TOP 40 DEBUT: December 22, 1979
PEAK POSITION: #30 (January 19, 1980)
Herb Alpert is the best-selling trumpet player of the recording era. In second place is, probably, Miles Davis. (Sales figures were murkier back then.) The legacy of Miles is Kind Of Blue and Birth Of The Cool and Bitches Brew, seismic rifts in music and culture and the reinvention of jazz a half-dozen times over. The legacy of Alpert is a girl on an album cover slathered in whipped cream. One man is among the most respected artists of the 20th century, the other an easy punchline. But both were geniuses. Herb Alpert never swam in the same critical circles as Miles, so you’ll never see the words “musical genius” attached to his name, but when it came to the business of music, he was damn near untouchable.
As the “A” in A&M Records, Alpert was one of the first artists-turned-executives in the entire industry, self-financing his own recordings while Davis (and most other jazz musicians) continued to argue budgets with corporate label heads. In 1965, when Whipped Cream & Other Delights sold six million copies, Alpert reaped the benefits. In 1970, when the Carpenters’ break-through single stayed at #1 for four weeks, Alpert—who’d signed the duo over the objections of his own staff—reaped the benefits. Over the ‘70s and ‘80s, A&M scored #1 singles with Styx, The Police, Captain & Tennille, Bryan Adams, and Janet Jackson, among others. (We’ll be discussing a lot of A&M artists in future entries.) In 1989, the company he founded with Jerry Moss in his garage sold for half a billion dollars. And throughout twenty-five years of signing and producing A&M acts, Alpert continued to have hits. I strongly suspect his success in one area informed the other. Because a song like “Rotation” only happens when an artist has learned to play the marketplace as easily as his own horn.
As 1978 wound down, Alpert the Artist found himself staring down a decade-long commercial slump. He hadn’t hit the top 40 since his fluke #1 from 1968, “This Guy’s In Love With You.” (It’s a 3.) And his records with the Tijuana Brass were experiencing a similar fate, usually scraping the lower reaches of the Billboard 200 or missing the album chart altogether. In the eyes of the record-buying public, Herb Alpert was a relic, a Sixties-era novelty. His bank account wasn’t suffering (A&M released both Frampton Comes Alive! and Breakfast In America in the back half of the decade), but the same couldn’t be said for his musical rep. And so, with disco at its all-time peak of chart dominance, one of the shrewdest minds in the industry very nearly made one of the worst decisions of his life: Alpert phoned his nephew and asked him to work up “dance arrangements” of his early Sixties hits.
Randy “Badazz” Alpert is the kind of person who decides to enter the music business before he enters junior high. At age eleven, he was working in the A&M mailroom; in his teens, he toured with Humble Pie, shooting photos that would later grace the gatefold of their double LP Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore. (That’s his work on the cover of Joe Cocker’s Greatest Hits, too.) By 1978, he’d moved on to producing demos for a variety of funk and R&B acts—most notably Con Funk Shun (who will eventually get one lone entry in this column)—while using his spare time to record original tracks with writing partner Andy Armer.
As a kid, Randy idolized the Tijuana Brass, to the point of taking up trumpet just to play along with the records. But he balked at his uncle’s idea of “disco-fying” those back catalog selections. And he would’ve turned down his famous relative without a second thought, if not for a chance encounter with Billy Preston in the halls of L.A.’s Record Plant studio. (Randy tells the story in a 2017 Billboard interview: The legendary sideman reminded him that “your uncle touches people with his trumpet,” and suggested he approach the project by “chang[ing] the frame around the picture.”) Taking Preston’s advice to heart, Alpert and Armer experimented with a more funk-based approach, eventually presenting a demo tape where new arrangements of “The Lonely Bull” and “Spanish Flea” shared space with one original song, “Rise.”
And here’s where the genius of the elder Alpert comes into play. Forty-five minutes into the session, Herb realized the old songs weren’t working and switched focus to this newer Alpert/Amer composition. Initial attempts to record “Rise” hewed close to the demo’s original disco-friendly tempo of 125 beats a minute; it was Herb’s suggestion to slow the track down to 100 BPM, a tempo that allowed club audiences to “dance and hug each other at the end of the night.” The released version of “Rise” was the very next take recorded: an epic nine-minute monster groove, edited slightly and overdubbed with group handclaps, incidental bass slides, and three passes of a soon-to-be-canonical Echoplex-ed guitar.
At A&M, expectations for the single were low, to the extent that “Rise” was released as a stand-alone, with no plans for a corresponding album. After all, which radio stations in 1979 were going to play a seven-minute jazz instrumental from a washed-up, 44-year-old trumpet player? The answer, it turned out, was “all of them.”
“Rise” was an across-the-board sensation, hitting #1 on both the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts, getting up to #4 on R&B Singles, going Top 20 in Australia and Japan, and even reaching #13 in the U.K., albeit in bizarre fashion. (British DJs mistakenly played the 12” single at the wrong speed, thus bumping the tempo back to a very disco 135 BPM.) Two decades later, “Rise” would return to the top spot of the Hot 100 in sampled form, when Sean “Puffy” Combs used that guitar breakdown as the rhythmic bed for “Hypnotize,” the posthumous smash from The Notorious B.I.G. (“Hypnotize” is a 10, obviously.)
