Scheinfeld also has a documentary coming out on Sergio Mendes, whose story overlaps in a big way with that of Alpert and his wife Lani Hall (who started out as a member of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66), so fans of midcentury-modern music have a veritable Marvel cinematic universe of converging sagas to look forward to from the director. He has a very sensitive touch, and when we spoke, he just seemed to understand my game.” “When I saw the things John did on John Coltrane and Harry Nillson and John Lennon (‘The US vs. Herb Alpert box set Courtesy Grandstand MediaĪlpert had been interested in taking part in a documentary for some time, but “I was looking for the right director,” he says. I wanted to see how far I could take the sound that I discovered through other musicians and picking and choosing. I didn’t want to play ‘The Lonely Bull’ sideways and upside down in every variation of it. But after that, I felt if I was gonna make it in this record industry, I’d have to come up with some more interesting stuff. ‘The Lonely Bull’ was the record that started A&M in 1962, and I know that had a commercial ring to it. I mean, I never tried to make a hit record. “And I’m proud of what I’ve done musically. I made a list of songs that I thought would be good, and then he made his list and we combined them. And we put that together in a nice package, and I’m proud of it. He thought it was an opportunity to put the music that was not only in the special, but also music that people might want to hear from my past and present. My nephew, Randy ‘Bad-Ass’ Alpert, handles that end of it for me, and I go along with him. “It seems like the logical thing to do,” he says, to have one come out now in conjunction with the documentary. Hardcore fans may want to spring for the vinyl version, in which all of that printed ephemera comes in the form of a coffee table book, to go with the 180-gram LPs.Īlpert makes it sound like he wasn’t sweating out the fact that he didn’t have a comprehensive boxed set until now. I didn’t just want it to say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ I wanted it to have a feeling of honesty to it, and I think it really has that.”īoth the three-CD and five-LP versions of the boxed set will include 180 pages of photos and liner notes that include an essay from music critic Bud Scoppa. But I think people can relate to that feeling and the things you have to do to come out the other end. I think I said ‘miserable’ in the documentary. “I had the gold ring, I had hit records, I was famous - and I wasn’t feeling great. “I think one of the things that is kind of fascinating about my life is that I, at one point, had the American dream come true,” Alpert tells Variety. While Alpert says his life has been dreamlike, he didn’t want Scheinfeld’s film to whitewash his life as if it had all been a good dream.