Song 799: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, written by Julius Wechter, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. In the era after the Beatles rocked my world, I mostly heard about them and their fellow British Invaders, but as my freshman HS year unfolded, the Top 40 excursions got more inclusive, and in the spring of 1966, a rocking instrumental group topped the charts with a wild ride that mainly had trumpets playing the tune's melody. While I generally preferred the vocal stories riding the airwaves, the surprising and unexpected melodic message from the Herb crew roped me in as well. A few years earlier, having no idea about the rocking sounds that would appear, I had decided that the musical instrument I wanted to learn to play was the violin, and I became a fiddler, but then the strong tones I heard coming from the Brass bunch got me wishing I could blow a horn. However, that could not have happened. My working class family had bought me a violin and an acoustic guitar, and the home had an upright piano, but they could not have afforded to also get me a trumpet, so I had to limit my own musical excursions to the possibilities I had already explored, and that actually brought me excellent results!
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