RIFF SUMMER CHALLENGE
The Lonely Bull
The romance of surfing
Yesterday, I divulged my guilty pleasure of watching Back to the Beach over 100 times, gratefully leading me to surf music. Among the amazing range of surf classics featured in the film was “The Lonely Bull” written by Sol Lake — a friend of Herb Alpert — and performed by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass in 1962. It was the first album to be released by A&M Records, co-founded by living legend Alpert, an accomplished vocalist, instrumentalist and son of Jewish immigrants who settled in California.
A generation or two later, I would come to love it as part of my musical upbringing. To me, my anachronistic taste is the yearning of a nostalgic soul from which I have suffered joyfully.
I remember my Dad would always name a tune within seconds (as I was trained) and when this song came on in Back to the Beach, he instantly named it, despite the song not making it on the official soundtrack. It would be several years later that I would download it on Napster, then finally get it on vinyl.
“The Lonely Bull” is a toreadorian aria that became subsumed by surf music. It is captivating like a spacious stadium, rich with Alpert’s overdubbed layers, lullaby-inducing mandolin and bass, the regal sound of Alpert’s trumpet, and that mono-stereo aura of an…
