Review: The Ventures - Walk Don't Run (1960)

Tracks: 1) Morgen; 2) Raunchy; 3) Home; 4) My Own True Love (Tara’s Theme); 5) The Switch; 6) Walk, Don’t Run; 7) Night Train; 8) No Trespassing; 9) Caravan; 10) Sleep Walk; 11) The McCoy; 12) Honky Tonk.

REVIEW

In the beginning, way back in 1928, there was New Moon, an operetta by Sigmund Romberg, whose most enduring aria was ‘Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise’, which went on to become a bit of a jazz standard, performed (e.g. by Artie Shaw) or deconstructed (e.g. by Coltrane or Eric Dolphy) in miriads of your well-known jazz ways. Catchy, but corny, in 1954 the composition served as a contrafact inspiration for virtuoso jazz guitarist Johnny Smith, who used the harmonies to write and record ‘Walk, Don’t Run!’, a short and moody instrumental with a memorable melancholic main theme, lovingly caressed on the electric guitar with a bit of a Spanish feel (apparently using what is generally known as the «Andalusian cadence»).

Relatively few people cared about Johnny Smith, though, outside of fellow guitarists — such as Chet Atkins, who fell in love with the tune and made his own acoustic recording for the album Hi-Fi In Focus in 1957. In his arrangement, the tune took on a slightly more folksy flavor, or, perhaps, a slightly more gypsy one? may be faint echoes of Django Reinhardt in there... anyway, the important thing is that many more people at the time probably listened to Chet Atkins than to Johnny Smith, and among those people were a couple of young guitarists from Tacoma, Washington — more precisely, Bob Bogle, who owned the record, and his recent friends Don Wilson and Nokie Edwards, with whom he’d only just formed a band they originally wanted to call The Versatones, but settled on the humbler-sounding Ventures when they learned the former name was already taken by competitors. And this is where our story properly begins.

It is interesting that the general concept of an «instrumental rock band» is one of the few concepts of the pre-Beatles era where the UK may actually hold precedence over the US. By the time The Ventures appeared on the scene, The Shadows had already made a big name for themselves with ‘Apache’ and established an artistic reputation independent of being merely the backing band for Cliff Richard. Meanwhile, over across the Atlantic the concept of «instrumental rock» was rather epitomized by solo artists such as Duane Eddy — or bands that had a mix of vocal and instrumental numbers, such as New Mexico’s The Fireballs (whose ‘Torquay’ is an important, if not particularly impressive, stepping stone in the development of instrumental rock and roll, but who actually had their own lead vocalist as well — singing pleasant, but somewhat lukewarm Buddy Holly-esque ditties like ‘I Don’t Know’).

Everything changed overnight when The Ventures finally managed to get ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ on the air — which took a bit of an effort, since no record label wanted to sign them up at first and so they had to set up their own one (New Horizon). For the record, the band’s first recording on that label was not ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, but rather ‘Cookies & Coke’, a vocal number (ha ha!) co-written by Bogle and Wilson that sounds absolutely primitive, more like a bunch of hillbillies around the campfire than anything even remotely resembling America’s tightest and most professional instrumental rock band — which, at that point, they had absolutely no intention of becoming; but with the unexpected smash success of ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, which eventually made it all the way to #2 on the charts, The Ventures’ fate was decided beyond their will.

As it often happens, it is difficult today to fully realize the impact of ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ because such a great deal of rock and roll recorded after it — not least by The Ventures themselves, but also by miriads of other artists, including about 90% of the entire «surf-rock» movement — would sound so much like it. But was there anything that sounded that much like it before the song was released? Nope, not really. As I relisten to stuff that had already been en vogue, everything from Duane Eddy to The (Fabulous) Wailers and beyond, I fail to find an opening that would be as rhythmic, powerful, and at the same time sonically feather-light as Skip Moore’s cymbal-heavy drum fills and the rhythm-lead duo of Wilson and Bogle, as the latter reprises Chet Atkins’ memorable melancholic lead while the former pins it to a formerly non-present, subtly Latin-flavored rhythm part that we’re all probably sure we heard a million times before but not so sure we heard it on any song earlier than ‘Walk, Don’t Run’...

...anyway, enough with the attempts to write pseudo-objective musicological history: ‘Walk, Don’t Run’, as performed by The Ventures, is simply a great rocking instrumental that takes the faint touch of nostalgic melancholy from Johnny Smith and Chet Atkins and counterbalances it with driving, irresistible rhythmics — this is no longer your suicidal loner sitting and moping on top of some remote hillock, this is your suicidal loner getting on his suicidal bike and propelling his lonely ass along the lonely highway, because there’s nothing like a wild ride that can chase away one’s moodiness... or, at least, properly convert that moodiness to something orgasmic in nature. In all honesty, The Ventures should have retitled their version ‘Run, Don’t Walk’, as there would be no better verbal way to express the difference of their interpretation from the earlier arrangements by Johnny and Chet.

It is useless to argue which of the three versions is the best one — they all serve such different purposes. In comparison to Wilson, Bogle, and Edwards, Smith and Atkins were seasoned guitar pros, and their playing reveals far more depth and technicality; but clearly, only The Ventures here came close to creating an entire new musical genre — and immediately found themselves trapped by its success. Not that ‘Walk Don’t Run’ really became the proverbial stone around their neck; given the guys’ lack of natural talent for either singing or songwriting, they seemed to be fairly happy with becoming rock music’s leading «instrumental band», embarking on a long and adventurous path of covering other people’s material and letting their guitars do all the talking. In the process, however, The Ventures really became «The Shadows» — a band that kept a sharp eye on the trends and fads of contemporary pop music and regularly offered their own instrumental projections of other people’s hits, almost karaoke-style.

