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- 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 three or four o'clock 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 awhile 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 .
- 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
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 Apreggios.
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.
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,
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 get these people, put them in the car.
They'd just wait until they got about five of them
and then they'd take them all to jail.
When we played there,
we played from noon until midnight.
It did us a lot of good though,
because we had to have quite a repertoire
and not keep playing the same things over and over again.
We saved enough to go into the studio
and we were $25 short.
I asked,
I went to my dad.
I said, can I borrow $25.
I can't remember the exact phrase he said
but he said, not only am I not going to give you money,
I don't want you wasting your time
trying to play that guitar.
But my mom was a big, big supporter.
- Josie had been a singer earlier in her life
and appreciated music,
saw a talent.
- I thought well, I think they probably deserve a chance
to see maybe if they can make a record.
- And she was a pioneer in the music business.
She produced and promoted The Ventures
with the original Blue Horizon label.
- She said, you know, if no body wants you guys,
why don't we start our own record company?
So we did, Blue Horizon.
My mom wrote "Cookies and Coke".
That was our first record.
- There was a woman involved in the beginning of their band
and she worked really hard for them
and she was really smart
and she made decisions and pursued the radio station.
She really pursued things for them
and I think that that's really special for us as women too.
- Yeah.
- There was no women in the business at that time,
especially producing.
I'm sure she was unique and maybe the first one.
- She paved the way for other bands to do it on their own.
- She started the fan club and she worked it
while she was doing production and everything else.
- As a little kid I would write to Josie
and ask her questions about
when's the next record coming out
and all this stuff.
And she would write me back.
She would send me a personal letter.
- Josie was influential,
stood behind The Ventures,
gave them every opportunity.
She was the biggest fan.
- To measure what she contributed
is immeasurable, really.
- Don's mom was awesome.
- So, then we found a song
that was on a vinyl record of Chet Atkins
called "Walk Don't Run".
And he played it in a jazzy finger-style.
We'd only been playing for six months.
We couldn't do that.
- We weren't professional enough
to play the song the way it was written.
It was too complicated for us.
- So, we Venturized it.
- Written in 1954 by Johnny Smith,
recorded in 1957 by Chet Atkins
and regarded by Rolling Stone magazine
as one of the hundred greatest guitar songs of all time.
I give you "Walk Don't Run".
- We'd have to always do that song
three or four, five times a night
because people just loved hearing it.
So, we decided to record that.
- I did take them to a studio in Seattle.
Joe Boles Custom Recorders.
- It was a two track.
The bass and the drum on one track
and you did the rhythm and the lead on the other.
I remember his echo chamber
was a microphone hanging on the shower in his shower room.
He said, I'm going to try something with you guys.
I'm going to put a microphone right there
where you're picking
and I want to see if I can't get the pick sound,
you know picking the strings.
Anyway, he got a great sound out of us.
- Bob Bogle played lead.
Don Wilson played rhythm.
And Nokie Edwards played bass.
- I was working with a country artist, Buck Owens.
Don and Bob came in the club where I was working
and saw me play
and liked the way I played.
And asked me if I wanted to join up with them.
- He was just outstanding as a guitar player.
We asked him if he'd play the bass
and he said that he would and he did.
- If you're a real geek
then you know that there's two distinct versions
of The Ventures in the 1960s.
There was the early period
where Bob Bogle played lead guitar
and that was definitely more rooted
in sort of a '50s rock and roll feel
but then at some point, Nokie Edwards who was playing bass,
switched over to lead guitar.
And Bob went over to play bass.
And then it became a completely different band.
- Don was a great rhythm guitar player.
Has his own sound, his own style, his own touch.
Bob had his own style too as well.
Very much like a guitar player on bass.
Nokie was a brilliant lead guitar player.
- Nokie had been playing the guitar
since he was five years old.
He was a king around Seattle, Tacoma area.
- Nokie had his roots in country.
There was no question about it
but he evolved into more of a finger-style picker
after he came in with The Ventures.
- Now, he was a country player
but he was obviously listening
to a lot of current music at the time
and so he was bending a lot of notes.
- I asked him one time why he played this way
and he said he just wanted to play more notes.
Not to overplay,
just to make his arrangement a little bit fuller.
- Chet Atkins and Les Paul were Nokie and Bob Bogle's idols,
especially Nokie.
- He really likes mellow music.
When he sits at home he just sits
and plays mellow finger picking music
but everything kind of came together
at that point in the mid '60s
where he sort of became this snarling, punk rock,
crazy, violent sounding lead guitar
and it sort of worked with everything
that was going on at that time in the music scene.
- You know a funny thing with Nokie too,
Les Paul sped up his playing
and Nokie says he never knew that.
So, he would try to play that as fast as it was sped up
and I got to tell you,
sometimes he did a pretty good job.
- Bob Bogle loved the lead guitar
but he knew that Nokie was the better player.
And Nokie was on bass right from the beginning,
so Bob decided to switch with Nokie
and said, you know, we need to feature you more.
Bob mentioned though that he didn't know how to play bass
and Nokie said,
well, it's just the four strings of the guitar.
Nokie was not pretentious
but he always helped his fellow players play
and that's what made The Ventures great.
They supported each other.
- Anytime I saw The Ventures live,
my favorite part of the show
was when Bob would switch to guitar for a couple of songs.
But then, at the same time,
Bob was also a wild man on the bass,
which was kind of strange
because he didn't have a wild man personality
but man, on the bass he was amazing.
- The drummer that played "Walk Don't Run"
was somebody that we had done these talent shows with
and he was a different type of a drummer.
He would make some drum rolls
that were quite different from anybody else.
He would belt on it.
There were rim shots in between the different things.
He happened to be absolutely perfect for "Walk Don't Run".
I said, we'll either give you a percentage
of what it makes or $25.
He said, I'll take the 25.
That's the last we heard of him.
And you know, he never cashed that check.
Then we got Howie Johnson.
He was with us for,
I guess maybe a year and a half, two years.
And he got in a terrible car accident,
so he couldn't really travel much.
And so, we needed a drummer.
So, we happened to be at the Palomino club
in North Hollywood.
They said, why don't you get up and play?
And I said, well, I don't know
they maybe not know "Walk Don't Run".
Mel, he said, I know your song very well, yeah.
Sure come on, get up here.
So, we did and he did it well,
so we hired him.
- Mel Taylor was a slamming drummer.
- The bar is set very high by Mel
because "Wipeout" is no easy task.
- To hear that kind of music
with a drummer who hit the drums that hard,
that excited us, you know.
- When I saw them live,
the dynamics of Mel Taylor,
the drive that he put behind those guys in front
that just took it to another level.
