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Whipped Cream & Other Delights: A Love Letter to the Dollar Bin

For 60 years, ‘Whipped Cream & Other Delights’ has been something of an pre-internet meme to collectors. But for some fans, it’s the greatest dollar bin record ever.

By RM Clark

60 Years of Whipped Cream & Other Delights header

It’s 1965 in America. Like A Rolling Stone.”

But right now, it’s Friday night. The kids are asleep upstairs. You reach for a record — just like more than six million other Americans. You choose Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. So do they. 

Whipped Cream is an album of slick, Spanish-inspired instrumental jazz pop released in April of 1965. It spent 141 consecutive weeks on the Billboard charts and has sold more than 14 million copies.

But you’re reading about it today because of its cover. Those 14 million copies meant 14 million images of Sgt. Peppers….no sireee!”). 

Whipped Cream & Other Delights
Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass
2015
Smooth Jazz
Vinyl, Reissue, Remastered
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Speaking over the phone from his home in California, Alpert recounts being approached by a fan of the record shortly after its release.

“Mr. Alpert, you know, I think you should win an award for this album,” said the fan. “It’s fantastic. I like the whipped cream, I like the girl. You should win some kind of award, it’s really that great.”

“That’s fabulous,” Alpert replied. “But what about the music?”

“Well, I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet.”

Three months pregnant and covered in shaving foam, Dolores Erickson wore a low-cut white bikini with the straps down. She earned $1,500 for the day’s work and, alongside art director Peter Whorf, created one of the most enduring images of the 1960s.

The cover has since been spoofed everywhere from Spaghetti Sauce & Other Delights. 

“Who knows,” reads another entry on an online forum. “Long after we’re gone, Dolores Erickson may be held in the same regard as the Mona Lisa.”

Some music stays perpetually relevant — but not instrumental faux-Mexican jazz, at least not to the mainstream. In the past 50 years, fewer instrumental hits have charted than in 1963 alone. The times, as they say, were changing. And if you tossed your LP collection in the early ’90s, Dylan’s records likely survived the cut. Alpert’s didn’t. And yet, Whipped Cream outsold Highway 61 Revisited five times over. The question of who will endure is a fool’s errand. It is far more interesting to think of the how.

In the past, the answer was simple thanks to physical releases. Even though albums may wane in popularity after their initial release and promotion cycle, the physical copies of said release continue to exist.

For years, the world’s clutter mirrored its musical tastes. But in the streaming era, music exists only as long as it’s playing. No hangover, no remnants — when you go, your music taste goes with you.

Film director and record collector Christopher Bickel recalls the early ’90s. “That was the heyday of finding records in thrift stores,” he said. “CDs and cassettes took over, and people dumped their entire vinyl collections.”

Spaghetti Sauce & Other Delights
Pat Cooper
1966
Jazz, Non-Music, Pop, Comedy, Ballad, Easy Listening
Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono
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“It was an amazing time,” he said. “But in searching for something cool, I’d run across ten copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights. The shelves were crammed full of them. It was everywhere because everyone in the country owned it, and then everyone in the country got rid of it.” 

Eventually, Bickel folded, vowing to purchase the record every time he saw it for a dollar or less. “I used to joke to my friends that if I ever got to 100 copies I’d get rid of all my other records and then have a funny joke when people came over. Oh, would you like to see my record collection? And then it’s a collection of just one record.”

Bickel now owns more than 500 copies — but he never could bring himself to toss his other albums. Unbeknownst to him, dozens of record collectors across the country had the same idea. Whipped Cream had begun its second life as a pre-internet meme.

“Then when the internet came along, everybody sort of found each other,” he said.

Today, Whipped Cream holds a special place among vinyl enthusiasts — seeing it online feels like hearing a joke so many times you forget if it’s actually funny. Sometimes, the humor spills into the real world. In 2014, Bickel gave 100 copies to visual artists, displaying their altered versions in a local gallery.

I tell Alpert the story during a break in his tour with the newly reformed Tijuana Brass, celebrating Whipped Cream’s 60th anniversary. His days are filled with fans’ love for the record, yet Bickel’s collection still surprises him. “Really?” he laughs. “Is he crazy?”

For Alpert, Whipped Cream has never gone out of style. It’s always been his most beloved album, the one fans always shout out songs from. As we speak, “Ladyfingers” — a track from the album — is going viral on TikTok, with over 2.8 billion streams. “The figure is just way beyond my imagination,” Alpert said. “I mean, I don’t even know how that works.”

At 89 years old, Alpert is most amused by the record’s newfound status as a digital hit; whilst I, sixty years his junior, am far more interested in the opposite. From being featured as an inside joke in The Big Lebowski (1998) to decorating entire walls of music stores in Alabama and Kentucky, and even temporarily serving as the only LP stocked by a record store in Michigan, I am fascinated by Whipped Cream’s momentum as a physical presence, almost entirely removed from the quality of its music. 

“The irony is, from my point of view, I didn’t even like that cover,” said Alpert. “My partner Jerry Moss was pretty adamant, so I went along with it. But my initial take was a negative. I didn’t get it.”

Six decades and almost fifty more albums later, I wonder if his view of the cover has softened.

“Me? Oh man, I love it! It’s the best cover I’ve ever seen, I think I should win some awards.”

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