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.
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.