- It's definitely sort of like the epitome of surf drumming.
- The Ventures came
and they played their first record for me
and I said, you know, I think you're very good.
But this is not,
this isn't it.
- Everything was no.
It was not a hit.
A guy named Pat O'Day, who was the,
became one of the,
probably most famous disc jockey in Seattle.
We got to be friends.
And I said, do you think you could play "Walk Don't Run"?
And he said, well, you know,
I'd have to ask the program director.
- If Pat played your record,
all the other stations did too.
It's like he made us into these little mini superstars
in Seattle and Tacoma.
- So, he said, well, the only thing I can do is to play it
as what they call a news kicker.
- Every hour they had news
and before they put on the news program,
they played what they called a news kicker.
Pretty soon they announced over the air,
please don't call.
Please don't call anymore.
Our phone lines are jammed.
We will play this record in its entirety.
- Well, we were working.
There was another guy there
and we had a little portable radio.
And we started listening to it.
I said, that's our song right there playing on the radio.
Sure it is.
- I heard on KJR radio in Seattle
this remarkable instrumental.
And I said, well, they're bending notes in there
and they're flat, their sharp deliberately.
- We had been to Bob with the tape before
and he turned us down.
Well, then bob contacted me again.
- And I said, this is going to be a big hit.
Do you know that?
She said, really?
And I said, this is going to be possibly number one.
- I think the smartest thing I'd ever done
was to take him on as a partner
because he had the contacts.
He had had a number one recording the The Fleetwoods
called "Come Softly To Me".
I knew that he would have the knowledge of what to do
and he already had a contract with Liberty Records.
- So, he sent it down to Liberty Records
and the president of Liberty Records says,
no, i don't think it's a hit.
Although it was climbing the charts in Seattle
but only Seattle.
Mr. Reisdorff said, well, I'll guarantee it.
If it doesn't make it, I'll pay the cost of the promotion
and pressing and whatever else was involved.
And it wound up going to number two in the nation.
- As soon as I heard "Walk Don't Run" I bought a copy of it.
- I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
The drums were great
but the sound of the guitars, the melody,
everything about it.
- I was hearing a song
that was being played,
being sung on the guitar.
- It sounded innovative.
It sounded modern.
It sounded explorative.
We had never heard anything like that before.
- It has a feeling of adventure
and you want to go on this trip with them.
- I can't imagine what it would have been like
to have heard that music for the first time.
- At that point in time, we were going,
how are they doing that?
- I mean, there was so much going on on that record
that I didn't understand.
Had this incredible, now I know it's called reverb,
but I didn't know what it was then.
It was just guitar music.
- Who found "Walk Don't Run" for them?
How'd they find that tune?
I was growing up playing jazz.
I had a million Johnny Smith records.
I even had that song on one.
- I never got a chance to ask Don and Bob,
how in the heck did you pick a bebop song like that
and turn it into what you made into a classic rock tune?
- Every band in the world had "Walk Don't Run" in their set.
Not the Johnny Smith or the Chet Atkins version.
It was The Ventures version.
- I think The Ventures made music that was,
maybe wasn't accessible to the average person.
They took like a jazz,
a complicated jazz tune like "Walk Don't Run"
and made it into a simpler arrangement for rock,
like a rock and roll arrangement,
which made a lot of kids go, I want to learn that.
- The chord progression to the rhythm guitar part
on "Walk Don't Run"
was the very first thing I ever learned on guitar.
- When we would listen
and we were trying to play note for note.
We'd try to pick it out.
Wait.
Do that again.
And they'd lift up the needle and go .
And you'd do it again.
Lift up that needle one more time.
I think I might have it this time.
Nope, that's not it.
Until you got the little parts.
- I would write all of the chords down
and I would make the sheet music
and I would sell it to the local bands.
- They were probably the first guitar teachers
most of us ever had.
- The great thing about it was everything was hearable
because there were only four people
and there wasn't singing
and a bunch of other stuff in the way.
You could hear everything.
- People were saying, you're going to go in
and record it without a piano or a saxophone?
- A lot of people said it's too empty.
You know, you need an orchestra.
- We didn't know any piano players or saxophone players.
And probably was fortunate that we didn't
because you know, it was just four pieces.
Two guitars a bass and a drum.
- The Pacific northwest, the Seattle, Tacoma area,
in the late '50s,
it was just the beginnings of rock and roll.
- We were at the crossroads from an old era.
The big band era moving into the new era of music.
- This was new, modern, exciting electric guitar rock.
- It's called electricity.
And when you're messing with electricity
weird things happens sometimes.
And if you can catch it, you go, hey, that's cool.
- The Ventures were a rock and roll band
and they had a lot more roll than they had rock.
I mean, The Ventures swing.
They really swing.
- But if you go back and listen that initial album,
it's stands up against anything today.
It's tight.
It's musically correct.
And it's infectious.
- The early days were, to say the least,
tough.
Any rock and roller will tell you the same story,
that their family suffered because of their work.
I was on the road sometimes for six months at a time.
You know, that was just,
took over everything.
You know, trying to make a living,
which I thought, you know, well, I'll support them
and I'll send them money and all that
but it's not enough.
Your presence is worth more than that.
You're dad.
- I remember playing with Little Bill and the Blue Notes,
The Whalers.
All these guys were like 17 and 18 years old.
We were 25.
Our dressing room was right through the dance floor
and I remember when I walked by
some guy said to his girlfriend,
he said, boy, these guys are old.
We were playing not big halls like Elvis
or somebody of his stature would play.
We saw a place with chicken wire on the windows
and I said, wouldn't it be funny if we were playing there?
And it turned out that we were.
If we made $300 or 400,
we each got 100 bucks.
Then we had to pay our own expenses besides that.
When people see you,
they see you get up on stage and play,
oh yeah, boy, they've got it made.
That's an easy thing.
They don't know about getting to and from.
We carried our own amplifiers and guitars
and stuff and drums
and we had to set them up ourselves.
We had this station wagon
and we pulled a Uhaul trailer
with all of our equipment in.
And we had an old friend of mine
that wanted to be the road manager.
And we did have a saxophone player for a while,
on the road.
And so, there's six of us.
Three in front and three in the back.
And you know, you're like this
everytime I hit a little thing.
Because we really couldn't afford it
and we wanted to go home with some money,
we had a motel room.
All five of us stayed in one room.
- They had agents booking them across the country.
And they get there and their next gig would be in Texas.
They're in Chicago.
They have to call ahead to get some money
to pay for the gas to go to do the job.
- Promoters had a system.
