Little Rich wrote:

Very interesting.  I remember the Ventures being the creme de creme of guitar instrumentalists and have several of their early albums.  Seems like, for whatever reason, they kind of faded off into the sunset., with solo guitarists, like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, stealing the spotlights.  I have often wondered what happened to them.  I really enjoyed their music.  Maybe I was "off-base."  The percussion was somewhat de-emphasized, focusing more on the guitars, BUT, I enjoyed the percussion as well. 

apparently the ventures have been hiding in your plain sight. looking at their discography, it would appear they never broke up or went anywhere and were active well into the 2000's. a live album from tokyo 2006 is available, and a couple more albums issued until the end of that decade, though i can't say whether those were new or reissue recordings.
 

Last edited by gopher (January 24, 2022 1:18 am)

Little Rich wrote:

Very interesting.  I remember the Ventures being the creme de creme of guitar instrumentalists and have several of their early albums.  Seems like, for whatever reason, they kind of faded off into the sunset., with solo guitarists, like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, stealing the spotlights.  I have often wondered what happened to them.  I really enjoyed their music.  Maybe I was "off-base."  The percussion was somewhat de-emphasized, focusing more on the guitars, BUT, I enjoyed the percussion as well. 

I'm no expert on the group, but my impression of them is that they relied mostly on doing covers rather than original material. That worked out well enough for them here when the originals weren't that well-known, but from what I know they had a tendency to record a lot of covers of songs that had been recent hits. That probably contributed to them disappearing from the charts here after 1969, but they became very successful in Japan which really helped to sustain their career. 

I'm sorry to hear of Don's passing.It is worth noting that the Ventures placed 36 LP's on the charts from 1960 to 1972.  Between them and Sandy Nelson, they were the primary contributors of "Top 40 " instrumental music to the LP charts in the early days. I'd be willing to bet that every radio station that played music in the medium and smaller markets had some Ventures albums in their library to use as backup music for in-house local commercial production!  I saw them on their first trip to Japan in the Spring of '62.  Only two made the trip, Don Wilson and Bob Bogle, and along with Bobby Vee, they played an afternoon gig at Tachikawa AFB Airmen's Club.  It was great.

Last edited by Jim Southern (January 28, 2022 2:40 am)

The info at 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures_discography#Studio_albums shows that they did chart three albums from 1970 to 1972, and I believe those would be Billboard chart positions as that is the default on Wikipedia. IMy previous comment referred to the singles charts ... when I made it, I thought that they might have charted albums after that, but most people wouldn't have been aware of them. I actually was, but only because my sister belonged to the Columbia Record Club, where I recall Ventures albums were constantly featured in their publications. However, my recollection is that by then, their albums generally if not always were made up of covers of recent hits. My guess is that they found a formula that worked well in Japan, and that was a big enough market to make their albums quite successful for them even though they were no longer having hit singles here. 

I didn't realize they had such a broad catalogue of work as I only have one record by them, the 45 of Hawaii Five-O. IMO that record, alongside The Box Tops' The Letter, stand alone as the two greatest pop songs clocking in at under two minutes in length. Honorable mention goes to The Who's I Can't Explain which clocks in at 2:04.