THE VENTURES
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Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
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1960–2022 |
Pop rock |
Walk, Don’t Run (1960) |
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Album
released: December 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Morgen; 2) Raunchy; 3) Home; 4)
My Own True Love (Tara’s Theme); 5) The Switch; 6) Walk,
Don’t Run; 7) Night Train; 8) No Trespassing; 9) Caravan; 10) Sleep
Walk; 11) The McCoy; 12) Honky Tonk. |
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REVIEW In
the beginning, way back in 1928, there was New Moon, an operetta by Sigmund Romberg, whose most enduring
aria was ‘Softly, As In
A Morning Sunrise’, which went on to become a bit of a jazz standard,
performed (e.g. by Artie Shaw) or deconstructed (e.g. by Coltrane or Eric
Dolphy) in miriads of your well-known jazz ways. Catchy, but corny, in 1954
the composition served as a contrafact inspiration for virtuoso jazz guitarist
Johnny Smith, who used the harmonies to write and record ‘Walk, Don’t Run!’, a
short and moody instrumental with a memorable melancholic main theme,
lovingly caressed on the electric guitar with a bit of a Spanish feel
(apparently using what is generally known as the «Andalusian cadence»). |
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Relatively few people cared about Johnny Smith,
though, outside of fellow guitarists — such as Chet Atkins, who fell in love
with the tune and made his
own acoustic recording for the album Hi-Fi
In Focus in 1957. In his arrangement, the tune took on a slightly more
folksy flavor, or, perhaps, a slightly more gypsy one? may be faint echoes of
Django Reinhardt in there... anyway, the important thing is that many more
people at the time probably listened to Chet Atkins than to Johnny Smith, and
among those people were a couple of young guitarists from Tacoma, Washington
— more precisely, Bob Bogle, who owned the record, and his recent friends Don
Wilson and Nokie Edwards, with whom he’d only just formed a band they
originally wanted to call The Versatones, but settled on the humbler-sounding
Ventures when they learned the former name was already taken by competitors.
And this is where our story properly begins. It is interesting that the general concept of an
«instrumental rock band» is one of the few concepts of the pre-Beatles era
where the UK may actually hold precedence over the US. By the time The
Ventures appeared on the scene, The Shadows had already made a big name for
themselves with ‘Apache’ and established an artistic reputation independent
of being merely the backing band for Cliff Richard. Meanwhile, over across
the Atlantic the concept of «instrumental rock» was rather epitomized by solo
artists such as Duane Eddy — or bands that had a mix of vocal and
instrumental numbers, such as New Mexico’s The Fireballs (whose ‘Torquay’ is an
important, if not particularly impressive, stepping stone in the development
of instrumental rock and roll, but who actually had their own lead vocalist
as well — singing pleasant, but somewhat lukewarm Buddy Holly-esque ditties
like ‘I Don’t Know’). Everything changed overnight when The Ventures
finally managed to get ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ on the air — which took a bit of an
effort, since no record label wanted to sign them up at first and so they had
to set up their own one (New Horizon). For the record, the band’s first
recording on that label was not ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, but rather ‘Cookies & Coke’, a
vocal number (ha ha!) co-written by
Bogle and Wilson that sounds absolutely primitive, more like a bunch of
hillbillies around the campfire than anything even remotely resembling
America’s tightest and most professional instrumental rock band — which, at
that point, they had absolutely no intention of becoming; but with the
unexpected smash success of ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, which eventually made it all
the way to #2 on the charts, The Ventures’ fate was decided beyond their
will. As it often happens, it is difficult today to fully
realize the impact of ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ because such a great deal of rock and
roll recorded after it — not least
by The Ventures themselves, but also by miriads of other artists, including
about 90% of the entire «surf-rock» movement — would sound so much like it.
