April 22: This Guy’s In Love with You

Trumpet player Herb Alpert sang a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, “This Guy’s In Love with You,” to his wife Lani Hall on a CBS television special on this date in 1968. A deluge of calls from fans to the television station convinced Alpert to release the song as a single two days later, and it became a number 1 hit for for four weeks. Alpert’s father was a mandolin-playing tailor from the Ukraine; Alpert’s mother, from Romania, was a violinist. He was already a hitmaker, with six Grammy Awards with his Tijuana Brass band, by the time he released “This Guy’s . . .” — and although the band had no Hispanic musicians, it did create a broad popular taste for Latin-flavored band music. Today Alpert is a recording industry executive with A&M Records (“A” for Alpert, “M” for Jerry Moss), a painter and sculptor, and a philanthropist through the Herb Alpert Foundation. To see the music video in which he introduced the song, look below. “There was a point with the Tijuana Brass where we were playing for such huge crowds that I kind of lost contact. At one point, the only connection I had with the audience was with people out there lighting cigarettes.” -Herb Alpert