If they had,
you were out, let's say for ten shows,
and one was canceled,
they wouldn't call you.
They knew it.
But they wouldn't call you until the day before
that cancellation.
They'd call the day before and say,
tomorrow night has been canceled.
So, you've got 500 miles to drive.
And then we were naive at the time
and we'd take a check and we'd bring it back
and you know, take it to the bank.
They say, well, that's no good.
We learned after awhile that you better get cash
or nothing.
Surf music got very popular.
Of course, with "Wipeout" and "Pipeline"
it was really getting a foothold.
So, we thought "Walk Don't Run" in a surfing style
would be maybe something.
And it was still that wonderful melody of "Walk Don't Run".
To our surprise, it made the top ten.
I was watching Casey Kasem on TV
in the top 40 countdown, you know.
He said, who was the very first artist recording
that had this same song with two different arrangements,
both hit the top ten?
And I'm sitting there saying, I don't know.
I wonder who it was.
And he came back and said, it was The Ventures
with "Walk Don't Run" and "Walk Don't Run '64".
- The Ventures are musicians and scientists
of what it is surf music
before surf music was even predicted.
- We have been labeled as a surf group
but that term wasn't coined yet, you know surf music.
- People that define a genre,
very rarely consider themselves of that genre.
I'm sure Elvis didn't think he was a rock-a-billy singer
or rock and roll singer.
I'm sure he thought he was just like Frank Sinatra.
- Probably the reason that they got
thrown into that surf hopper
is because they played Fender guitars
through Fender reverb units,
through Fender amplifiers,
had a very clean sound.
- This was all new technology in those days.
A Fender Stratocaster was a new thing.
A Jazzmaster Fender basses we exciting times
and they incorporated these sounds
in the records that they made
and they were unique.
- The Ventures, I've heard, love Fender.
And Fender is that mass produced guitar
that everyone uses
and they're great work horses.
But the mystique lies in the Mosrite guitars,
which they had their names on.
And I think a lot of people think,
everything was done with Mosrite guitars.
- Nokie introduced The Ventures to the Mosrite guitar
because he was friends with Gene Moles and Semie Moseley.
- Semie Moseley approached us
and said, I'll make a Ventures model guitar
and we'll pay you a royalty.
We picked up the Mosrite
and played it for about three years, I guess.
- I always wanted a Mosrite
because The Ventures played them, you know.
- Well, it was that unusual guitar.
It was like a Stratocaster upside-down.
- Mosrite guitars are unique
because they're very frail.
They have a very slim neck.
- If you're trying to play blues
or rock and get sustained notes,
you're trying to push a note up and hold it,
on the Mosrite it would hit the next string
and it would cancel each other,
it'll craple out your sustain.
Eh-uh.
And it would suddenly stop
because you're hitting the next string.
- And they have something called a zero fret.
And in fact there's a zero fret guitar behind me here.
Not a Mosrite
but the advantage of a zero fret,
it's usually the trademark of a very cheap guitar
but it's a trick you can use
to get the stings lying flat against the fingerboard,
which means they're easy to play.
And if they're easy to play,
it's easy to play fast and clean.
- Wilson Brothers Guitar Company was set up by Tim Wilson,
Don Wilson's son, to honor his dad.
- They're one of the first bands, if not the first band,
to have their own signature guitar line.
And of course, they started with Mosrite.
When that ended in the '70s
they went with Aria in Japan.
They had some Fender guitars.
And now they have the Wilson Brothers.
And all those guitars,
what's really the most important thing
is that they were accessible to the average fan.
They weren't super pricey.
The average fan was able to buy one
and feel like there were part of The Ventures.
- When you hear the word Ventures,
you hear the word guitar.
And if you say guitar,
you say The Ventures.
- It's like the backbone of guitar music, you know.
- And even if they weren't the first guys
who played electric guitar,
they're the ones that we associate it with.
- There weren't a lot of people playing guitar.
I mean, now a days, there's millions of guitar outs
and millions of people that play guitar.
When I was young,
if you just owned a guitar, that was a big deal.
- The guitar can be played in any style
and it's portable.
- When troubadours who were going with portable instruments,
ancestors of the guitar,
mankind started to be able to play anywhere.
Walk or take a horse or a car,
go anywhere and play.
It's true.
I cannot do that with a piano.
- Beethoven described it as a mini orchestra.
It's one of the few polyphonic instruments
that you can play.
It's relatively easy to learn.
Three chords and you can do a lot of your favorite songs.
- Or you can take it to the Andres Segovia style
and become a concert artist.
- I think it's always been a rebel instrument
because,
just because of the volume you can achieve quite easily.
And there's nothing like plug it in,
turn it up to ten and just,
it makes great things sound amazing.
- The guitars helped.
But it's always the player that makes the sound great.
- Bob Bogle and Don were very, very, very precise players.
That's what impressed me the most.
I wanted to sound like that.
Most guitar players connect the idea
of the use of the vibrato arm on an electric guitar
with The Ventures.
- The whammy bar creates a pitch bend
that gives a sense of like a shimmering wave, if you will.
And it sound something like this.
- Don said, okay, you do the melody with the tremolo arm
and I'm going to do the rhythm.
- Tremolo is similar to vibrato
but it's not the same thing.
And people get this confused all the time.
Instead of frequency,
this is an amplitude or a volume change.
The one that's built into the amp
sounds a lot like something I can do
with just the volume control on the guitar.
- Don and I would have a contest
to see who could put the most reverb on our guitars.
It was just like little kids.
- The sound of The Ventures,
I think it has a lot to do with the reverb.
It sounds like the sea.
If you bang the reverb chamber,
it sounds like crashing waves.
- In the case of The Ventures,
it was mostly spring reverb.
For all you techno geeks out there,
the Hammond reverb pan, long spring.
- So, this is what the reverb sounded like back then.
This is from the reverb tank.
- This is a reverb mechanism pulled out of an amplifier.
The guitar sound is fed in through here.
It goes through a spring.
And it's picked up here and fed back into the amplifier.
And by the waving of this spring, the vibration,
it vibrates,
it modifies the sound in a immediately recognizable way.
- Surf bands claimed that it sounded like
they were in the pipeline of a wave.
- It's a sweet sound
and it takes a lot more skill
to play a guitar cleanly.
- They call it the drip.
I'm a rock-a-billy guitar player
but I incorporate some of that stuff.
But the real purist want to get the drip
and that's achieved by putting the reverb tank
before the amplifier.
- Back in the '60s, effects were generally created
with some pretty big boxes.
So it wasn't such an easy process to incorporate them.
