I love it! The fact that he can't sing very well only adds to it's intimacy. Damn I loove this one too! I made my mom play the 45 repeatedly. Again, the MONO mix is the only way to go. It's on CD, too! Rarely? It's never been played on oldies radio!
I know.. right? I consider it to be one of Herb's worst efforts. Never can judge public taste. I feel his best work was this song, it came in at #27... but DID get the #1 spot on the Adult Contemporary chart.
I'm not fussy about This Guy's in Love With You but I can't really find a reason to slag it; it's a decent song on its own merits like quite a few other non-favourites. I would prefer to listen to some of his Tijuana Brass hits, particularly Zorba the Greek. It was around this time that Alice Long by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart came out. That is one song that I will always and forevermore rank as 10 out of 10, I just love it to death! As for The Horse, I never found any redeeming qualities in it, just totally uninteresting. On the other hand, Soul Coaxin' by Raymond Lefevre came out in 1968 and that instrumental is wonderful, and I believe something of a forum favourite too ...
It's my favorite, too but Lonely Bull is right behind it. So is this one which should be familiar to anyone who watched The Dating Game: Whipped Cream , Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass , 1965 Vinyl
I also wanted to say that, while this record was high on the chart, oldies radio won't play it, but will play some song that charted somewhere in the 20s or 30s. I still think radio's market research is a bunch of bunk.
American radio is a real pain in my ass a lot of times. But I guess it is what it is. Sometimes really great songs will catch fire, other times, poop will float to the top. It's always fascinating to see what was happening in the UK at any given time, for instance, during the run of "This Guy's In Love With You", this song was sitting atop the chart in the UK. Incidentally, the lead singer of this group would never hit number 1 in the US... but would sit at #2 for 5 straight weeks in 1983.
Three minutes, 58 seconds, actually, but still . . . Given the particular content of this record and its reputation, I guess that it figures that first-pressings had the old UA label design which dated to 1963. It was one of the last to so bear such label, as well as one of the first Columbia Pitman pressings for the label to utilize 6 point Spartan Heavy Condensed: This is the label design I have. If you're gonna get it, do it right, I say. But while this record was climbing the charts, they switched to the same orange and magenta color scheme as now used by Dunkin' Donuts: This is a second variant I just was made aware of. Not long after, writer Bobby Russell switched his membership from BMI to ASCAP and the label changed only a bit more: P.S. RCA's fabled Nashville studios did the lacquer mastering on this one. Doubtless their W3KM master numbers, if any, would have been within the 6500 block . . . These are all just Columbia Pitman typesetting variants, now. I'm not even gonna get into the others - from Shelley Products, Monarch, and even Nashville-based Southern Plastics. If you're gonna get diabetes-inducing treacle, better it be with label fonts like these, I'd say . . .
Won't get into the label specifics, but suffice it to say early pressings from Columbia's Pitman, NJ plant of this record had both this and its B side "Old Friends/Bookends" as being "From the Motion Picture 'The Graduate' " - although only the A side actually was (Terre Haute and Santa Maria pressings at least got that distinction correctly). Yet, when the label copy was updated to substitute a promo blurb for their LP Bookends (all copies of which single variant, from all plants, used Pitman type) for the film reference, the names of the producers (Simon, Garfunkel and Halee) inexplicably disappeared, not to return again until the 1969 reissue of this coupling on the label's "Hall Of Fame" series.
I have to agree with you. Here's another record that had a zillion label design and typesetting variations; my own pressing's a Specialty Records Corp. (SP) pressing, with the same Keystone label fonts as on many a Capitol LP rainbow and 45 swirl pressing of this period, but with the early 1967 rim print variant of the original Dunhill label design that served as the label's 1965 inaugural; most copies had the newer "Dunhill / abc" rainbow box label inaugurated at the tail end of 1967.
Simon mentioned DiMag in the song only because, to his ears, it fit the meters. Who knew that the Yankee Clipper was more truly the symbol of lost innocence than whom Paul originally wanted to mention - Mickey Mantle, whose wholesome image was shattered the next year by revelations in onetime teammate Jim Bouton's controversial book Ball Four.
