Review: The Ventures - Another Smash!!! (1961)
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.
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?
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...
Only Solitaire reviews: The Ventures