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On a construction site in Seattle, Washington, in 1959, two guitarists, Don Wilson and Bob Bogle, decided to perform together at local sock hops, initially as the Versatones. They later added a rhythm section and then became the Impacts for a very short period. Finally settling on the name The Ventures, they recorded two songs that Don’s mother Josie released on her Blue Horizon Records label. The Ventures self-pressed a second single, a cover of Johnny Smith’s “Walk, Don’t Run,” which Don and Bob had discovered on a Chet Atkins album.
“Walk, Don’t Run” was a massive hit single in 1960, reaching Number 2, just behind Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never,” and over the last forty-six years, Wilson and his partner Bogle have subsequently recorded 250 albums and sold 90 million records, 50 million of them just in Japan.
The current Ventures studio and concert lineup includes Wilson, Bogle, drummer Leon Taylor, and rotating lead guitarists Nokie Edwards and Gerry McGee, along with long-time pal, musical associate and now band-mate guitarist Bob Spalding. The late, legendary drummer Mel Taylor (Leon’s father), who started out playing and recording with Buck Owens and also anchored the rhythm section on the seminal hits “Monster Mash” (Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers) and “The Lonely Bull” (Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass) drove the Ventures beat from 1962 until his untimely passing in 1996.
The Kings of Instrumental Rock, influencing scores of musicians around the world to pick up electric guitars -- they endorsed the Mosrite -- and strum along to the nearest TV theme or dance craze, including many kids who bought one of their influential instructional LPs called Play Guitar with the Ventures. The group recorded five of those, which became the only instructional albums ever to appear on the U.S. national Billboard charts. Loads of musicians credit the Ventures with helping them learn their instrument, including Anthrax, the B-52s, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Dire Straits, Dave Edmunds, Marco Paroni (Adam Ant), the Pretenders, Mick Fleetwood, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Johnny Ramone, Jello Biafra, Keith Moon, Gene Simmons, Jimmy Page, Jim Diamond, Chris Spedding, Toulouse Engelhardt, Insect Surfers, Black Train, Gary Pig Gold, Al Di Meola, Max Weinberg and the Malibooz’s John Zambetti.
In January 2006 the Grammy Hall of Fame added The Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run” to their list of the most influential songs in the history of music.
British keyboardist and arranger David Carr, a graduate of the Royal College of Music, and with the Ventures in the studio since 1971, is a former original member of the Fortunes, who charted just behind the Beatles’ “Help” in 1965 with their “You’ve Got Your Troubles.” “I’ve seen Eddie Cochran and the Shadows in England, opened for the Beatles twice, played a Royal Command show at the London Palladium and performed in Japan, Mexico and the U.S. with the Ventures,” offers Carr, who arranged this interview with the Ventures’ Don Wilson in a Glendale, Calif. recording studio. “Funny thing is, when I first started out playing piano in London pubs and seaside holiday camps, two of the songs in my repertoire were ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ and ‘Perfidia’ by the Ventures. Little did I know that a decade or so later, I’d be playing the same songs on stage in Japan with the band I’d learned them from!”
Q: Who was your first guitar hero?
Don Wilson: Les Paul. I thought he was amazing. We didn’t know he sped up the things. As a matter of fact, our lead guitarist, Nokie Edwards, he learned to play on a lot of those things not knowing they were sped up and he was playing real fast. And Paul’s things with Mary Ford were excellent. Then, Duane Eddy. Big impact for me. For one thing, I had just learned how to play. I learned to play a stringed instrument from my mom when I was twelve years old, called the tiple. Made by Martin, tuned like a ukulele, and it had twelve strings arranged in four sets of three. Each set of three strings had a center string that was tuned an octave lower than the two outer strings, giving it a unique sound. Duane Eddy. The whole big sound. His stuff was very easy as far as lead guitar, because the melodies were simple, yet effective, so he was one of my very first teachers.
Q: And you had a balance of all the instruments on that first record, it seems the lead guitar since has always been out front in the mix, or featured a little more loudly sonically, not even counting the lead guitarist in concert situations.
DW: That’s very true. Our recording of “Walk, Don’t Run” was different. We had four pieces. And I told them, “I want to hear every one of them.” And the way it worked out is that you do hear every instrument. You hear the bass, you hear the rhythm, you hear the lead and you hear the drums.
A local L.A. DJ, Earl McDaniel, involved in management, he sent us out on the road, and boy were we green. I mean, we were taking checks and waiting until we got back to L.A. to try and cash them. (laughs). I’ll tell you how they used and abused us. We’re an instrumental group and they (promoters) are trying to save money and we’re naïve. We go out with Dion, without the Belmonts, he was very good on stage, and Bobby Vee, and all kinds of different artists and we backed every one of them. We had to learn their songs and played four hours a night. Backing them and then playing our own set. We were happy to be on stage…
Q: But your concepts and philosophy regarding the use of vibrato and the tremolo bar also distinguished you from everyone.
DW: Yes. Well, you know, there’s a very simple story to that. When Bob and I started, there were not really four-piece bands. You either had a saxophone or a piano. You need a piano or a saxophone. We didn’t know a drummer or a saxophone player. So, he and I when we started learning, I played very percussive rhythm, and he played with a vibrato, and coming to certain notes with a chord to make the sound even more full. So the two of us together tried to make up for drum, piano or whatever else. And the whole thing was, when we did get a drummer and a bass player that stuck with us, that was our style and the way we played. A lot of people come up and say “How do you get that sound?” Well, it’s not a matter of getting it. That’s what we do.
