The Ventures...Pioneers or Hacks

How do you classify The Ventures.

  • Rock and roll pioneers

    Votes: 19 57.6%
  • Hacks who where at the right place at the right time

    Votes: 1 3.0%
  • Okay, some good songs, but not true innovators

    Votes: 6 18.2%
  • Who/What are The Ventures?

    Votes: 7 21.2%

  • Total voters
    33

mawtangent

New member
I have read the claim that the Ventures are the most successful Rock and Roll Instrumental group of all time.

When I was a kid there was a Ventures (vinyl) album (belonging to my older brother) around the house...there has a girl in a bikini on the album cover...I gave the album a listen or two, it was okay...years later I bought a "best of" cassette with many of the same songs I remembered from the "bikini" album. Recently I spoke to a young guitar player who told me that he comes up with decent music but has trouble with lyrics, so I introduced him to the concept of instrumental rock and roll, which naturally led to talking about the Ventures (he had never heard of the Ventures)

Now I am in the process of getting another "very best of" Ventures album in CD form (my cassette is sounding rough). It seems (from searching through half.com) that there are dozens (at least 30) Venture albums containing many varied combinations of the same (maybe 300 or more) songs (most contain the song "Walk, Don't Run"). There is even a 3-CD box set of the Ventures recording/remaking their own songs in the late '90s/early 2000s (I got this box set thinking it contained the original 60's era recordings). I finally found a CD (on ebay) that contains most of my favorite original/60s-era Venture songs. I especially like "Hawaii Five-O", "Telstar", "The Lonely Bull", "Tequila ", "Out of Limits", "Pipeline", "Apache", and "Rebel Rouser".

The Ventures are still "okay" to me. I don't think they wrote many of their songs and I guess they didn't have mind-blowing, innovative technical skill on their instruments, but they seemed to have filled a niche in the Rock and Roll landscape.
 
Hack may be too strong a word, for what The Ventures did. They were pioneers, in that they were in the first wave of surf bands, although they've never claimed to be, and still deny being a surf band. They were also pioneers, in their surf guitar instrumental style arrangements of songs that were popular during that first wave of surf bands. While they may not have been a surf band, The Ventures are a big influence on some of what I want to accomplish with my own guitar instrumental efforts, especially in the arranging of existing songs into surf guitar instrumentals.

Matt
 
They were innovative hacks! OK, they weren't the greatest musicians but calling them hacks is a bit harsh. I think they were at the right place at the right time.
 
The Ventures were one of the first rock (pop) guitar bands to have an influence on me. They weren't amazing but they had a unique sound which opened my eyes and ears to a different aproach to guitar. I think they had more influence on country guitarists than on rock, I still hear "Venture like" sounds in many of today's country songs.
 
I learned Walk don't run in the early 60's, I still play it but I always preferred "The Shadows" a Brit group, who started in 1957 and just had their retirement tour last year.
 
philboyd studge said:
They were certainly the most commercial of the guitar groups, but I've got to go with the Fireballs as being more influential to me....and on a slightly earlier timeline.

http://www.fireballs-original.com/history.html

The Fireballs! I have the CD of the Fireballs Norman Petty masters (Norman Petty was the producer/engineer who partnered with Buddy Holly on his earlier stuff, kind of a precursor to George Martin IMO).

The Fireballs were truly innovative, but it's not music that will knock you out - kinda like no one's really knocked out by the Ventures. You won't find any instrumental pyrotechnics in their music - it's a different paradigm, with which most of us are not familiar these days. They concentrated on rhythms, melodies, guitar sounds (e.g., playing melodies on baritone guitar), and precise, competent playing, rather than showing off. George Tomsco was the "guitar genius" of the group. The Telstars, the Champs, the Ventures, all of those groups owe something to the Fireballs.

After Buddy Holly died, the Fireballs were brought in to dub over some demos that Holly had made with just his voice and acoustic guitar. They did a damn fine job of doing that, especially considering that the demos were not rhythmically precise.
 
