Well, this is pretty nuts but …

… I have this bizarre urge to buy one of the early albums by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Maybe even two.

Remember them?

They were very popular in my grade school days — not with me or my friends, necessarily, who were deep in our Beatles / Beach Boys stupor — but HA&TB were sorta omnipresent in Adult Land. Or so I remember. Top 40 radio, playing over grocery stores speakers ... As such, though at the time I found the music goofy (yet admittedly different and vaguely exotic), the idea of hearing those songs again fills me with the promise of a warm nostalgia for childhood. I know my folks had a few of those albums and occasionally played them.

On the other hand, I just looked at a Brass discography and I hardly recognize any of the songs. Which probably means one or two of them are embedded in the Youth Corridors of my brain — and the rest of them would mean nothing at all. I probably wouldn’t even recognize them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass since sixth grade, though.

In the early ’80s, traveling constantly in a hotel lounge band called Broxton, we frequently played Texas border towns like McAllen and Laredo.  You’d get through with the gig at the Sheraton or whatever at two in the morning, and could change out of your tux and head across the border to Reynosa or Nuevo Laredo — where the world stayed open forever and liquor was cheap 24/7.

One post-midnight, our keyboard player, Ronnie Wilson, and I went bar hopping in Reynosa just across the Rio Grande Bridge, thirsting for tequila. The idea, if I remember correctly, was to drink a shot and a beer in each bar, then move to the next one.

I should point out that, at the time, there was a Mexican lager called Tres Equis — not to be confused with the still-popular Dos Equis, whose current pitchman, the Most Interesting Guy in the World, is one of the coolest things ever. Anyway, to my knowledge — and believe me, I’ve looked — they no longer make Tres Equis. This is a crime of incalculable proportion. I still believe it was the best beer ever. And not just based on that idiotic night. I’d long been a fan of the product before Ron and I went on our outing.

To get back to the point: at the first or second bar Ron and I entered, there was a tourist-happy mariachi band, completely decked out in tourist-happy spangled outfits with these huge sombreros, playing loudly for the delight or annoyance of the mostly Anglo crowd.

And it occurred to me, when Ron went to the restroom, to tip the band to play the Tijuana Brass song “The Lonely Bull” when he emerged from the john.

Oh, how we laughed! Because no wit is quite as witty as when you’re machine-gunning tequila.

The cool thing, though, is that Ron and I then decided to hire the band to follow us from bar to bar — our own private mariachi combo providing a soundtrack for our lunacy! Yes, we were clever! Yes, it was money well spent!

Now that I think about it, though, I’m not sure my idea to whip up the nostalgia by ordering a Herb Alpert CD would in fact cause me to drift off in mellow recollections of childhood — or if instead, by dark association, result in the sort of railroad-spike-in-your-brain headache that Ron and I both experienced the next afternoon when we woke up with what the Guiness Records folks have verified were Two of the Worst Hangovers Ever.

Do you remember the Brass? Thoughts?