Ventures’ ‘Wild Again’ Cd Surfs On Band’S Successes

With summer and surf only hours away, it is inevitable that whether we recognize it or not, we all soon will hear music by the Ventures.

There’s something about the sun that seems to draw Ventures music out: “Walk Don’t Run.” “Hawaii Five-O.”

The funny thing is, they’ll tell you they aren’t really a surf band. Well, they aren’t just a surf band.

Were they purely a surf band, they would not have lasted 40 years and sold more than 75 million records around the world, parlaying a relatively modest number of hit singles into a career as the best-selling instrumental group in rock ‘n’ roll history.

Still, there will always be something about “Walk Don’t Run,” now 38 years old, that suggests warm days and top-down convertibles.

The Ventures know it, too. Their new CD, “Wild Again” (Crescendo), features live versions of “The Lonely Surfer” and, yup, “Wipe Out.”

Bob Bogle, 61, founded the Ventures with Don Wilson in Seattle in 1959, and they still lead the quartet today.

“When ‘Walk Don’t Run’ became a hit, that enabled us to make a career change,” says Bogle. “I was working construction. Don was selling used cars. Then this became our career, and it’s worked out.”

Since the Ventures have never been known as innovators like, say, Jimi Hendrix, Bogle says they built on the equally smart principle of simplicity.

“When we started, we were doing pretty basic three-chord stuff,” Bogle says. “The big three guitarists then were Chet Atkins, Les Paul and Duane Eddy. We knew we’d never be as sophisticated as Chet or Les, and there wasn’t room for two Duane Eddys, so we took the territory that was left.”

In fact, “Walk Don’t Run” was a slow track on an Atkins album before the Ventures enlivened it for guitar and bass. They moved to Los Angeles, and because the soundtrack of the surfing craze was guitar instrumentals, the Ventures became members of a club they hadn’t even known existed.

“We got pegged as a surfing band because there was a scene then with the Beach Boys, the Chantays (‘Pipeline’) and so on,” says Bogle. “But before we got to L.A., we’d never even heard the phrase ‘surfing music.”’