- I can't understate how many hours
I stared at the album cover or the back cover,
looking at their guitars
and wondering how they got certain sounds.
- The engineer was experimenting too
with trying to get different sounds and everything.
They put speakers on the floor
and they cut speakers
and they would turn things around.
- We did "Walk Don't Run '64"
and you know,
it sounds like it's a keyboard playing in there
but actually what it is,
and people are surprised at that,
it's a saxophone played through a Leslie speaker.
- If you look at "Silver Bells" off the Christmas album,
there's a vocoder being used for the first time.
These things were just remarkably innovative
and experimental for their time.
Nobody else was doing that.
- The beginning of the song "Telstar",
in order to recreate what Joe Meek had done
on the original with The Tornadoes,
Don used a fire extinguisher to get that sound
of the satellite taking off.
- The Ventures were one of the first bands
to use the fuzz box,
although other people had used fuzz before.
I think Paul Burlinson
from Johnny Burnette's Rock 'n Roll Trio
punched holes in his,
either punched holes in his speakers
or rattled a tube in the,
he rattled a tube in the back.
But to reproduce that in a controllable environment
is from a fuzz box.
- It was created for them by a guy named Red Rhodes.
He was a electronics wizard,
as he was a steel guitarist.
- If you never heard anything like that before,
like we hadn't,
then you're thinking what does that sound like?
And we thought, hm, sounds like a 2,000 pound bee to me.
And so, we did parts one and two
of "The 2,000 Pound Bee".
- VH1 went on to state
that it was the first song ever recorded
using a fuzz box guitar.
- I mean, that's a really, really early use of a fuzz tone.
I mean, there's one or two right around the same time
but The Ventures were right on that cutting edge
and you're talking about five or six years
before the psychedelic groups started using the fuzz tone.
- Part B of "2,000 Pound Bee" became the first single
to hit the Billboard chart using this fuzz tone.
- The echo is great.
The reverb is great.
They don't really even use a vibratos really, you know.
They were just playing.
- When we first started,
after about three years we had a record producer
that was helping us produce the records.
We told him that we were,
felt like we were running out of ideas
and he said, well, one idea
is to find more sounds in that guitar.
He said, there's sounds in that guitar
you've never found yet.
He was right.
We kept trying and finding more techniques.
- A lot of stuff was just Nokie and his hands.
I mean, Nokie did all kinds of what you would call tricks
but to the people in the audience it was like,
whoa, how are you doing that, you know.
There's a record where he's doing this with his pick
- In "Diamond Head" that little sound you hear,
is Nokie rubbing fingernail on the strings.
- In "Wooly Bully" he would pick behind the bridge
where you're not suppose to play over here
and he would
- Probably one of the reasons
why they influenced surf bands so much
is because they were good at playing
quarter notes and eighth notes
in very, very, very strict time.
You can't drive a song
unless you have a rhythm guitar player like Don Wilson,
who can play very, very, very straight ahead eighth notes.
- And he would do double picking
or really fast picking
but with he reverb sound
he had sort of this percussive thing
that he loved so much.
- So, they actually created the sound,
I believe,
that surf bands then reached out for
and it became their own.
- Growing up in southern California
in my early teens, I had a surf board.
And when you're riding the waves, man,
that was the sound track that's going through your head.
- The Ventures will be remembered forever
for creating a culture in southern California
of surf music
and they started it.
Not consciously.
It was a happy accident.
- You know, I like surf music.
I think it's exciting
and I like to play it.
It's fun to play on stage.
- One of the staples of surf songs
is the so called rundown.
And it sounds something like this.
- Bob on the bass actually came up with that rundown.
You know, that was the .
- I don't think anybody had ever heard
that.
In the solo of "Barracuda" by Heart
I do that.
- We decided that we're going to move
to Los Angeles and Hollywood
because we wanted to be where it was happening.
And we stayed in a motel
right across the street from Liberty Records.
They had a lot of studios there
and we wanted to record.
And Bob Reisdorff said,
you've got such a good sound with Joe Boles,
I want you to go back up to Washington
and record there.
So, we did.
And then he said it again the second time
and we're thinking, oh, I want to record here.
But he said, no, go ahead and go up there
because he's got your sound down.
You don't want to change too much of you sound
from what "Walk Don't Run" sounds like.
So, we did it again.
- Back in the '60s they would do four or more albums a year.
- We put so many albums out
that we had five albums on the top 100 at one time.
- They were the sixth best selling band
behind The Beatles, Elvis, Frank Sinatra,
Johnny Mathis, Herb Alpert.
- Yeah, Bob Reisdorff said, most artists,
you're probably good for, at the most,
maybe three, four albums and that's about it.
He says, I suggest
that you really put your money in the bank
and save whatever you get.
And of course, we didn't.
To prove his thinking,
he sold The Ventures after about maybe six albums
or something like that,
to Liberty Records.
I've never heard anything about his complaining about that
but we kept on selling and selling and selling
and it was a bad move on his part.
We were responsible for 25%
of Liberty's total volume of record sales.
That's when we kind of knew,
hey, maybe we're going somewhere.
They had some pretty good artists, you know.
They had the Chipmunks.
I mean, come on.
- For decades they were just like this machine
that could not be stopped.
- They recorded so many records, it's insane.
I don't even know if anyone's done that before,
have they?
200 records?
- And the thing about The Ventures is,
they'd have a surf album.
They would have a soundtrack album
where they're doing movie soundtracks.
One of my favorites is The Ventures country and western.
- I think one thing that resonates with The Ventures
is they're a versatile band.
They can play anything they want to play.
- Whatever kind of my that I wanted to play,
you could sort of get the origin of that
within a Ventures' instrumental.
You know, if you wanted to play rock-a-billy,
if you wanted to play country,
if you wanted to play blues,
if you wanted to play psychedelic rock,
there was some Ventures' instrumental that you could learn.
- Probably the third or fourth album we did
was "The Colorful Ventures".
And we had songs that had color.
- Well, they'll be remembered in our house
with their Christmas record
because we know it's Christmas
when we put that Ventures' record on for Christmas time.
- We had a classical album.
And we had 35 musicians playing behind us.
One time we thought, you know,
we're going to do a disco album,
which, I mean as far as I'm concerned,
Venture fans really scoffed at.
- Oh yeah, they did disco.
So, we won't talk about the disco era.
- They permeate every aspect of life.
I mean, there's something
for every emotion that they've got.
And I think that their songs will live on for that reason.
- When we just,
like what I said before,
we kind of ran out of ideas.
We thought, let's get a keyboard in there.
And so, we had a girl playing keyboard for us to begin with.
