The Shadows and the Ventures

[Mr. FOLLARD]

I was going to do this as a poll, but I'd rather we just talked about these two groups. 

BBC4 had a half-decent documentary on the Shads last night. I've heard a couple of tunes I like but most of it sounds LAME-O! it dated pretty quickly, I guess - very much the kind of thing we'd call 'granny music' - and this was back in the eighties! I was reminded of how FAST things moved between 1961 and 1964. Quantum leaps between 'Kontiki' and 'You Really Got Me'. 




The Ventures also seemed to put out their fair share of polite beat-combo instrumentals around the same time, but then there were things like this - which I WILL post again! because I think it's the most exciting sound ever and really doesn't date as much as most of the other music that was going on




erm....that's all I got

[~ / % ? *]

Pretty lame and tame even in their day, but showed how deep this new fangled rock and roll thing reached into the culture, but with an inherent musicality. i remember being given a venture's guitar study book at one of my first lessons, not a bent string to be found, but in the days after Jimi and the heyday of Jimmy this was considered a hip approach to guitar lessons. So I would go home and do Sabbathian versions on my brother's Marshall Super lead dimed to 11, my ears are still ringing' so are the neighbors, police's too. Mosrite guitars are somehow connected, guess that's where the ramones discovered too, through the ventures. I guess we can blame the Shadows for ONJ. There was a brisk business to be done in the US in selling Venture's vinyl, but it ended abruptly sometime in the mid90s as those collector's died out. I still have some, there were all kinds of variants and rarities that kept their market going, lots of Asian interest, too.

[Deleted]

I assume you know this one John as it's been posted/discussed quite a bit over the years, but anyway it's the most exciting thing I've heard from them.


Adam once managed to persuade me that their catalogue had a lot of obscure nuggets so I downloaded their complete 60s recordings and dutifully waded through it, but I can't say I discovered much of interest!

[Mr. FOLLARD]

Yeah, I'd heard it before and it's pretty good - but only when compared to the rest of their output.

I think Marvin's twangy lead is the most off-putting thing and it's all over EVERY ONE of their early hits. It's difficult to imagine something like this NOT sounding really tame to audiences at the time.

[Mr. FOLLARD]

This one's great! I had it on my iPod for years, mislabelled as by LINK WRAY!

[rayge]

Wonderful Land didn't sound 'tame' to me or all the people who kept it at number one for a month or so when it was released, largely because there was no 'wild' available in terms of guitar-band rock instrumentals, rather than sax-led stuff such as Johnny & the Hurricanes, drum ones by Sandy Nelson or Cozy Cole (not that one, the fifties American guy who topped the charts with Topsy) or piano wig-outs. I mean, Bert Weedon? It was all about tunes rather than effects when it came to guitars, in the UK at least.

Rumble was released over here but wasn't remotely a hit and probably never on the radio, and the Shads were the only game in town. Well, there were the Outlaws, who mainly backed Mike Berry and had a small hit with The Cruel Sea, the Cougars, whose Saturday Night at the Duckpond was pretty nifty, original Shads rhythm section Jet Harris & Tony Meehan who had a big hit with Diamonds, and then there the Joe Meek produced, but undersold Spotnicks...

Actually you've tapped into a well of memories here - I was really into instrumental singles, from the US especially, in the early to mid sixties and I might try to sort out a longer post later (incidentally, I had a couple of Ventures albums - including Caravan with a drum solo, as excoriated by Zappa - and more than a dozen of their singles) but right now I'm hungry and on my dog-walk I noticed my favourite chippy was open, so - bye for now.

[loveless]

The Ventures are an interesting phenomenon.

To my knowledge they only ever had the one hit ("Walk Don't Run" - they would keep coming back to it in various forms), but they managed to put out what seemed like 5 albums a year for a good decade and a half (or more?).

My personal favorite has always been the Christmas LP (do you know this one, John? I hesitate to call it a desert island disc, but...I've certainly played it hundreds of times by now, and really can't recommend it highly enough). This is typically what gets played when we're decorating the tree.

As the sixties went on, they bent like a good willow (the album Super Psychedelics, while not quite Forever Changes, is pretty classic Grandpa Takes a Trip material):



Their cult is interesting. They got to Japan before the Beatles (and their 1965 live album is STORMING!!!!!):



I remember meeting a guy who worked with my stepdad at Tulane University maybe ca. 1986...he apparently had some sort of truly remarkable audiophile hi fi system, and when I asked him what he listened to he answered succinctly: "The Ventures."

I went through a phase in the early mid 1990s (as did a number of my friends) of collecting the LPs second hand in the wild (you could spend a lifetime amassing them one by one for cheap): there are a handful that I remember as stone cold classics (In Space..., Telstar/The Lonely Bull, Knocks Me Out, $1,000,000 Weekend), and quite a few others that held together nicely enough (The Horse, Underground Fire, Guitar Freakout). In some way, these abundant old records captured something musty and exotic about these long gone times in a way that, say, the Buffalo Springfield didn't.

[~ / % ? *]

Yes! One thing i remember about the Ventures' collector scene is the guys were all relatively clean cut with only an interest in the Ventures. They didn't stray into other parts of rock and roll, strictly the ventures. a lot of the rarities I've known found to be weird Taiwanese, Japanese, Malaysian, etc., counterfeits/pirates/boots that can't be sold on discogs. My biggest ventures customer turned out to be running some immigration scam with Sri Lankan women, a real Walter Mitty type. But like doo wop , it seemed the desirability and sales of Venture' s stuff seemed to dry up overnight. Doesn't seem to be any ironic revival that other bands have enjoyed.

[rayge]

On Stage and In Space were the two that I bought as a teen. The latter is a real knockout for the period, with lots of effects - they varied their sounds by introducing other instruments, such as a farfisa organ, one of the reasons they kept going.
They did have a couple of non-Walk big hits in the US (the follow-up, Perfidia, and Hawaii 5-0) but most of the others that I remember cracked the 100, but not the 40, altough as loveless points out they were huge in Japan. All their singles were released in the UK, most of them on Liberty, distributed here by EMI, which shoved them out on red-A demos that I could pick up at half price. They were the only way you could get hold of surf-style instrumentals (recommend Penetration, which I had on one of those demos and recently sold for a fair whack) in the UK - I'd read about Dick Dale, but his US label(s) didn't have much of a deal over here. EMI's Stateside label also had the rights to Link Wray, which is how I got to get the Rumble EP, as well as Black Widow/Jack the Ripper and The Sweeper/Run Chicken Run.

And I don't know how the fuck I didn't mention Duane Eddy in my earlier post in this thread, but the Rebels' records, although led by his bass-strings-heavy 'twangy' guitar (Hank and his tremolo arm but a pale imitation at best) most of the time, also relied heavily on the saxes of Jim Horn and Teenage Steve Douglas and the piano of Larry Knechtel (all three later members of the Wrecking Crew), Lee Hazelwood's production brilliance and sometimes string sections for their distinctive sounds.Theme for Moon Children was one that doesn't get mentiomned very often when talking about his greats, but I like it loads.