Songfacts®:

• This 2:15 trumpet-based instrumental evokes a bullfight, with crowd noises from a bullring in Tijuana, Mexico dubbed in. Herb Alpert - the trumpet player - explained in the liner notes for the re-issue of the album:
  
  "In 1962 after experiencing my first bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico, I was inspired to find a way to musically express the feelings I felt while watching and listening to the wild responses of the crowd in the stands and hearing the group of brass musicians who introduced each new event with a rousing fanfare. The bullfight was gory, beautiful and sometimes troublesome to watch, but the energy in the stands was overwhelmingly exciting."
• The song started out as an instrumental called "Twinkle Star" written by a piano player Alpert worked with named Sol Lake, who is the credited writer on "The Lonely Bull." Alpert added to that song, with the bullring sounds coming from a recording a friend made.
• Alpert produced this song with his friend Jerry Moss, who came up with the song title. They formed their own label, A&M Records, to release the song. When it went to #6 and sold a million copies, they used the proceeds to make a full album called The Lonely Bull, also released on A&M. The label added other acts, including Chris Montez, The Sandpipers and Sergio Mendes, and went on to become one of the most successful labels of the 1970s, with a roster that included the Carpenters, Joe Cocker, Free and Cat Stevens.
  
  When they released "The Lonely Bull," Alpert and Moss were running the label from Alpert's garage.
• Alpert recalled to Mojo December 2010: "I'd had a trip to Tijuana, watching the bullfights, and I tried to interpret that feeling I'd had at the fights into a sound. Of course, I was loaded on wine at the time."
• This song is often classified as Mariachi music, but it isn't, according to Alpert. "I was just trying to do a personalized version of what I was hearing and use some other Latin instruments," he said.
• The bullfight that inspired the song took place at the Plaze De Toros in Tijuana. Alpert was living in Los Angeles when he took a trip there with Jerry Moss to catch the action.
• Herb Alpert used the sound he found on this track to become one of the most successful artists of the 1960s. He kept the Tijuana imagery, recording as "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass." Over the next few years he had five #1 albums and finished the decade as the fourth best-selling albums artist, following Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Frank Sinatra.