We hired Hal Blaine,
which he was with The Wrecking Crew
and he got triple scale
and we had him play the tambourine.
Can you believe that?
Carol Kaye also played the bass one time.
I had a neighbor in the '60s a couple of houses away from me
and his name was Glen Campbell.
And I got to know him
and I said, would you like to play some music with us.
And he said, oh, I'd love it.
So, we used him three or four times.
Tommy Allsup was the guitar player
for Buddy Holly and The Crickets.
He played a couple songs too.
- I performed "Secret Agent Man" with The Ventures
on the anniversary show.
And it was amazing to be part of that.
I felt like I was in with the guys.
I was part of the gang,
the surf gang.
If there's such a thing.
- Billy Bob Thornton was a big, big fan.
- I was about to make an album.
It was before the Boxmasters.
We were doing a solo record of mine.
I'd had this idea.
I said, why don't I just use The Ventures
to make the record with?
It was such an honor getting to know those guys.
Since then, I've kept up with them a lot.
I still have all of that stuff.
So, one of these days I'm going to put it together
and maybe put it out, you know,
as me with The Ventures.
- Gerry McGee joined the band in the late '60s
when Nokie went on his sabbatical.
- Gerry was a real well-rounded guitar player.
I mean, really good.
- Gerry played with greats like Bobby Darin,
Delaney and Bonnie, Kris Kristofferson, Elvis.
- He did an album with The Monkees.
Before they played instruments themselves,
he did a lot of the guitar work.
- His sound was different.
But it was always within the bounds
of what The Ventures sound was
and it always has worked.
- I'll never forget sitting in the control room
with Gerry McGee.
He was about to play something
and I said, where's your whammy bar?
He said, I never used a whammy bar in my life.
I said, you can make that thing
jiggle that much without one?
He said, oh yeah.
We always did it that way.
So, I learned little things about them,
about their guitar technique and all that kind of thing.
- Somebody came to us with an idea
called Guitar Phonics.
And they said, you know,
there's a lot of people learning off of your music
and I think you guys should put out an instruction album
where you play the song
and you explain what you're doing with it
and the notes that you're playing.
The first one hit the charts, the Top 100s.
We decided we'd do a couple more
and those two hit the charts too.
So, we had three instruction albums
on the Top 100 of Billboards.
We had some kind of magic.
We wanted it.
And you've got to want it.
There's not that many instrumentals
that you can take and put on an album,
so we use to take vocals and Venturize them.
- The Ventures are known for,
not being a cover band,
but for being interpreters of a generation.
Every time a musical genre would change,
they would do their own version of the songs.
- They were imagineering, you might say.
So, let's say they were doing
a song that had been a hit on the radio
that had saxophone.
Rather than imitating the lines that the saxophone played,
they would figure out some other interesting thing
to play there,
like arpeggio with chords
or maybe
doing a rhythm thing with the chords.
- When you're a musician,
to play a cover of someone else's songs,
you better be damn good.
You better be damn good
because you've got to be better then the original.
- All the cover songs that they did,
as well as their own,
really have their own stamp on it
and I think it's such a unique sound.
- If it was "Snoopy and the Red Barron" or a disco track
or a film soundtrack,
anything that was popular,
they'd do their own version.
- So, people kind of thought that songs
like "Pipeline" and "Wipeout" were Ventures' songs,
even though they weren't, originally.
In that regard,
The Ventures kind of road the crest
of this instrumental music wave
as the best known group in America
that did instrumental songs
and became almost like a generic term,
like Kleenex, you know.
- When they covered film soundtrack stuff,
it becomes almost the iconic version.
- I have to congratulate them
because they captured the energy and the vigor of my music.
- We had an engineer
and he came to Mel one time
and he said, I just did some engineering
to do the music for "Hawaii Five-O".
And he said that the writer,
who is Mort Stevens,
only has a 30 second version of it just for the show.
And he does not plan on doing a longer version
or putting it out.
And so, he said, I think you guys should put it out.
We did the "Hawaii Five-O" video
and we did it out in the Mojave Desert
on a dried up lake.
That was kind of our last hurrah, let's say,
in the U.S.
"Hawaii Five-O" was a single hit.
But we continued to sell albums,
especially in Japan.
- America seems to go in and out of trends
and then they come back to them later.
But The Ventures have been popular in Japan
since the beginning.
Still are to this day.
- We started going to Japan in 1962, was the first time.
We were the opening act with Bobby Vee
and a girl named Joanne Campbell.
And they were more listening to their own music,
which was a the time call enka.
- Enka is Japanese Blues.
Something like .
So, it was easy for Japanese people to understand
and easy to feel the melody.
It almost sounds like Japanese people are playing the music.
- And when we came about with guitars and electric guitars
and we started a guitar boom.
- When Don does his rundown,
it's ticky ticky ticky san.
- The second time we came there was in 1964.
We landed in Haneda Airport.
There were people on the roof of the terminal
and all, you know.
I thought for a second,
who is on this airplane for God's sake?
It must be the President or the Emperor or somebody.
We get closer and they had all kinds of signs
that said, welcome The Ventures.
They wanted to pull us into a room
for radio and TV and all that right away first thing.
Then when we left to go out to get in the car,
our fans were out there.
They were ripping at our clothes and everything, you know.
You couldn't leave the hotel room.
Maybe 100 people out there waiting.
- The Japanese were just developing
an interest in American culture
and at that time, English was not as common as it was today.
- The Ventures music had no language barrier.
It was so simple for Japanese people to just listen.
- They were attracted to the feeling.
- "Walk Don't Run" doesn't say walk don't run in the lyrics.
So, you just make up your own interpretation of that.
- Music is a universal language.
- It was Venture mania then.
And a lot of mothers and fathers
tired to keep us out of the country.
All that did was make the kids want to see us more.
We turned out selling about 40 million records
in Japan alone.
Our same record company had The Beatles
when The Beatles came out.
And so, I know this for a fact.
Not only did we outsell The Beatles in Japan,
but we outsold them two to one.
- They went to Japan in 1962 for the first time.
This is before The Beatles.
They went to Japan in 1966.
Then all the bands started going into Japan,
Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and so on.
- The success in Japan was incredible.
- We did 108 shows in 78 days
without a day off.
- It's been 60 years ever since The Ventures came out.
And The Ventures did more than 22,000 shows in Japan.
- We started writing songs strictly for Japan.
Really listening to what they did in buying their records
and listening to them
and seeing what kind of sounds they had
and what appealed to them.
- The Ventures did collaborations with the Japanese singers
and also, they came up with the Japanese titles,
such as "Ginza Lights",
"Hokkaido Skies" and "The Kyoto Dolls".
