Wall of sound
Everyone has some terrible thing their parents did to them that they can never forgive. Mine is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad had an old Ford LTD wagon in 1976, which came with a couple of 8-track tapes containing Herb’s greatest hits. We made liberal use of the infinite-replay feature of 8-track technology. Now that I’m pushing 40, it’s beginning to look like the sick attraction to Herb’s modest, pleasant brand of Muzak may be a lifelong disorder. Today I own a copy of every LP Herb ever recorded, plus several by the Baja Marimba band, an even less compelling spinoff group. (Laura likes For Animals Only, with the immortal “Last of the Red-Hot Llamas.” Describing this as a joke album would not help you distinguish it from the rest of the BMB’s oeuvre.) We were listening to some of this stuff over the weekend, idly listing its many deficiencies, and it occurred to me that this could be one reason I have music on all the time, at home and in the car and at work: to drown out the Herb tunes in my head.
Categorised as: Music