At the time, but after Simon made his explanations about what he meant, DiMag warmed up to it - and after his death, Simon sang at his memorial service.
"This Guy's..." was notable in that it was the first A&M single since Chris Montez' 1966 cover of "There Will Never Be Another You" whereby Columbia Pitman pressings bore its own label fonts (instead of Santa Maria's) . . . This was one of a handful of A&M singles to bear these fonts in this year; others being Alpert's follow-up single "To Wait For Love" and a second release of the Tijuana Brass' rendition of "My Favorite Things"; and Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66's cover of "The Fool On The Hill." Most others, alas, used the Santa Maria type. Columbia also gets credit for holding true to the original ochre and orange color scheme of the A&M label design the longest; by this time Monarch was long past going off the rails, with the 'A&M' part of the label design already leaning towards a more reddish tint (more specifically, Warm Red) and the ochre becoming at first a dark mustardish, then totally mustard. Oh yeah, while Mr. Alpert may not be that much a singer, I'll take his version of this any day over anybody else's. I should note that B. J. Thomas did a cover of this on his late 1969 LP Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head.
That section on Harris' original was also used for many years as the theme for The Lou Gordon Program which originated from Detroit TV station WKBD from 1965 until Gordon's death in 1977. As well, a cover by Hugo Montenegro was used by Cleveland TV station WJW-TV 8 (known from 1977 to 1985 as WJKW-TV) for its City Camera News in the mid-1970's (and through its first month or so after its name became Newscenter 8).
The irony was, Nobles wasn't even on this side (he sang on the other side of which this was the instrumental backing track - "Love Is All Right"). Also, many of the instrumentalists here later formed the nucleus of MFSB - and Bobby Martin, one of the arrangers during the heyday of the Gamble/Huff Philly Sound, was the arranger on this one.
Most copies had grooves like that (this was known as variable pitch, ladies and gentlemen, whereby the softer passages were spaced close together whereas the louder ones spread out); I wonder if A&M was cutting their lacquers in-house at this point or what. (I seem to recall the same lathe used to cut lacquers for another #1 coming down the pike - The Doors' "Hello, I Love You (Won't You Tell Me Your Name).") A small number of copies - such as mine, with the Pitman fonts seen in one of my earlier posts here - were cut (or more specifically, recut) by Don Thompson at Columbia's Hollywood studios - and unlike most copies of this (heck, even unlike the lacquers he cut for S&G's "Mrs. Robinson"), he used a constant, fixed pitch for "This Guy's... ."
Oh, I agree, I agree; if you check @Grant's R&B #1 thread, you'll find a Columbia Pitman label variant which switched around the matrix numbers for Parts 1 and 2 - not just on the label, but also the lacquers Columbia recut for their own pressings. This may have fertutzed Atlantic enough to bar Columbia from pressing any "backup" copies of Aretha Franklin's "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" - but not so much as to disqualify them totally, as happened in 1965 after they put out a reissue of the Four Tops' "Ain't That Love" and Motown, to bury it, rush-recorded and -released "It's The Same Old Song" (and then shut Columbia out of pressing any stock Motown product until fall 1970, except for a brief period in 1967 when RCA's pressing plants were on strike for a time).
That would be Guyanese British musician Edmond Montague "Eddy" Grant and his hit "Electric Avenue". Regarding the aforementioned hit by The Equals, a cover version... "Baby, Come Back" - Electric Music, 1992.
Speaking of Herb Alpert, according to "The Wrecking Crew" documentary (highly recommended), Herb Alpert hired a few of the Wrecking Crew musicians as scabs for “The Lonely Bull”, as he didn't have the money at the time. When it topped the charts, Alpert went to the musician’s union, confessed, paid the fine and sent full scale payments to the musicians. Pretty cool move.
This probably fits better on the R&B thread but since The Horse has been discussed here and Jesse James wrote and produced the above song as well as this one: FANTASTIC JOHNNY C Hitch it to the horse