- You know, they toured Japan
and you see people who were fans of theirs
when they were kids
but you also see people who,
young people there who know the legend of The Ventures.
- They'll never die in Japan.
- Japanese people love The Ventures.
- Playing in front of a Japanese audience
I got to feel what The Ventures felt.
They were super enthusiastic.
- I love The Ventures.
- Teke teke wah.
- I love The Ventures.
- The Ventures performed at Kohaku back in 1991.
Kohaku is a major music event.
It happens in the end of the year.
In order to to perform for Kohaku
you have to have a hit song
or you have to be very popular.
The Ventures were not just popular
but it is part of our Japanese culture now.
- There were no guitar groups in Japan.
And now, when we go over to Japan,
and have been for the last 20 years,
there's The Hiroshima Ventures, The Tokyo Ventures,
The Osaka Ventures, The Sapporo Ventures.
Every city in Japan has a Ventures.
- Not just the big cities like Tokyo or Osaka.
You just go to any cities in Japan
and you're going to always find Ventures tribute bands.
- When I see them I get a kick out of it.
They watch us so closely,
even on stage,
that they're doing whatever we do.
- So, the Japanese took The Ventures into their hearts
and no matter what was going on in the rest of the world,
The Ventures always were welcome in Japan.
Welcome is an understatement.
- When they become your fan,
it's your fan for life.
So, I look at it like,
if they're my,
they're loyal to me.
Now I'm their fan too.
- John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd
created the unforgettable killer bee characters
on Saturday Night Live in the '70s.
The story goes that one day they were walking along a beach
and talking about their debts.
And at the same time they were listening
to a tape by The Ventures,
"The 2,000 Pound Bee".
- So, they made a pact, whoever dies first,
the other one will play
"The 2,000 Pound Bee" at the funeral.
John Belushi passed away.
Dan Aykroyd held up a portable radio
and the sounds of The Ventures filled St. John's The Divine.
We've had a lot of things in movies, our songs,
and on TV, commercials and things.
- Tarantino decided to put a song in "Pulp Fiction".
- And that song was called "Surf Rider".
- It was something that
when he was a kid learning to play guitar,
he learned that song.
Well, it stuck with him all those years.
- There's me as a 20 year old
as a gun toting surfing bad girl.
- Our fans were use to seeing pretty models on our covers.
We had quite a few.
And I like those too.
- The vinyls appealed to me
because they had really groovy looking
hot chicks on the cover,
colorful, happy.
- The females on the album covers for The Ventures
were rad.
They were so sexy and self-contained and confident
and they were absolutely a part of the music.
- Half the time I'd pick out the records by the covers.
And The Ventures had the coolest covers.
Once I started seeing covers like this,
and then when you opened it up like this,
I mean, this was like everything I was aspiring to.
- Back then in the early '60s
there was no social media.
The way that you discovered who they were
and how they created that music
were the album jackets.
- I think it was a really neat and fun way
to market themselves.
And it's super fun to collect all of their albums
because of this.
- Yeah, I think pretty unique for the time too.
- Grab the eye, you know,
and once they played what they played
it grabbed the ear,
so that was good.
- In the 70s, rock n' roll itself
kind of died a little bit.
It had gone from being something really cool and really fun
to these '70s rock stars with their excessive habits.
- In the '80s a lot of people
started to reinvestigate their early tones
because some of those clean guitar tones were,
there's a purity to it, an honesty
that got lost with all the effects and distortion
and some of the over technical playing.
- Rodney Bingenheimer started basically, KROQ,
as Rodney on the ROQ playing new bands in 1976.
The radio station would say,
you can't play music from the '60s anymore.
- The Ventures had never stopped
because of their popularity in Japan,
so they were still around.
- Some kids, like punk rockers,
started calling into the radio station to say,
who's that new wave group called The Ventures?
And these are kids that had never heard of us
or didn't know at all.
But they thought we were something new.
- They would send these letters saying,
we're like The Ventures meets this meets this
but we're also like punk rock.
- Punk rock kind of brought rock and roll back,
the original spirit of rock and roll.
- The punk bands loved The Ventures for the simplicity,
the do it yourself mentality.
- Oh yeah, Ventures signed my guitar.
- I think that's how a lot of people learned to play.
So, that's why they loved them.
And it was very simple to play.
It's very hard to get right
but it's simple to play.
- The rapid fire rhythm of punk
was very reminiscent of Don Wilson's
punk rhythm playing on 1960.
No one was playing bar chord like that.
Other people were jazz guitarists
playing finger-pick style and bar chords and all that.
Don Wilson was doing a punk style rhythm guitar.
- A bar chord, for people that don't play guitar,
as oppose to the cowboy chords,
which are what you learn when you play classical,
it's a chord that can be played
with one finger, two fingers underneath
and it can be moved up and down the neck of the guitar.
So, if you want to play G, A and B,
you don't have to learn all this complicated Segovia stuff.
You play the same thing but you move it.
The Sex Pistols, The Ramones,
all of the kind of iconic 101 punk stuff
is based around bar chords.
Johnny Ramone used a Mosrite guitar
but that that was by design or not,
I have no idea.
I never asked him.
But that's definitely a Ventures' style guitar
and there were Ventures' style guitar chords
all the way through all The Ramones stuff.
- We were big fans of The Ventures.
We loved the instrumentals they did.
They were the best at what they do.
- The Ventures sounded dangerous.
They sounded "hoodlum-y".
Their music just sounded like,
like it would befit the kind of people
that would show up in hotrods to the beach
in leather jackets
and then just hang out there,
not right on the sand
but on the beac. like, "hoodlum-y" smoking a cigarette
and watching the girls in their bikinis go by.
- The Ventures live in Japan,
it has the most aggressive, amazing sound, I think ever.
I mean, I think that the Sex Pistols
were getting a run for their money there.
- I actually got my job
because a guy who had been the road manager
was about six two, six three
and he got his nose broken at Disneyland
at a gig at Disneyland.
I asked him,
I said, how come you're willing to give this gig up?
He said, too crazy for me.
And at that time The Ventures were all in their mid 40s
and this was too crazy.
The mods and rockers were showing up
having a war with each other.
- Oh yeah, because we had slam dancers,
if you ever remember that.
I mean, they were just rough on each other.
Do we appeal to them?
Wow.
- We played CBGBs in New York.
We played The Mudd Room in New York.
The 9:30 Club in Washington, DC,
Peppermint Lounge in New York City.
I had kids doing swan dives off the stage.
They'd get past me and run out
and just to a swan dive into the audience.
I mean, there was some,
they were seriously crazy times.
