—although in this case many used record store proprietors might have a head start in terms of catching up to him!
 

 
More after the jump…

 
When I was young, copies of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass‘s chart-topping album Whipped Cream & Other Delights could be found nearly everywhere you looked. In record stores, in every garage sale, and most probably in your father’s record collection. Maybe you noticed this too? It was a hard one to to miss!

Suave and good-looking, the dapper and charismatic trumpet player provided the perfect soundtrack to the archetypal bullfight poster-clad swinging bachelor pad of the 1960s—not to mention a James Bond movie. If your parents went to Vegas, they might’ve come back with a tale of seeing a fiery set by the Tijuana Brass.

Even if Herb Alpert was pretty cool, he was still your dad’s generation’s idea of “cool” (or perhaps your grandfather’s by this point). His songs were played during The Dating Game and Alpert frequently appeared on the most staid and middle-of-the-road TV variety shows. Not unfairly he is considered somewhat of a “show biz” performer of the “easy listening” variety, but he produced some of the most iconic and pleasing pieces of instrumental pop music of the 1960s, at times outselling even the Beatles and shifting some 70 million albums.
 

A sundae kind of love?
 
Best of all? He co-owned the record label (Alpert is the “A” in A&M Records, the “M” is his business partner, Jerry Moss). Your father’s idea of cool, perhaps, but the motherfucker was a gangsta businessman, too, raking in millions selling crate-loads of Carpenters, Cat Stevens, Sting, Janet Jackson, Supertramp and Peter Frampton albums.

More after the jump…