But was there anything that sounded that
much like it before the song was
released? Nope, not really. As I relisten to stuff that had already been en
vogue, everything from Duane Eddy to The (Fabulous) Wailers and beyond, I
fail to find an opening that would be as rhythmic, powerful, and at the same
time sonically feather-light as Skip Moore’s cymbal-heavy drum fills and the
rhythm-lead duo of Wilson and Bogle, as the latter reprises Chet Atkins’
memorable melancholic lead while the former pins it to a formerly non-present,
subtly Latin-flavored rhythm part that we’re all probably sure we heard a
million times before but not so sure we heard it on any song earlier than ‘Walk, Don’t Run’... ...anyway, enough with the attempts to write
pseudo-objective musicological history: ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, as performed by
The Ventures, is simply a great rocking instrumental that takes the faint
touch of nostalgic melancholy from Johnny Smith and Chet Atkins and
counterbalances it with driving, irresistible rhythmics — this is no longer
your suicidal loner sitting and moping on top of some remote hillock, this is
your suicidal loner getting on his suicidal bike and propelling his lonely
ass along the lonely highway, because there’s nothing like a wild ride that
can chase away one’s moodiness... or, at least, properly convert that
moodiness to something orgasmic in nature. In all honesty, The Ventures
should have retitled their version ‘Run, Don’t Walk’, as there would be no
better verbal way to express the difference of their interpretation from the
earlier arrangements by Johnny and Chet. It is useless to argue which of the three versions
is the best one — they all serve such different purposes. In comparison to
Wilson, Bogle, and Edwards, Smith and Atkins were seasoned guitar pros, and
their playing reveals far more depth and technicality; but clearly, only The
Ventures here came close to creating an entire new musical genre — and
immediately found themselves trapped by its success. Not that ‘Walk Don’t
Run’ really became the proverbial stone around their neck; given the guys’
lack of natural talent for either singing or songwriting, they seemed to be
fairly happy with becoming rock music’s leading «instrumental band», embarking
on a long and adventurous path of covering other people’s material and
letting their guitars do all the talking. In the process, however, The
Ventures really became «The Shadows» — a band that kept a sharp eye on the
trends and fads of contemporary pop music and regularly offered their own
instrumental projections of other people’s hits, almost karaoke-style. In this way, following The Ventures’ impressive LP
discography is in itself a fascinating journey — by listening to all of their
albums (at least all through the 1960s) in chronological order, it’s as if the
entire history of the decade’s rock and pop music is gradually unveiling
before your eyes, albeit with a heavy emphasis on the Billboard charts, of
course. The bad news is that this quickly turns into a routine process, and,
in fact, they would never again get to catch the public eye as efficiently as
they did with ‘Walk Don’t Run’ (the closest they came was in 1964, when they
once again hit the Top 10 with... the remake
of ‘Walk Don’t Run’!). The good news is that there are much worse routine
processes that I can think of: while you always knew more or less what to
expect from The Ventures, you could also expect it to be consistently fun and
tasteful. Thus, for their first album, quickly recorded at a
home studio in Seattle after ‘Walk Don’t Run’ became shooting up the charts,
The Ventures (with Howie Johnson replacing Skip Moore on drums) chose to
cover such contemporary material as ‘Morgen’, the big recent international
hit for the Croatian artist Ivo Robić (the original is a good
choice for all the fans of German language delivered in funny Slavic accents,
but I’m taking Bob Bogle’s guitar lead over Ivo’s vocal lead any time of the
week); and ‘Raunchy’, the famous instrumental hit by
Bill Justis that would land a young George Harrison employment with The
Quarrymen — The Ventures might here be offering the definitive version of the
tune, with perfectly dedicated interplay between all the four members; Nokie
Edwards switches to lead guitar for this one, with Bogle laying down the
simple, but powerful boogie bass line, yet ultimately, the effect is very
cumulative, with each of the four musicians playing an equally important role
in getting you up from your seat and down in your imaginary race car on Highway
61. On the more romantic side of the equation, the band
covers ‘Sleep Walk’, the beautiful steel guitar masterpiece that had only
recently brought fame to Santo
& Johnny; since the Ventures did not have a steel guitar player, a
large part of the magic of the original is unfortunately gone — but they
compensate for this with much tighter rhythm guitar and an overall smoother,
more perfectly flowing twangy lead tone. It’s also a good occasion to compare
the style of the Ventures to that of the Shadows, who would also cover the song next
year: the Shadows play it a little slower, and Hank Marvin makes an effort to
preserve the «otherworldliness» of the original by equipping his guitar with