- Even though we all had our roots in punk rock,
we were really, really super informed
by that whole early '60s mod beach party aesthetic.
That led to Go-Go's to write "Surfin' & Spyin'",
which was actually influenced by The Ventures.
She wrote this next song.
The Ventures recorded it,
so you'll be hearing it soon.
It's an instrumental.
It's called "Surfin' & Spyin'"
and it's also a dance song.
- And they came down to our studio
where we were recording and they recorded with us.
We recorded their song
and they played along.
- There's a pretty straight line that you can draw
between The Ventures and all this guitar music
that came later on.
Whether you're talking about punk rock with The Ramones
or new wave with the B-52's
or you know, even heavy metal
was some of the crazy sort of violent leads
that Nokie would play.
- Somebody sent me a CD of Anthrax
and they said, so many people just don't know
what a contribution Don Wilson and Nokie Edwards
did for thrash metal.
- Both surf music and heavy metal
are the province of the electric guitar.
To hard rock of the 1970s, classic metal of the '80s
and into today's massive guitar tones
that form the backbone of modern extreme metal,
on behalf of all of us metal guitar players,
thank you Ventures.
Horns up.
- The Ventures have always been known
as the band that launched 10,000 bands.
- Rodney Bingenheimer, he believes that pretty much
almost every band was inspired by The Ventures.
Whether they know it or not.
- In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
I was backstage and Billy Joel was back there
and he came to me and he said, you know,
one of the very first songs that I ever learned on the piano
was "Walk Don't Run".
There's a lot of people that give us credit
for a lot of things that they play,
which would not be our style.
A disc jockey we're very good friends with,
his name is Mark Christopher,
and he does a lot of work in the Seattle area
with KBSG Radio.
- Do you think they've earned a nomination yet
for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
- We got a petition together
and had people sign it
that wanted us to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- It was an incredible moment this morning
in the state capital.
First time I know of, ever
when a rock and roll band was invited
to appear before the state legislature
to receive what was called
the proclamation of a resolution of support
for something that all the Senators
voted unanimous and believing in
and that the The Ventures
to somehow get a nomination
to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- We got the legislature, the Senate and the House
and everybody together in Washington state.
- Great job.
We were rocking in Olympia today.
You know, I kind of set down a little protocol that I have
that requires that everything be handled
with dignity and decorum.
And we put on The Ventures
and we rocked on the floor of the Senate.
They recorded over 3,000 songs,
released over 250 albums.
They are ambassadors to the world.
- The Rock Hall has very strict criteria on who they accept.
First of all, you have to have 25 years of playing time,
you need a body of work
and your significance in the contribution
and perpetuation of rock and roll
is also a key criteria point.
- We were eligible for 22 years.
- They were preeminently qualified
but they needed a push to get them in.
- There are many artists
that are nominated for the Hall of Fame
but they don't get in.
And I think there are some
that have been nominated three times
and they still didn't get in.
So, when we were nominated,
we got in the very first time.
- It all started about 50 years ago
when Don Wilson and Bob Bogle got together
and talked about maybe getting some guitars
and starting a band.
With the help of Don's mom,
they formed their own record company
and they cut an instrumental
that they'd heard on a Chet Atkins record.
It gets picked up nationally
and makes it all the way to number two.
That record kicked open a whole movement in rock and roll
and empowered guitar players everywhere.
The Ventures have gone on to record over 250 albums.
Now days, some of us would be happy to sell 250 albums.
The Ventures are the most popular
instrumental rock and roll band of all time.
It is my honor to induct The Ventures
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- I've had the opportunity to work with this great band
and I got the honor tonight to play "Walk Don't Run"
for a friend and a mentor, Mr. Bob Bogle,
the co-founder of The Ventures
and a truly innovator of guitar and bass guitar.
Bob wanted to express his profound thanks
for his induction and The Ventures induction
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- I want to thank our fans all over the world.
May God bless you and keep you safe and healthy.
- It was a whirlwind five day period in New York City
surrounding the event.
- This is our display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It happens to be right next to Madonna.
- It's really great
that they're in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
They absolutely are so worthy of that honor.
- To see The Ventures honored in a forum
that's very eclectic,
did my heart really good.
- I want to compliment The Ventures
on their 50th anniversary.
They certainly,
they're certainly in the blueprint of rock.
- The induction ceremony, the after glow party
and all the events the day of
were pretty special, obviously.
But there was a surprising thing that we did the day after
and that was the ringing of the bell
at the New York Stock Exchange.
- So, The Ventures in April of 1996
were honored with putting their hand prints
at the Rock Walk Hall of Fame,
which is in Hollywood at the Guitar Center.
And it's since kind of become a must see stop
for music tourists.
We knew the manager of the House of Blues
and he got us on the bill.
They played that night.
When we got to the House of Blues
they were very generous.
Their back stage door was open
and they answered my dopey questions.
And you could tell they really enjoyed what they were doing.
- I've had just amazing experiences and memories
with all these guys.
- You know, they were rock stars
without being rock stars.
You could just walk right up to Nokie or Don or Bob or Mel
and they would talk to you.
- They were just good people, you know.
You could,
you felt good knowing them.
They weren't out doing crazy things or anything.
- They're all such regular guys
that they put you at ease right away.
- What was interesting about that
is later on when you'd get attitude from rock stars,
I always remember how accessible these guys were
and how nice they were to their fans.
And I think that's been a big part of their success.
- I have some letters here from Japan.
Our Japanese fans are really true.
I mean, they start with you, they end with you.
Anyway, this one says,
thanks a lot for your nice band all the time.
I'm so happy to listening your music.
Hello, my name is Susumu.
I ride in a wheelchair.
I have a lot from different countries.
Some from England, Germany, you name it.
There was somebody that sent me a letter
that was totally deaf.
And what he use to do is play the
our record and put his hand on the speaker
and the vibration,
he could understand that.
Yeah, that's really amazing.
- I was a kid.
I was 11 years old.
I wrote a letter to The Ventures' fan club.
I wrote a letter to Bob Bogle
and he sent me back a letter.
I said, what kind of guitar should I buy?
And he said, thank you for your letter
and you should go buy a Fender Jazzmaster.
So, I went and bought a Fender Jazzmaster.
- In Seattle one time, it was just after a show
and a young man came up in a wheelchair.
He was pushed up by his brother.
And he wanted an autograph or something signed by the guys.
So, I went down and I told Bob what was up
and he says, well,
why don't I just come out there and meet him?
So, he did.
And the look on this guys face was just,
it was priceless.
And Bob was so gracious,
signed some things,
gave him some picks
and spent time with him.