In this way, following The Ventures’ impressive LP discography is in itself a fascinating journey — by listening to all of their albums (at least all through the 1960s) in chronological order, it’s as if the entire history of the decade’s rock and pop music is gradually unveiling before your eyes, albeit with a heavy emphasis on the Billboard charts, of course. The bad news is that this quickly turns into a routine process, and, in fact, they would never again get to catch the public eye as efficiently as they did with ‘Walk Don’t Run’ (the closest they came was in 1964, when they once again hit the Top 10 with... the remake of ‘Walk Don’t Run’!). The good news is that there are much worse routine processes that I can think of: while you always knew more or less what to expect from The Ventures, you could also expect it to be consistently fun and tasteful.

Thus, for their first album, quickly recorded at a home studio in Seattle after ‘Walk Don’t Run’ became shooting up the charts, The Ventures (with Howie Johnson replacing Skip Moore on drums) chose to cover such contemporary material as ‘Morgen’, the big recent international hit for the Croatian artist Ivo Robić (the original is a good choice for all the fans of German language delivered in funny Slavic accents, but I’m taking Bob Bogle’s guitar lead over Ivo’s vocal lead any time of the week); and ‘Raunchy’, the famous instrumental hit by Bill Justis that would land a young George Harrison employment with The Quarrymen — The Ventures might here be offering the definitive version of the tune, with perfectly dedicated interplay between all the four members; Nokie Edwards switches to lead guitar for this one, with Bogle laying down the simple, but powerful boogie bass line, yet ultimately, the effect is very cumulative, with each of the four musicians playing an equally important role in getting you up from your seat and down in your imaginary race car on Highway 61.

On the more romantic side of the equation, the band covers ‘Sleep Walk’, the beautiful steel guitar masterpiece that had only recently brought fame to Santo & Johnny; since the Ventures did not have a steel guitar player, a large part of the magic of the original is unfortunately gone — but they compensate for this with much tighter rhythm guitar and an overall smoother, more perfectly flowing twangy lead tone. It’s also a good occasion to compare the style of the Ventures to that of the Shadows, who would also cover the song next year: the Shadows play it a little slower, and Hank Marvin makes an effort to preserve the «otherworldliness» of the original by equipping his guitar with a reverb effect and tuning it to a downright angelic pitch — whereas Bob Bogle puts his faith in the «twanginess», giving the whole thing a much more Hawaiian, surfy angle. Ultimately, the Shadows take you to fairy dreamland, while the Ventures take you to a sunny beach — so much for cultural differences between the US and the UK circa 1960-61.

Mixed in with the recent hits are covers of some classic oldies: Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’ from 1956 was already perceived as one of the first proverbial «instrumental rock» numbers, so it was only natural for the Ventures to add their own twist to this slow shuffle (it’s a bit draggy for my tastes, though), and ‘Caravan’... well, what sort of an instrumental band does not have ‘Caravan’ in their repertoire? (In their defense, I really love those little extra «buzzing bee» runs that Bogle throws in during his second run through the main theme — they’re quite hilarious!). There’s also ‘Night Train’, which everybody was doing at the time — still a long way away from the explosive interpretation of James Brown, but already faster, tighter, and punchier than the old school Jimmy Forrest original from 1952.

The band’s original songwriting is mostly confined to a small group of fast, rocking numbers that are not very inventive (thus, ‘No Trespassing’ is clearly just a riff on Duane Eddy’s ‘Moovin’ ’n’ Groovin’, with a bit of ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ briefly quoted inside for good measure), but serve their limited purpose full well. By the way, I think that ‘The Switch’ might actually refer to the fact that for this recording, too, Bogle and Edwards switch their lead and bass parts, even if drummer Howie Johnson is still the true hero of the song; that fast, precise, and infuriatingly hyper-active style of drumming was actually far less spread with American rock and pop artists around 1960 than we’d commonly like to think — I know Levon Helm was a big adept on his earliest records with Ronnie Hawkins, but overall, drummers tended to exercise a bit more restraint, which puts Howie in a class of his own. (Too bad that class would only last up to 1962, when Howie would be permanently put out of the overdriven drumming business after a serious spinal injury).

On the whole, though, the overall quality of Walk, Don’t Run does not properly manifest itself these days before you place it in the general context of 1960 and realize that nobody for miles and miles around was combining tightness, energy, and fun on the same level with these four rebel-rousers from Tacoma. No, they weren’t about danger, aggression, titillation, or provocativeness — but neither were they about distilling the essence of rock’n’roll to the lowest common denominator. More than anything else, The Ventures were a band, perhaps one of the first true examples of a tightly coordinated rock band where the whole matters more than the individual players and the individual players are 100% bent on polishing their individual strengths to lend them to the collective purpose. In other words, they were doing for rock music more or less the same that James Brown and The Furious Flames were doing for R&B — that is, bringing it out of its «rambunctious teenage phase» to a state of respectable maturity, while at the same time taking care to preserve the inner child. And in some respects at least, that state remains as perfectly enjoyable today as it was more than sixty years ago.

P.S.: The one thing that remains most dated about the album is its oddly mismatched cover — as was common back in the day, Dolton Records occupied most of the sleeve with the alluring figure of a model (Barbara Grimes) so as to make horny teenagers part with their money even quicker than usual, but since the band themselves were on tour at the time, they had to use a bunch of stockroom workers to take their place in the background. And would The Ventures themselves ever stoop to breaking their concentration and falling all over their instruments like dolts at the first sight of a sexy chick in high heels? Nah. At the very least, this is not what the actual music on the album suggests.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Ventures