a reverb effect and tuning it to a downright angelic pitch — whereas Bob
Bogle puts his faith in the «twanginess», giving the whole thing a much more
Hawaiian, surfy angle. Ultimately, the Shadows take you to fairy dreamland,
while the Ventures take you to a sunny beach — so much for cultural
differences between the US and the UK circa 1960-61. Mixed in with the recent hits are covers of some
classic oldies: Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’ from 1956 was already perceived
as one of the first proverbial «instrumental rock» numbers, so it was only
natural for the Ventures to add their own twist to this slow shuffle (it’s a
bit draggy for my tastes, though), and ‘Caravan’... well, what sort of an
instrumental band does not have ‘Caravan’ in their repertoire? (In their
defense, I really love those little extra «buzzing bee» runs that Bogle
throws in during his second run through the main theme — they’re quite
hilarious!). There’s also ‘Night Train’, which everybody was doing at the
time — still a long way away from the explosive interpretation of James
Brown, but already faster, tighter, and punchier than the old school Jimmy
Forrest original from 1952. The band’s original songwriting is mostly confined
to a small group of fast, rocking numbers that are not very inventive (thus,
‘No Trespassing’ is clearly just a riff on Duane Eddy’s ‘Moovin’ ’n’ Groovin’,
with a bit of ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ briefly quoted inside for good measure), but
serve their limited purpose full well. By the way, I think that ‘The Switch’
might actually refer to the fact that for this recording, too, Bogle and
Edwards switch their lead and bass parts, even if drummer Howie Johnson is
still the true hero of the song; that fast, precise, and infuriatingly
hyper-active style of drumming was actually far less spread with American
rock and pop artists around 1960 than we’d commonly like to think — I know
Levon Helm was a big adept on his earliest records with Ronnie Hawkins, but
overall, drummers tended to exercise a bit more restraint, which puts Howie
in a class of his own. (Too bad that class would only last up to 1962, when
Howie would be permanently put out of the overdriven drumming business after
a serious spinal injury). On the whole, though, the overall quality of Walk, Don’t Run does not properly
manifest itself these days before you place it in the general context of 1960
and realize that nobody for miles
and miles around was combining tightness, energy, and fun on the same level
with these four rebel-rousers from Tacoma. No, they weren’t about danger,
aggression, titillation, or provocativeness — but neither were they about
distilling the essence of rock’n’roll to the lowest common denominator. More
than anything else, The Ventures were a band,
perhaps one of the first true examples of a tightly coordinated rock band
where the whole matters more than the individual players and the individual
players are 100% bent on polishing their individual strengths to lend them to
the collective purpose. In other words, they were doing for rock music more
or less the same that James Brown and The Furious Flames were doing for
R&B — that is, bringing it out of its «rambunctious teenage phase» to a
state of respectable maturity, while at the same time taking care to preserve
the inner child. And in some respects at least, that state remains as
perfectly enjoyable today as it was more than sixty years ago. P.S.: The one thing that remains most dated about
the album is its oddly mismatched cover — as was common back in the day,
Dolton Records occupied most of the sleeve with the alluring figure of a
model (Barbara Grimes) so as to make horny teenagers part with their money
even quicker than usual, but since the band themselves were on tour at the
time, they had to use a bunch of stockroom workers to take their place in the
background. And would The Ventures themselves ever stoop to breaking their
concentration and falling all over their instruments like dolts at the first
sight of a sexy chick in high heels? Nah. At the very least, this is not what
the actual music on the album suggests. |
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Album
released: February 4, 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) The Shuck; 2) Detour; 3) Ram-Bunk-Shush; 4) Hawaiian
War Chant; 5) Perfidia; 6) Harlem Nocturne; 7)
Blue Tango; 8) Ups ’N Downs; 9) Lonesome Town; 10) Torquay; 11) Wailin’; 12)
Moon Of Manakoora. |
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REVIEW The
only possible way to write more or less meaningful reviews of the Ventures’
output, which is almost as vast as the universe itself (and, at a certain
period in time, seems to have been expanding at comparable rates), is not to
ask what The Ventures can do for their country, but what their country can do
for The Ventures; in other words, look at each album as capturing a certain
state of mind, relevant for a certain particular period, and see the band as
a group of musical priests celebrating that state of mind. The Ventures were
not — and never pretended to be — deep and inventive enough to uncover new
emotional levels or hitherto hidden meanings in the songs they performed.
