I didn’t really “get” rock until I was in college (which is weird, when you consider that I grew up right alongside the 1950s and ’60s). My appreciation of a certain Liverpool quartet’s songs was postponed for years thanks to the kids across the street, who stood on the sidewalk and annoyed passersby (and neighbors) by shrieking repeatedly, Yea, yeah, yeah! And in the house where I grew up, it seemed that the big hi-fi cabinet’s tuner had been spot-welded in place — allowing only the sounds of a nearby station’s 24-hour Big Band playlist to enter the living room.

I settled on neither rock nor Big Band music for my first playlist. For some reason, I settled on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and bought around a half-dozen of their LPs.

The band had a string of perky pop hits, often including weird special-effects instruments like cowbells and bicycle horns: “Spanish Flea,” “The Mexican [a/k/a Teaberry] Shuffle,” “Tijuana Taxi,” and so on. Of course, these songs made it onto their albums. But the LPs featured other music as well — also “Ameriachi”-sounding, vaguely, but slower and moodier. These were my favorites. What I didn’t know about loss back then could fill a stadium, but these tunes seemed to me drenched in it.

(An ongoing family joke centers around my teenage habit of whistling to myself while doing my laundry in the basement. The songs I whistled most often — at least as I imagined — were Alpert/TJB numbers: the slow ones.)

Here’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s interpretation of “Tangerine,” by Victor Schertzinger and Johnny Mercer:

When first written, the song perched at #1 on the Billboard list for six or seven weeks in 1942. The subject and lyrics? Unusual but not exactly melancholy. No, it’s something about the trumpet which affected me (and still does). Even the little upbeat curl at the very end feels rueful — as if backing the last line of that bitter poem by Dorothy Parker: You might as well live.

Lyrics:

Tangerine
(as performed by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra,
with vocals by Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell)

(Male singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine,
When she dances by
Senoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I’ve seen
Toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine
Yes, she has them all on the run
But her heart belongs to just one
Her heart belongs to Tangerine

(Female singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they say
With mascara’d eye and chapeaux by Daché.
Tangerine,
With her lips of flame
If the color keeps, Louis Philippe’s to blame.
And I’ve seen
Clothes on Tangerine
Where the label says “From Macy’s Mezzanine.”
Yes, she’s got the guys in a whirl
But she’s only fooling one girl
She’s only fooling Tangerine!