Musician Herb Alpert might’ve been caught off-guard by his left-field success, but businessman Herb Alpert? He made sure to capitalize as quickly as possible. Rise (the full-length LP) was released in September 1979, even as “Rise” (the single) was still ascending the charts, and despite being assembled at near-breakneck speed, the album holds together remarkably well. (It might be the best entry in Herb’s entire discography, actually.) Smartly, the elder Alpert brought back Randy and Andy to handle production duties, and in just two days, they created “Rotation.”
“Rise” is a fantastic song, the perfect marriage of groove, melody, and chops, and it deserves all the credit in the world for reinvigorating Herb Alpert’s career. (It’s an 8.) But “Rotation” is the better track, despite being a smaller hit. In hindsight, “Rise” makes perfect sense for 1979, its four-on-the-floor stomp and lite-jazz melody an easy sell in the final days of disco. “Rotation” was a far riskier move. Randy Alpert and Andy Armer cut the entire track themselves over a whirlwind 48 hours, using a then-state-of-the-art 3M 32-track recorder, overdubbing at will and mixing live instruments with programmed parts. They took chances, and they created something years ahead of its time.
There’s no bass guitar on “Rotation.” Instead, the low end is handled by a synthesizer churning out a monotonic pulse of relentless, sequenced sixteenth-notes. And there’s no snare, either. “Rotation” has rhythm to spare—I hear bongos, shakers, finger cymbals, bells, and even the occasional snap—but nothing resembling a backbeat. It’s buildup without any easy payoff, a tension that never settles. If “Rise” was built for the dance floor, “Rotation” is for the long drive home afterwards. Thom Jurek of AllMusic calls it “one of the first ‘chillout’ tunes,” and he’s absolutely right; you could expand this track to a full half-hour and lose none of its hypnotic pull.
Only two outside elements appear on “Rotation”: Herb Alpert’s trumpet and Bill “Rotation” Earl's voice. Earl, a longtime blues guitarist, was also Herb’s longtime assistant; his baritone pronouncement of his own nickname wound up giving the Alpert/Armer instrumental its title. The “swirling“ effect came from running his microphone through a Roland Space Echo, the same processor used to enhance the elder Alpert's trumpet.
Herb's horn part—cut basically live, with minimal rehearsal, late on the second night of recording—was the final piece added to “Rotation,” and it’s a seminar in underplaying. His lines curl like wisps of smoke, darting in and out of the groove, teasing traces of melody or simply letting single notes linger in the air. A few upper-register flurries pop up in the fade; other phrases simply decay into a wash of reverb. It’s an approach that owes less to “Rise” and more to an unlikely source: Miles Davis’ On The Corner.
For those unfamiliar with its history, On The Corner is now (rightfully) regarded as a minimalist masterpiece, but in 1972, the album nearly ended Davis’ career, thanks to withering reviews and the worst sales of his life. At the time, the record felt like commercial suicide. Even by 1979, it was no one’s idea of a cultural touchstone. Yet Herb Alpert found a way to repurpose those exact same ideas in the service of a downbeat, ambient jazz instrumental, and then his own label turned it into a Top 30 hit. Does that put him on equal footing with the legendary Miles? Maybe, maybe not. But forty years on, “Rotation” sure feels like a genius-level move.
GRADE: 9/10
[UPDATE, June 15, 2020: Randy “Badazz” Alpert was kind enough to contact me via this site to provide additional details and clarifications about the making of “Rotation.”The original piece has since been edited slightly to reflect this more accurate information. Randy also offered some fascinating recollections about the process, which are excerpted below.]
“I was a 22 year-old kid, very much a part of that moment in time, when I went into the small Studio C at A&M in July of '79 with my writing partner Andy. We laid down that song in two days and then had Herb come in to play his part on the evening of the second night... I did play all of the hand drums, sticks, finger cymbals and rhythm parts and felt that it grooved really well without a traditional drummer and bass player.
“FYI~ We did not have any drum machines or sequencers at that time, so the synth bass playing the 16th notes is actually me playing a CV/gate control pad that we hooked up into my modified original Mini-Moog synth. Andy held down the bass notes on the keyboard and I was playing the actual 16th note feel on the controller pad. So really the entire rhythmic ‘feel‘ of ‘Rotation’ is coming from one person... The Moroccan hand drum feel that runs throughout the song is locked to the same 16th note bass [part], as well as all of the other rhythmic elements. Everything is coming off the same pair of hands.
“The really surprising thing for me at the time was that the head of A&M pop radio promotion wanted ‘Rotation’ to be the follow-up single to ‘Rise.‘ I really fought that decision as I knew that ‘Rotation’ was not a top 40 type of pop record. It was too different sounding musically from the Bee Gees and Donna Summer records at that time... Actually, I was rather surprised that Herbie really liked it when he came in to play the melody.
“It was a really fun record for Andy and I to put together. To this day I have musicians young and old contacting me from all around the world who love ‘Rotation.’ Who knew? Just a couple of kids who had an idea and didn't want to do another traditional dance type record.”
I WANT MY MTV: I’m a sucker for any “fly on the studio wall” footage, even when the rational part of my brain realizes every element of this track was actually recorded far, far away from motion-picture cameras. (Make sure you catch the cameo from Randy Alpert around 1:08. And I’m 64% certain that’s Andy Armer at :36, too.)
12”ERS: “Rotation” wasn’t a massive hit in the 12” format like its predecessor “Rise,” but at least this version has some unique elements, mainly with the synth-bass breakdown about halfway through.