But, as a rule, they were intelligent enough to understand their actual meanings, and translate them to
their own instrumental language in the most accessible of all possible ways. |
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In late 1960, that instrumental language still
mainly represented an early form of surf-rock, so it is hardly surprising
that when their eye fell on ‘Perfidia’, the old Spanish hit for Xavier Cougat
in 1940, they arranged the song as a fast, rocking, danceable number. Why
they chose to take ‘Perfidia’, I don’t know, but the song was very much in
the public eye — at least, in the Latin public eye — ever since the first
recorded versions, and even Nat King Cole had recorded a Spanish-sung version
in 1959, so maybe that helped trigger the band’s interest. The funny thing is
that, even if the Ventures faithfully preserve the main musical theme of the original hit, the rhythm of the song directly repeats
that of ‘Walk Don’t Run’ (for the first 6-7 seconds, you could swear it was
just a re-recording in a different key) — which helps reconstruct the
original motivation as something like «well, we have just successfully
converted jazz into surf-rock; shouldn’t the next move be to do the same for
Latin music?». And it works, because by speeding up the tempo and replacing
the boring old-school violins with the exciting and fashionable twang guitar
they turn the song into a potential anthem for young lovers (well, young ex-lovers, given the song’s theme, but
since there are no lyrics anyway, who cares if the song is really about
treachery?). Still, lightning does not strike twice if you try
luring it to the exact same place, and ‘Perfidia’ only managed to hit #15 on
the Billboard charts (and even that, I would think, was rather surprisingly
high — just going to show the true strength of the momentum of ‘Walk, Don’t
Run’). Not wanting to fall into the same trap for the third time, the band
then switched gears for its next single and chose a semi-obscure blues
shuffle: ‘Ram-Bunk-Shush’ was originally recorded by Lucky Millinder in 1952,
then became a decent
R&B hit for Bill Doggett in 1957, which is clearly the version that
the Ventures are emulating, replacing the «gargling» sax of Doggett’s version
for a relatively countrified electric lead. From a technical standpoint, the
performance is all but flawless, but a tad too mechanical and predictable — a
bit like «The Ventures are passing their Blues 101 exam with flying colors».
The single only reached #29 this time, and not until three years later would
the band be able t once again break into the Top 50. That said, in late 1960 and early 1961 The Ventures
were still perceived as a fresh and hot presence, rather than the «Silent
Guardians Of The Charts» into whom they would soon evolve, and their second
LP, which they decided to simply title The
Ventures, still has plenty of youthful excitement to go along with the
professionalism. Both ‘Perfidia’ and ‘Ram-Bunk-Shush’ are here, but, to my
mind, they are not the obvious highlights. On the fast-and-exciting front, I
would rather award that honor to ‘Detour’, shorter than Duane Eddy’s
instrumental by about forty seconds but tightening it up to much higher intensity.
Eddy’s version was primarily a demonstration of his own twangy genius, but this ‘Detour’ is most definitely a
band effort, with rhythm, lead, bass, and drums locking together in eighty
absolutely explosive seconds. And even they don’t have Eddy’s guitar-vs.-sax
advantage, the lead guitar part here compensates fully by getting more and
more excited as the song goes on, rising in pitch, throwing in extra
eighth-notes to fill up the entire space, and creating the illusion of
constant acceleration even if the song’s tempo never really changes. Pretty
kick-ass for early 1961. Another good show of taste is the cover of ‘Wailin’
by The Wailers — symbolically, this had been the band’s first single to not hit the charts, so The Ventures’
selection of it rather than ‘Tall Cool One’ or ‘Mau-Mau’ (both of which did chart in 1959) can be seen as a
special gesture of appreciation. More likely, though, they just took the
fastest and most overtly rock’n’roll number from the band that they could
find — and although the Wailers’ original is predictably a little dirtier,
sloppier, and greasier than the Ventures’ tight-as-heck version, far be it
from me to complain that it does not rock every bit as tough. I mean, come
on, it is no crime to admit that the Ventures have a sharper developed sense
of rhythm than the Wailers ever had (just listen to that opening lick on the original — they
already lose the rhythm in the first two seconds of the song), and that’s a kind
of discipline that is not just there for purely Apollonic purposes, you know. As for the slower, moodier numbers, the obvious
stand-out here is ‘Harlem Nocturne’, which the band adapted from the recent hit by the
Viscounts, a short-lived band from New Jersey that never managed to repeat
its original success. Again, you can feel the Ventures’ power when they take
the Viscounts’ idea — turn the old jazz ballad into something that would
remind you of a slightly more sinister vision of «Harlem at night» — and
sharpen its fuzziness with stronger, tighter rhythm work, replacing the
somewhat «gloppy» bass playing of the Viscounts with metronomically
punctuated notes and removing the excessive tremolo effect from the lead
guitar, making it woo you rather through the actual notes played than the
special effects administered (always a worthy cause when we’re talking
professionalism vs. amateurishness). The result is a pretty haunting
combination of impending danger and subtle melancholia-cum-wistfulness. Of the relatively recent hits, the Ventures also
turn their attention to ‘Torquay’ by The Fireballs, a nice
reminder of the existence of this once-fine New Mexican rock band (that is,
before they turned into more of a novelty act with ‘Sugar Shack’ in 1963),
though they don’t do a whole lot of magic with the song this time around.