And I just thought that this was a truly great man here.
- He was a very pensive man,
very introspective.
Before he would answer a question,
he would stop for a minute and think about it
and really give it some thought
before he gave you an answer,
which means number one, he cared about what he said
and he cared about what he was saying to you
because it was important to him.
- Nokie would talk, talk and talk and talk
until you put a microphone in front of him.
Then he couldn't say anything.
- I liked to call him the Nokester
because he's such a funny guy.
He's always telling jokes.
He taps me on the back, I turn around
and he's got two symbol felts in his eyes
and they're kind of like raccoon eyes.
And he's just got this look on his face.
It was priceless.
Don was always fun to be with.
He just was always joking about things
and always good spirited.
- Don's a lot of fun.
He's always got great stories.
- Fans come up and talk about the same thing.
He's probably heard it so many times
but he is genuinely thankful and gracious.
And that says a lot.
- Don and I became really good friends
just because we're both a little nuts
and when we were on stage,
it was just like a couple of kids.
- Don, in addition to his set list,
had this thing called his pattern.
And his pattern were really bullet points
for all the jokes he wanted to tell.
- A good looking girl sit next to me, of course,
and I says to her, do you think you could get interested
in an older man?
She looks at me and says,
why, you got a son?
I learned some impressions,
impersonations of different actors.
I had a hat rack
and I put on a different hat for different impersonations.
I did James Cagney and Ed Sullivan.
Use to be rock and roll to me then.
But at my age now, it's rock and Rolaids.
- Thank you very much.
We're going to feature our singer
- What?
- at this point.
- Wait a minute.
What'd you say?
- We're going to feature our vocalist over here.
- I thought we were an instrumental group.
- Yeah, we're basically an instrumental group.
We don't often sing
and you're going to find out why.
- I went down to a University of Washington seminar
where Don spoke
and it was so interesting
hearing him talk about some of the stories from the road
and he kind of demonstrated how a group could be successful
and have incredible longevity
while maintaining integrity.
They maintained a touring schedule over all these years.
It's just a very inspiring thing.
- I had worked now for 56 years in a row.
That's a lot.
I mean, most people do 20, 25 years, they retire.
I didn't want to.
My last show was in Japan in 2015, believe it or not.
Now, with me retiring,
the group still goes on.
When Mel passed away his son took over, Leon Taylor.
And he had learned the drums
when he was a little kid, from his dad.
- Bob Spalding and Lucas Griffin
head up the new version of the group.
Bob's been there 30 years or more.
And Lucas is the new bass player.
And I got to jam with them at Venturefest,
which occurs every year in October in Pennsylvania.
- They, like I said, go to Japan.
They play locally.
They've had offers to go to Europe.
I'm very happy about that.
I would hate to see The Ventures die on the line.
So, they will keep The Ventures name alive and going.
- Here they are still playing
all these years later.
I mean, they just keep on going
and keep their fans happy.
- They were the ones.
They put out so many great albums.
- It speaks for the integrity of music in general too
that you can tour the world
and speak to all these different languages
in the single language of music.
- There's never been an instrumental band
that's been as popular.
- The Ventures will always be known as, I don't know,
the Godfathers of guitar instrumentals.
- They're like the Cadillac of instrumental bands.
- I think The Ventures ability
to make melodies stick in your head
and keep those songs going for as long as possible
is what every songwriter's goal and aim is.
- There were a lot of instrumental records out in those days
but they all kind of bordered on novelty records.
The Ventures had a degree of sophistication.
They were playing more advanced chord forms,
advanced melodies.
This was well considered, well thought out music
that didn't insult your intelligence.
And it wasn't like the were playing down to kids.
- They made the idea of playing a melody
a really cool thing.
- It wasn't just licks.
It was something that was totally accessible
to my ear and to my spirit.
- The sound just didn't effect one
in a sense of just a note on a guitar.
It literally effected you,
and effected me in my heart
and in my inner being.
- I would be inspired by the feelings I would get
and that inspired me as a songwriter.
- It changed people's lives, you know.
It's music that has totally inspired us
and we're not the only ones.
There's millions of people.
- We're always just consciously,
pretty much asking ourselves, what would The Ventures do?
And then that's what we do.
- There's going to be bands copying them for ever more.
There's going to be tribute bands
when we're all dead in the ground.
Even if it's only Guitar Hero type thing
on a video game,
everyone wants to get that sound.
- They changed the sound of psychedelic.
They changed the sound of mod, punk,
new wave, even heavy metal.
- It all started with The Ventures.
- There's no tellin how many people The Ventures influenced
to go out and get a guitar
or bug the hell out of your parents til they got you one.
- To become a better player,
you don't just listen to your influences,
you listen influences influences
and you just dig as deep as you can.
- In my travels for Fender musical instruments,
I go many corners of the Earth.
When you're talking guitars with other musicians,
undoubtedly everyone points to The Ventures
as far as their stepping stone.
- You will hear musicians say, give me a Ventures lick.
Right in the middle of a session the producer might say,
can you give me a little of that "Walk Don't Run" fill
or something of that nature
and they know immediately what they're talking about.
- A lot of music becomes very dated
and as the decades go along,
it doesn't age well, you know.
To me, if I put on a Ventures record from 1965,
to me it just sounds like something
that could have been cut yesterday.
- They still sound fresh.
They still sound great.
- It doesn't really sound like it's trapped in time.
It sounds like something that is timeless.
- Timeless.
- Timeless, completely timeless.
- It's not something where I remember when
but it's not popular now.
It's forever popular.
- It's like meatballs and spaghetti.
You know, it's just there,
always going to be there.
- Maybe when we're on Mars
people are going to be listening to The Ventures
and twisting in antigravity.
The Ventures in space takes on a new meaning.
- There's a new generation of kids
that are discovering them as well.
And there probably will be until the end of time.
- I ask young kids do they know about The Ventures.
And a lot of them go, yeah, yeah, Ventures "Walk Don't Run".
- In fact, I just met a young girl today,
18 years old who's into surfing.
She knows all about The Ventures and she's 18.
- All the kids would be learning Ventures songs
right now in Japan.
It carries on throughout the generations.
- So, the good news is
they're immortal.
- If younger generations
get to know the music of The Ventures,
then in the future we'll have bolder and better music.
- I think it's all fate.
Whatever happens is going to happen and that's it.
And timing and whatever just has to all come together.
- Well, you know, in 1960
when we first recorded our first hit "Walk Don't Run",
we were hoping that it would come to this.
Thank God we made it.
- Many thank yous to you people.
You people have kept us going
and what a reward that is for us.