If you’re just joining this ongoing journey through the decades-deep A&M Records catalog — my way of memorializing that label’s late great co-founder Jerry Moss, who died in August at 88 — let me bring you up to speed.
Vinyl Addiction
A&M Records Highlights: Carpenters
Like so many other platinum acts from A&M Records’s pre-rock catalog, the Carpenters struck me even from a single-digit age as featherlight schlock, inescapably omnipresent (especially in the ‘70s) but instantly dismissed by Gen X’ers (I’m one) who had yet to grow out of ironic hipster attitudes toward everything straight-laced and square.
Some of you surely remember as fondly as I do how that outlook changed dramatically for the better via the 1994 compilation ‘If I Were a Carpenter.’ At the height of grunge, here was an earnestly sincere salute to all this sterling popcraft we’d never properly appreciated.
A&M Records Highlights: Sergio Mendes
Because I’m not a boomer who came of age in the ‘60s, I neither fell for these cross-pollinated charmers as a swingin’ sophisticate nor first became aware of Brazilian music via the global smash — Stan Getz & João Gilberto’s ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ with aloofly dreamy vocals from the late Astrud Gilberto — that put the beguiling sound of bossa nova on a wider musical map.
A&M Records Highlights: Burt Bacharach
Like so many other milestones from the early A&M Records catalog, these records were always a reach away in my pre-digital childhood home — yet rarely were they played. I’ve always put their neglect down to the instant antiquity of ever-changing styles.
A&M Records Highlights
Music moguls have rarely been as monumentally influential as Jerry Moss was. Last week’s loss of the M half of A&M Records — Herb Alpert, the A, is still kicking at 88, the same age his partner reached — rises to a level of recognition reserved for legendary scene-shapers such as Mo Ostin at Warner/Reprise or Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. Like those fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Moss was a crucial titan with a decades-deep effect on careers and stylistic shifts.