However, on the sentimental side they perfectly bottle the existentialist
sadness of Ricky Nelson’s ‘Lonesome Town’, which always felt like much more
than «just» a breakup song for me anyway. I am not sure why they also chose
to cover such oldies as ‘Hawaiian War Chant’, ‘Blue Tango’, and ‘Moon Of
Manakoora’ (perhaps somebody of note covered those in 1959-60, I just
couldn’t be bothered to rummage through the chart records for all those tunes), but they all sound
nice anyway — particularly ‘Moon Of Manakoora’, a song that usually
qualifies as a piece of predictable «Hawaiian exotica», but whose magic
qualities they somehow manage to enhance without summoning visions of grass
skirts and luaus. To those who might have harbored any illusions,
based on Walk Don’t Run, that The
Ventures would turn their gift into original songwriting and general musical
innovation, The Ventures would be
a disappointment — with not a single attempt at writing their own melodies
and no particularly new sounds to surprise and astound us, it should have
been clear that the band settled into a comfortable formula that would
probably dominate their life from now on, regardless of whether it turns out
to be commercially viable or not. But now that we firmly know what to expect
of The Ventures, that formula is pretty sensible. The Ventures are perfectionists
— they seek out tunes whose full potential, as it seems to them, has not been
explored, and polish them up. In later years, when they’d start turning to
the Beatles and Cream, this would not work so well; with songs like ‘Detour’
and ‘Harlem Nocturne’, it works like a charm. The down side is that most of the existing Ventures
compilations are utterly useless — the probability of a «deep cut» on a
Ventures LP kicking just as much ass as a Ventures’ not-very-hit single is
pretty high, and your best bet for a perfect Ventures compilation is to just
get all the albums (I think there’s only about two hundred and fifty of them,
so not a big deal, really) and whittle them down to whatever gets your native
goat. But I do like to pay attention to all that «filler» as well, if only
for the sake of following this «musical calendar» that they kept updating for
most of the Sixties and even beyond that (though after about 1970, their
sense of time becomes far blurrier). |
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Album
released: June 26, 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) (Ghost) Riders In The Sky; 2)
Wheels; 3) Lonely Heart; 4) Bulldog; 5)
Lullaby Of The Leaves; 6) Beyond The Reef; 7) Raw-Hide;
8) Meet Mister Callahan; 9) Trambone; 10) Last Date; 11) Ginchy; 12) Josie. |
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REVIEW I
am unable to find where that punny front cover photo comes from — by the
looks of it, it may be a still taken from some old silent movie, but since
The Ventures aren’t The Beatles or even The Beach Boys, information is
understandably scarce here. In any case, the original sleeve was quickly
retired (were they breaking copyright laws?) and replaced by a much less
interesting cover with a «shadow man» depicted instead. That way, the title
became even more meaningless,
since, by any possible accounts, Another
Smash!!! was anything but a «smash» for the band. The album did chart
higher than its self-titled predecessor, but they could have hardly known it
upon naming it, and the accompanying single, a cover of the old jazz standard
‘Lullaby Of The Leaves’, was their lowest charting single to date. Still...
