I picked up a couple of CDs the other day. In the mood for some nostalgia, I became the proud owner of a copy of The Ventures — Live in Japan 1965. I remember when the Ventures were hot stuff back in the early 60s. Even though the British invasion had just started (Beatles, Stones, Dave Clark Five, etc.), and even though the Ventures were strictly instrumental, you had to like them. There were four of them, just like the Beatles. And the songs were entertaining, with plenty of guitar twang and fast drumming. And you saw them on TV. I didn’t know anyone who made the Ventures their favorite group. But I didn’t know anyone who didn’t think they were cool, either.

Well, as to the Japan CD… quite interesting. Give the Ventures credit for playing to a place like Japan way back then. Japan was still very second rate at that point. Only twenty years before that concert they were a wayward enemy empire that the US Army and Navy were trying to defeat. Here were the Ventures playing tributes to California surfing and to space shots from Florida in a country that was still recovering from our nukes. If it were record sales that the group was after, you’d think that France or Italy or Australia would have been a better place to play, at the time anyway. (If the Ventures were still in their prime, I wonder if they’d do a night or two in Baghdad?)

The sounds on the album are … well, a bit thin by modern standards. There are three guitars and a drummer and that’s it. No synthesizer or mellotron or anything else to fatten-up the music, as we expect today. But put the volume up loud enough and this album starts to make sense. The songs do sound alike after a while (29 cuts on this album), but if you can get into it, that’s not a bad thing. There may still be guitar instrumentalists out there who put out good sounds, e.g. Joe Satriani and G3, but the Ventures were probably the last big act that could get away without saying anything.

PS, I checked out some Ventures web sites, and learned that drummer Mel Taylor died back in August of 1996. Mel looks pretty beat in the picture on the live album — he appears to have a black eye as if somebody popped him! But he did get around — before going with the Ventures, Taylor was the drummer on the early 60s hit song “Monster Mash” by Bobby Boris Pickett (you still hear it around Halloween), and during a hiatus from the group, Taylor formed his own band and went back to Japan for a tour. There was a big tribute concert in Japan after his death. But my own tribute was paid to Taylor years ago, along with millions of other 11-year olds riding school busses and banging their forefingers on their textbooks according to Taylor’s accented drum roll on Wipe Out. OK, I know that the Surfaris did it first, but I liked the Ventures version better.

(Interestingly enough, the Ventures still make appearances with Taylor’s son Leon on the drums … wonder how he sounds doing Wipe Out?)