We used to rehearse for hours in the old days, putting things together. Arrangements for instrumentals are ultra important. You’ve got your sound and the arrangement. And that’s all you have. You don’t have that third dimension of a voice or vocal. I’ve read where somebody says, “the Ventures’ guitars sound like words.”
Q: I have this theory about the magic you and Bob have. Look, you met him when you were selling cars, and he then got you a better-paying hourly job to join him as a construction worker. You guys were always foundation-oriented. The rock solid foundation has always been there as well as precision and accuracy.
DW: Wow. That’s very true. The care and the precision. Never heard that observation… We shunned gimmicks and we were never in competition. We didn’t use foot pedals or the wah-wah pedal. Maybe a couple of times we did but then regretted it. Even on the amps you would have reverb and chorus and I never used it. I played lead and Bob played rhythm, and we’d switch off. And about half of the songs I played lead and half of the songs he played lead, and I played rhythm, and in the middle of a song sometimes we’d switch.
Q: Guitarist and former Takoma Records recording artist Toulouse Engelhardt, who has played Mosrite for 35 years, told me recently that the Mosrite guitars have a tendency to distort on stage at high volume.
DW: True. They did. And the simple reason for that was that Semie Moseley was so proud that he wound his pickups 5,000 more times than anyone else. And you could not get a real clean sound out of it. We tried to get used to it, the distortion at that time, because distortion was coming in, but after a while, we started thinking, “we kind of lost our clean sound, but maybe it’s better.” But I never heard anyone ever complain about the sound of the Mosrite. In fact they liked it. The guitar seemed to stay in tune just fine. I used it a lot. And, after us, members of the B-52’s and the Ramones played Mosrite.
Q: Where did the concept come from where you and the group started recording and covering television and movie songs, always included in albums? “Batman,” “James Bond.”
DW: If you play “Walk, Don’t Run” all the time, it’s just not gonna happen. We were looking for anything we could do, and those TV themes were mostly instrumental songs. Nine out of 10. That was a natural for us to go on instrumentally. And the songs could work without the visual. They were cinematic in nature, and minor keys we love. And that’s one of the reasons we got so popular in Japan. Minor keys are very prominent in Japanese music.
Q: Instrumental music in general. There’s always a place for it on the radio dial and in the record bins. You have always filled a welcome void, too. Why does the album Ventures in Space have such lasting power? It was one of Who drummer Keith Moon’s all-time favorite discs, and he told me his first group was the Beachcombers and that he learned to play along with the spooky, out-of-this-world pedal steel playing on that LP. No gimmicks, and an organic approach on tape.
DW: That’s true. I’m surprised, but for many followers of the Ventures, it is their favorite album. I don’t know if it has anything to do with not using anything electronic. We had a steel guitar player, Red Rhodes, he was absolutely great, and he put the first fuzz tone together. He owned a couple of equipment patents and he could play anything. But, using his steel guitar, and all the things he could come up with sounds, and all the sounds that we could come up with, and we tried, we accomplished, using no electronics at all. I think that impressed a lot of players.
Q: You also recorded a Ventures psychedelic album before the term was generally in use.
DW: That’s true. But a local L.A. DJ, The Real Don Steele on KHJ radio came to us and said, “There’s something coming up called psychedelic and you guys should get on that right away because it’s really gonna be something.” “OK.” So we did an album of it. We stretched out on that album and I really like that CD. Some good songs on it. A lot we had written and what we thought could be considered as psychedelic.
We were older than the other psychedelic bands and we wore velour and our hair was shorter. Man, red blazers and black ties. (laughs). And white bucks. How things have changed. In the Sixties you wore a coat on stage. You wouldn’t dare get up with just a shirt on. They would not let you on TV without a coat and tie. That was it. Bobby Darin went on a TV show in denim top and denim bottom, a railroad suit. I think he started the whole trend of whatever you wear is OK.
I think that our early learning and our musical appreciation, even before we picked up guitars, was quite different from somebody who picks up a guitar and has only heard and only appreciates rock ‘n’ roll. We go back to Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Jerry Vale. So many of these people that we really respected. And we learned those kinds of songs. We learned tunes like “Stardust” after we really started playing, and probably playing not the most perfect chords but good enough. But we were very conscious of playing something that sounded not right. There could have been better chords, no doubt about it, but they weren’t bad chords. I’ve heard a lot of that. And we’d modulate -- change keys -- in our records. Modulating. We’ve done that a lot of times. You don’t want the damn thing to get boring.
We had always felt we were a good combination of ears. What I hear, Bob doesn’t hear. And what Bob might hear, I don’t hear. We were basically producing our own things. Most of our producers let us have our head. Neither Nokie nor Gerry McGee play heavy. They play very light, using their fingers and thumb picks. Bob Bogle, who is really the Ventures’ sound of “Walk, Don’t Run,” “Perfidia,” “Blue Moon,” the very first things, plays with a heavy pick. But a great feel. But I still play the same as I would play anyway. I do what I want and I have a good feel for it. If I’m playing an acoustic guitar behind Gerry, I try and be as pretty as I can be. The reason we get along so well is because we don’t step on each other’s toes.
Check out www.theventures.com and www.venturesresurgence.co.uk
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