extra points for confidence? |
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Anyway, not all that much had changed in the musical
world in between February and June of 1961, so Another Smash!!! is not too thematically different from The Ventures. The band still retains
the principle of mostly choosing instrumental originals as the basis for
their instrumental covers, and still preserves a certain ratio of recent hits
to relative oldies. The single is actually classified as the latter: although
‘Lullaby Of The Leaves’ was recorded by just about anybody in the jazz
business, The Ventures base their cover on a 1957 reinvention by Chet
Atkins — perhaps with a faint hope that, just as it was with ‘Walk Don’t
Run’, Chet might once again serve as their lucky rabbit’s foot. Amusingly,
you can observe in comparing the two versions that they actually made theirs
sound even more similar to ‘Walk Don’t Run’ — by using the exact same drum
fills and guitar riff in the introduction. It’s a somewhat cheesy
self-plagiarizing trick that, as the charts clearly show, very rarely led anybody
to improved commercial success, but the recording still works as a slightly
more complex and slightly more rocking variation on ‘Walk Don’t Run’, even if
it has to expurgate all the remaining jazz echoes (still clearly audible in
the Chet Atkins version) to do so. Of the more recent hits, The Ventures mainly tackle
the surfy-twangy instrumental ones. The album opens with ‘(Ghost) Riders In
The Sky’, one of the oldest and most famous «mystical western» classics that
had only recently received a modern instrumental reading from The Ramrods; omitting
all of the extra-musical overdubs (swinging whips, yee-haws, mooing cows,
etc.) as useless baggage, the band replaces the Ramrods’ guerrilla-style
messiness and chaos with Prussian army-style discipline, making the imaginary
onslaught of the «Wild Hunt» even more coldly terrifying to the contemporary
listener (and if you strain your imagination a bit yourself, it might even
feel coldly terrifying to you today). Then, for spiritual contrast, this is
immediately followed by ‘Wheels’, the cover of a recent hit by The String-A-Longs, but
this is where The Ventures lose: the tune’s lightweight, catchy atmosphere
works much better with the original’s odd, somewhat «gurgly» guitar tone and
Tex-Mex percussive rhythmics, and «venturizing» the original arrangement
removes that charm. Likewise, one cover version that I absolutely do not
care to hear ever again is Link Wray’s ‘Raw-Hide’. The original, as I
have indicated in the corresponding Link Wray review, is easily my favorite
Link tune from the early days — that snarling guitar tone really kicks ass, or, more accurately,
tears ass to shreds — and all The Ventures are able to offer is a pale,
starving shadow; they can subdue and discipline another person’s tune like
few others can, but what can they do when the tune is already disciplined to perfection, and still manages to be
violent and aggressive at the same time? The Ventures are not a violent band;
subtly menacing they can be when the song demands it, but they were never
«young punks» like Link, and there is no purpose whatsoever to the
«venturizing» of the Link Wray sound. On the other hand, covering a second-rate surf-rock
band like The Fireballs is a completely different business — take their
original version of ‘Bulldog’
and it sounds like a tentative demo next to The Ventures’ tight-as-heck
reinterpretation. I am not saying that The Ventures’ sound is objectively
superior: it is objectively better produced, but, clearly, there is an edgy
rawness to the thin, crispy-dry, echoey riffage of The Fireballs (inherited
from the likes of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates) that is more «rock and roll»
than The Ventures could ever hope to be. Yet here at least, it is easy to understand
why The Ventures would want to cover the song and to enjoy all the extra
polish, starting with Howie Johnson’s beautiful drum patterns and ending with
Bogle’s rich ringing overtones on the lead guitar part. The rest of the covers are generally less memorable,
but still consistently enjoyable. These include: (a) a rendition of British
composer Eric Spear’s theme for the movie Meet
Mr. Callaghan, probably best known in the States for the weird-as-usual Les Paul rearrangement
