Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
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Album:The Best Of The Ventures
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To this day I still love surf guitar. I recently picked up "The Best of the Ventures" and although it's a short collection (15 tracks), it's a decent round-up of some of their better songs and covers. Notably, their cover of "Wipeout!" is on the CD, along with perennial favorites like "Hawaii 5-O," "Walk Don't Run" and "Pipeline."The amazing thing about the Ventures is that they were an instrumental band. There were few rock bands that would have even tried making a living doing only instrumentals. My guess is that none of them were great singers so they just stuck with what they were good at. Consequently, I've never heard a Ventures song that I didn't like - they all have something I find likable. The collection "Walk Don't Run - the Best of the Ventures" is a much larger collection, but includes some lesser tracks that, frankly, most people don't care about. For the average listener who is interested in surf guitar, this collection is just right.
Comments (2)
In the era when the Ventures were most popular, entirely or mostly instrumental artists/bands were not uncommon (i recall Dick Dale and Duane Eddy as instrumentalists - can't recall any vocal recordings under either of their names); as much a carry-over from the pre-rock popular music of the swing and Big Band era, where a band would have a featured vocalist, but most of its repertoire would be instrumentals. Generally the people best known in that era were band leaders - Benny Goodman, the Dorseys, Les Brown, Red Nichols - and even popular singers like Sinatra were often known more for what band they sang with than as artists in their own right.
It was the coming of singer/songwriter-oriented bands like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Kinks to name just three) that swung the pendulum so far the other way.