Back in the '70's when I had a band we'd go over the 'surf' instrumental subject a lot...who started it, who was best, who was most influential, etc. I still don't know, just the records I bought in the '50's. We sort of came the conclusion that anything before 1962 (when surf movies hit it big) was 'pre surf' and therefore much cooler.

Another great group of that era was The Strangers......could have been studio guys but I'm not sure.
 
I saw them in concert in the early eighties. Hacks is an insult to the kick arse music they made. They were fantastic live. Did they write their own songs-
sometimes (Nokie Edwards wrote Surf Rider- which is on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack), but mostly they made versions of songs that were distinctly their own. That makes them pioneers in my book. :)
 
mawtangent said:
I have read the claim that the Ventures are the most successful Rock and Roll Instrumental group of all time.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Ventures were the most successful and influential group in their time.

They shared equal importance with the likes of Duane Eddy and many others.

You had to be there at the time and later appreciate the paths they paved.
 
During the era in which the Ventures started, rock instrumentals weren't all that uncommon. There was Link Wray, best known for "Rumble," which everyone has probably heard, even if they don't know what it is. In the '50s and into the early '60s, Duane Eddy had a number of instrumental hits.

In the '50-'60s local PNW music scene, from which the Ventures came, instrumentals were pretty common. The Wailers started out as an instrumental band, then added some vocals. Actually, I think the Sonics started out doing instrumentals too, though all (or almost all) their records had vocals. Same with Paul Revere and the Raiders. When you're coming more from and R&B background and your goal is to pound out dance music for teenagers in some big and not-that-well-equipped hall, instrumentals are the way to get the job done.

By the mid-60's, surf became the only recognized instrumental genre, so anybody who played instrumentals either stopped doing so, or got called surf; and it got sort of marginalized pretty quickly. I'm not sure why instrumentals went away: probably a combination of music-biz reality (you can sell a face, and a singer is a face), the influence of the Beatles, and the influx of a folky influence (instrumentals are sort of a non-concept in folk music).

Instrumental didn't quite go away, though mostly from the mainstream. You still found instrumental in some AOR stuff, prog rock / fusion etc., and in bands that made (or tried to make) a claim to musical virtuosity. While "Layla" or "Free Bird" have vocals, long sections are instrumentals. Emerson, Lake & Palmer did some rather overblown instrumental numbers. Then you get to '80s hair bands and Yngie Malmsteen and his ilk, where large chunks of a song (or even whole songs) are extended cadenzas.
 
For their time, these guys were great. They set the standard for many others that followed. They produced a number of successful songs and albums and their music still lives on today.

Ed
 
Ed Dixon said:
For their time, these guys were great. They set the standard for many others that followed. They produced a number of successful songs and albums and their music still lives on today.

Ed

When I was a kid, I had over a dozen of their albums. I wore the grooves out on those records. I learned a lot about guitar by playing along with them.

Pioneers or hacks? Both, I'd say; if you're not at least somewhat of a hack you'd better have a good day gig.
 
Dick Dale kicks some mighty surf-guitar ass...And I'm not a surf music fan by any stretch...

Eric
 
stetto said:
Dick Dale kicks some mighty surf-guitar ass...And I'm not a surf music fan by any stretch...

Eric

I thought the thread was about groups, but if we go into individuals then you've got to include the likes of Dick Dale and Duane Eddy.

16p, 18p, 20p. 38w, 48w, 58w. That's the strings he's using now....he's gone to a lighter bottom end, down from 60's.

I just looked his bio and a lot of it is crap and exaggeration but one thing for sure, if any one person invented surf guitar it was him. Also, he really was a surfer. I've got to think of him as the original power guitarist.

Ron Eglit, who was in a band (playing lead and steel) I had back in the '70's played bass with him for over 20 years....guess it was quite a show.....Ron's with the Surfaris now.
 
When I heard the Ventures' music as it was being released, I always considered it to be novelty music and didn't pay that much attention to it.

I like it better now than I did then. I can't say that about much of the music from that era.
 
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