(on which he makes his guitar sound like a harpsichord, which automatically
makes the older version more interesting than the Ventures cover); (b)
‘Ginchy’, a rather perfunctory reproduction of the Bert Weedon original —
it is, however, curious to note how intensely the Ventures were studying the
UK musical scene even in those pre-British Invasion days; (c) ‘Trambone’, yet
another Chet Atkins
cover which, in my opinion, sounds far more delicious when done by Chet
in his trademark finger-thumbpicking style; (d) a guitar reinvention of Floyd
Cramer’s piano instrumental ‘Last Date’ which is at
least intriguing, though both versions are just «pleasant» rather than
«moving». Original compositions by Bogle and Wilson are
limited to just two numbers, both of them fairly romantic this time: the
faster-paced ‘Lonely Heart’ is a twangy-country ballad with some nice guitar
jangle and some corny old-time Western harmonies, and the slower-paced
‘Josie’ is heavily orchestrated, heavily similar to ‘Can’t Help Falling In
Love’ (though this is probably a coincidence, since the Elvis song was not
yet released at the time), and, overall, not the greatest finale to a
Ventures album I could think about. The fewer vocals and strings there are on
a Ventures album, the better it is, anyway, unless those vocals and strings
are used in a weird, spooky fashion like they are on ‘(Ghost) Riders In The
Sky’. On the whole, Another
Smash!!! is probably the weakest — if still nice — album of the Ventures’
«original trilogy», continuing to stick to the same principles of material
selection and sequencing but with steadily diminishing returns. The number of
misfires — such as making the obvious mistake of trying to adapt Link Wray,
or the embarrassing attempt to merge ‘Lullaby Of The Leaves’ with ‘Walk Don’t
Run’ — is significantly higher, and the number of high points is
significantly lower (I’d say that only ‘Bulldog’ is an unquestionable
improvement on the original). For all of the band’s professionalism,
enthusiasm, and lack of pop star ambitiousness, it was probably time for a
bit of a change, although few people could have predicted the actual strange
direction in which they’d take it on their next LP... |
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Album
released: October 2, 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) Blue Moon; 2) Yellow Jacket; 3)
Bluer Than Blue; 4) Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White; 5) Green Leaves Of
Summer; 6) Blue Skies; 7) Greenfields; 8) Red Top; 9) White Silver Sands; 10)
Yellow Bird; 11) Orange Fire; 12) Silver City. |
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REVIEW In
1961, Hank Levine (what a brilliant, 100%-American name-surname combination!)
was a little-known composer and arranger, whose principal achievements to
date was his work on records by such acts as Dorsey Burnette and The Fleetwoods
(he is responsible for the soft-as-silk production on their famous ‘Tragedy’, even if I
still prefer the Brenda Lee cover). The Fleetwoods became his clients because
he’d signed up to work for their label, Dolton Records, and so it was only a
matter of time before he’d also cross paths with The Ventures — and from that
crossing came ‘(Theme From) Silver City’, a minor hit for the band in August
1961 and easily the best song on this subsequent LP. |
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You could probably guess that there never had been a
movie or show like ‘Silver City’... and you’d be wrong! There was a Western movie called Silver City back in 1951, and it even
had an opening theme
(credited to Paul Sawtell) that had a few phrases vaguely reminiscent of
Levine’s composition — so it’s hardly a total coincidence, though it would be
hard to accuse Mr. Levine of copyright infringement; ‘(Theme From) Silver
City’ clearly finds more inspiration in the general Western style than
specifically rips anybody off. Not that this is really so important; what is important is that the lead guitar
melody is catchy, juicy, and uplifting in a way that only The Ventures, with
their perfect understanding of the importance of guitar tone, could provide
back in 1961. And Levine actually does a great job embellishing the band’s
tight performance with strings (note how they begin to stealthily creep in
around the second verse, propping up the already established «are-you-ready-to-take-on-this-world?»
