Review: The Ventures - The Ventures (1961)
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.
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.
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).
Only Solitaire reviews: The Ventures