The Ventures: Stars on Guitars

They asked me what I do.

I said, well, I play the guitar.

They said, well, are you in a group?

Ladies and Gentlemen, here are The Ventures.

I love The Ventures. -I know you do.

This is like one of my favorite groups in history.

Certainly, for us guitarists,

Jeff Beck, myself and Eric,

we've all played Ventures material when we were kids.

The Ventures.

In the sixth grade in grammar school,

every boy in my class

could play Wipeout on his desk.

Wipeout .

Those instrumentals led the way.

They have recorded 3,000 songs.

They have written 1,000 songs.

They took other people's songs

and made them way better.

All we have to do is hum Hawaii Five-O ,

or Walk Don't Run ,

and the person's instantly like, oh yeah, I know that.

Of course, I know that.

They're the number one song instrumental group in the history of the music.

There was no language barrier.

It was just movement.

The guitar has arrived,

and The Ventures are the messengers.

None of the rest of us would be here

without The Ventures.

I think like every band in the world

had Walk Don't Run in their set.

Everyone wants to get that sound.

It just speaks to you directly to the soul.

It just as magic to me.

This is surf music,

and The Ventures were a really important part of it.

This was like everything I was aspiring to.

The Ventures always made me feel like I wanted to dance,

pick up a guitar and just look really cool.

When I was younger

I wanted to learn how to play the trombone.

I thought the trombone had such a mellow sound, you know.

It was Tommy Dorsey that I really liked.

I started playing it in junior high school.

Then when I went into the army, I went to Germany.

They said, I see you play the trombone.

Would you like to go into the band?

No, I don't think so.

Biggest mistake I ever made in my life.

Use to wake you up at 03:00 or 4:00 in the morning,

for a 20-mile hike.

Then we'd go out on what they call biv-wack.

You would march and you'd stay out for about a week.

And I'm talking winter time.

After about three months

I'm thinking I'm going to try to get in the band.

I'll be darned if I didn't have my orders cut

to go to the band.

They called me out and said,

I guess you're going to the band.

We got the orders that your request came through.

So, then I was in the band.

And it was really good.

I really enjoyed that.

And I did meet a guy that was in the band.

He played the glockenspiel, which is bells.

And he played a guitar and he was kind of jazzy,

and I played a few chords on a guitar that I learned from my mom,

believe it or not.

He was with some trio that you might know,

the Page Cavenaugh Trio.

So, he taught me some kind of jazzy chords,

and stuff like that.

I never did pick up a guitar,

for a while until I met Bob Bogle.

I was working in my dad's car lot,

and I was considered to be the lot boy.

Bob Bogle came in one time.

I didn't know him at all.

And he wanted to buy a car.

He said, how about that car over there, he'd point to.

And I said, nah, you don't want that car.

You know, I was a terrible salesman.

A good salesman would say

yeah, that's the car for you.

He and I got to talking,

and we got along real good.

And so, I asked him.

I said, what do you do.

He said, well, I'm in the bricklayer trade.

He got me a job.

The first thing I did was I was a hod carrier.

As a lot of people know, it rains a lot in Tacoma and Seattle,

so a lot of times, if you're working outside

replacing the mortar between bricks,

a lot of times you can't work.

Bob and I, we thought what are we going to do.

You told me you play a little bit of guitar

and so do I.

Why don't we buy a couple of guitars,

and when we're not working out of town

we have nothing to do anyway.

Might as well try to learn how to play the guitar.

In 1959,

we bought two guitars in a pawn shop

in Tacoma, Washington,

and we probably paid $10 or $15

a piece for them.

And the strings were, I don't know, half and inch from the neck.

Those guitars were so hard to play,

but we bought chord books and things, and learned everything we could,

and then we thought we'd step out,

and pay a down payment on some Fender guitars,

which we did.

I think something that really

set The Ventures sound apart from other groups

is how they utilized two guitars

to really fill out their sound.

Normally, you think of there's the lead guitar,

and the rhythm guitar.

And the lead is always in the front,

and the rhythm's in the background, and thought of as not as important,

but in The Ventures both guitars were always just as important.

There was only two of us to begin with, two guitars.

I tried to make up for not having a drum,

and he tried to make up for not having a keyboard.

You know, by using the whammy bar.

Make it wavy.

The guy playing the lead,

which I believe was Bob Bogle,

but I didn't know that then,

but the guitar was really twanging.

It was going （imitates twanging）.

The lead was great,

but the rhythm parts were always just as interesting.

Don Wilson

is a really interesting rhythm player.

I looked at his amp settings.

He's got the high end cranked all the way,

and he's got the low end cranked all the way off,

and he's playing it,

and it's a percussive sound.

Just the rhythm man.

It was just straight ahead.

Mostly downstrokes.

Not （imitates mellow guitar playing）

I never did that.

That kind of rhythm was unheard of.

And when I was a kid, nobody played like that.

I mean, I just really beat hard.

He didn't just strum a chord.

He didn't just play Arpeggios.

He always made it interesting

by muting, adding reverb

and making it a little more percussive.

Me playing real hard rhythm,

and him playing that kind of style,

when we got a bass and drummer,

it just stuck.

We thought we were hey, versatile,

so we called ourselves The Versatones.

And we went to register the name, and by god, it was already taken,

otherwise we'd be The Versatones.

For about two weeks,

we called ourselves The Impacts.

I remember that.

And then my mom said, you know,

you guys are venturing into something new.

Why don't you call yourselves The Ventures?

I said, well, that's pretty corny, you know.

But anyway that kind of stuck,

and we said, well, okay.

We'll call ourselves The Ventures.

We'd play for anybody that wanted to hear it.

If somebody's having a party, can we come and play?

We weren't quite good enough to play for clubs,

and there was only the two of us.

So, we entered a lot of talent contests,

which are really a popularity contest.

In those days

you had to do something more than just play music.

I mean, a lot of times a drummer would put on some gorilla mask

or something, and act like a fool, you know

which that just wasn't our way.

We played some pretty rough places.

We worked at a place called the Blue Moon.

We worked there probably for a month,

and then we worked at the Java Jive for,

I don't know how long,

maybe a month, month and a half something like that.

At night I'd be at the Britannia every Saturday.

The Britannia, boy that was a rough place.

That was where they had a lot of soldiers from Fort Lewis,

and Canadian soldiers that were training at Fort Lewis.

There must have been five fights a night,

beer bottles flying.

They had actually a police car out in front.

When a fight broke out,

they would go and get these people, put them in the car.