mood) and horns — there’s a genuinely epic moment here at 0:52 when the horns
take over the main theme, and then the guitar and strings respond to the horns as if they were all members of
the same bunch of merry cowboys, scattered around the hilltops but in tight
coordination with each other. (The tune, by the way, is meant to be played in stereo — one of those cases where a monaural
version pretty much loses the purpose). I think Lee Hazlewood and Duane Eddy
might have been biting their nails over this one! The B-side to the single, perhaps accidentally,
perhaps not, also happened to share a color term — ‘Bluer Than Blue’ was
credited to Dolton Records’ general manager Dick Glasser and to Tommy Allsup,
lead guitar player for The Crickets; indeed, the lead guitar melody has some
very typically Buddy Hollyesque pop inflections that you will easily
recognize, even if, on the whole, the tune is quite retiring next to the
smashing cowboy pomp of ‘Silver City’. But more importantly, this funny
combination of «silver» and «blue» on the same single probably led to the
idea of recording an entire LP of songs featuring names for colors in their
titles — and thus, to the birth of the famous «Ventures Concept Album»
franchise, where, instead of randomly writing and covering songs on different
topics, they would group them together on a thematic basis (or, at least, on
a pseudo-thematic one, as song titles — particularly if the songs are
instrumentals — certainly do not always have a one-to-one correlation with
song moods and meanings). This quasi-conceptual approach had its ups and
downs, like most creative ideas do. On one hand, it somehow elevated the
status of The Ventures — instead of pure rambling around, they could now
arrange their albums as connected «suites», artistically exploring one topic
or another, and raising the overall level of intrigue for their listeners. On
the other hand, though, it downplayed their status of «silent trend
guardians»; when you restrict yourself to certain themes, it naturally
becomes harder to combine this with the idea of putting your own stamp on
contemporary hits. No better example of this than The Colorful Ventures: where every preceding album had relied on
covers of recent big successes, this LP puts together a bunch of freshly
written originals with a bunch of oldies’ covers — because, apparently, it
was not that easy to find a lot of recent chart hits with color words in
their titles. (Not that there weren’t any — Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Angel’ from
1960 comes to mind immediately, as do a few others — but I guess not every
pop hit lent itself all that well to a Ventures interpretation, and not
every dashing lead guitarist has the guts to mimic a Roy Orbison vocal part,
either). Instead, the lead-in track to the album — and also
the A-side for the second single off it — would be a rocking, typically
Ventures-style reinvention of ‘Blue Moon’, possibly the fastest and the most
drum-heavy version of the song you’ll ever find unless there’s an unreleased
version by Napalm Death hanging around somewhere. Granted, by this time you
are fairly sure of what to expect from a Ventures cover — speed, tightness,
note-for-note perfection, clean and colorful guitar tone, skilful use of
«bends and wobbles» — but that’s no reason not to have fun tapping along with
their little concoction once, after the deceptive slow introduction, it
launches all the way into fifth gear. The track selection is fairly diverse, though; The
Ventures wouldn’t want you to think that the only thing they are really good
at is the speedy Ventures pop-rocker (though it is indeed the one thing at
which they are better than at anything else), and so the «color trip» takes
them into Latin territory (‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossoms’, the most famous
version of which came from Pérez Prado’s orchestra in 1953); «genuine»
epic Western (‘Green Leaves Of Summer’, one out of two recent covers on the
album — from Dmitry Tiomkin’s score to The
Alamo); melancholy folk (‘Greenfields’, a hit for The Brothers Four in
1960); ballroom jazz (Woody Herman’s ‘Red Top’, remade into more of a Chuck
Berry-style number); pure country (‘White Silver Sands’, a hit for Don Rondo in
1957); and calypso (‘Yellow Bird’, originally ‘Choucounne’ as recorded by
Katherine Dunham in 1947). Of all these, only ‘Greenfields’ strikes me as
somewhat exquisite: for all their cheerfulness, here The Ventures try not
just to convey the deeply depressing spirit of the original, but emphasize it
as best they can by turning the lead guitar melody into a series of
expressive sighs and moans. Everything else is, well... okay. The two original Ventures compositions included on
the LP are fairly generic pop-rockers — both ‘Yellow Jacket’ and ‘Orange
Fire’ start out with the exact same chuggin’ rhythm guitar melody, follow it
up with a catchy-but-hollow lead figure, follow it up with a rocking solo,
and then end the song in a slightly different key for the purpose of
spiritual build-up. I suspect they wrote both of these in about half an hour
while looking for two more numbers to pad out the album, but they’re
certainly harmless enough. I do recommend listening to the album in its
entirety at least once, though, with the songs in exactly the original order,
and then deciding for yourself if ‘Silver City’, coming right at the very
end, actually grips your attention tighter than everything else combined — or
if I am deluding myself and there is really nothing outstanding about the
song other than its little French horn gimmick in the middle. Whatever be the
answer, it’s still pretty clear that The
Colorful Ventures on the whole is a nice little LP of courtier ditties
built around one particular kingly song... a definition that is probably
applicable to about 90% of the Ventures’ albums, all except the ones that do
not even have one kingly song to
their names. |
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