You Can't Believe Everything You Read

Recently I received a comment from Randy Badazz Alpert. It was in regards to my posting on the song that he co-wrote with his friend Andy Armer and the co-producer with his Uncle Herb Alpert of the song "Rise." The posting I did on the song was wrong about it orgins. Now I got the story from a usually reliable source. However, he said in the comment that it was not the true story. I hope he doesn't mind but I am putting it up front here so the readers of this blog can get the words straight from him on the creation of this beautiful song.
Hi Rick: Thanks for the nice words about "Rise" last week. Just to set the record straight: I was 22 in January 1979 and producing funk records for Columbia. Uncle Herb called me up and asked if I would work up some disco versions of some of his old Tijuana Brass songs. I never ever presented him with the idea of doing disco versions of anything. I was never a disco fan. My thing was James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Funkadelics, Aretha, etc. At our first meeting in Herb's office at A&M I played him Rise and he loved it however he still asked me to work up a disco version of the Lonely Bull and 2 other songs. I hated the idea then and never wanted to even attempt to record them. I had new songs and new ideas and thankfully when we went in to record them in early February, Herb did not like what he heard so we did Rise. Please note that I did not just pull out Rise because we had extra time booked in the studio. I had music charts drawn up for the musicians and we picked the musicians with the mind of recording Rise. I'm not sure how this all got started about me wanting to do disco. Not true at all. In fact I never wanted to work with Herb. I changed my name to Badazz because I wanted to be my own person totally out of the shadow of Herb. It took quite a bit of persuading by Herb to even get me to work with him. However, I'm glad that we worked together because we had a lot of fun and we created a classic record that went to #1 around the world. There sure haven't been a lot of #1 pop instrumental records during the past 27 years and I'm fortunate to have been a part of it. Thank you again for your kind words and sharing your happy memories.. randy badazz alpert

You're welcome Randy and thank you for setting the record straight.