Posted 5:32 PM by Gene

I think I discovered what killed off pop music for grownups. Last week WFMU.org's blog posted 99 imitation-Tijuana Brass MP3s*. One cannot fathom why so many thought they could make money with pale imitations except for the profound success of the real thing. But the unofficial A&M fan site lists 287 fake TJB albums; God knows how many remain uncounted (at least one appears among these MP3s -- a Pickwick kiddie record). Worse it defines of bad music. There's a group called the Mariachi Brass with the drug-addled Chet Baker playing a pathetic flugelhorn; they recorded the Dating Game theme for Chuck Barris. There's the idiot Modernaires singing doggerel lyrics to instrumentals -- hard to believe this act made such memorable music with Glenn Miller. There's Peter Nero with a supremely arch "Spanish Flea" that makes Liberace into the paragon of good taste. The "comic" acts are the worst; they need a laugh track. Like Al Tijuana and his Jewish Brass, the misbegotten brainchild of Bob Booker and George Foster, who had success with gentle ethnic humor and brought in Lou Jacobi to provide drippy commentary to some studio fender benders of mariachi and klezmer. What was the point? To make fun of Herb Alpert's background? Or The Frivolous Five, a supposed group of elderly ladies, playing flat, very flat, intentionally flat, unfunnily flat; their cover art was the worst on record (no pun intended) until the rock era. (Their album was produced by one Bob Halley, author of a couple of minor pop hits who recorded -- Tony Conigliaro! He doesn't mention the Five in his Web site.) Coming atop the prodigious bossa nova fad so many bad albums wiped the slate clean of adults they made the victory of rock complete, defeating our culture.

*It actually posted 100 MP3s, and the hundredth is most interesting: a Union 76 jingle by the real Herb and the TJB, demonstrating he wasn't exactly blameless in his overexposure.