My All-Time Greatest Albums, part two

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

In the days before albums became Artistic Statements, the Ventures were knocking out one record after another, all of which could be filed under the heading “teenage dance party music.” Between 1962 and 1967, they released 22 albums of instrumental rock, 13 of which reached the top 40. Their most successful single during this time, Walk Don’t Run ’64, went to #8. 

The kids in my neighborhood lined up to buy the latest Ventures’ release and for decades, thumbing through someone’s record collection or a box of albums in a garage sale or a flea market, you were always bound to come across, usually looking worse for the wear, at least one Ventures album. 

My initiation was Christmas 1965 when I found Ventures A Go-Go under the tree. Ventures’ albums were as predictable as mail delivery, and Ventures A Go-Go met the same criteria as all other Ventures albums. A quick listen? Both sides of the record, taken together, clocked in at under 30 minutes. Recent Top 40 covers? Satisfaction; Louie, Louie; The In Crowd; Wooly Bully; I Like It Like That. A bunch of original songs cooked up by the band in the studio, with interrelated titles? They’re listed right there on the back of the record: Go-Go Slow, A Go-Go Guitar, A Go-Go Dancer. Special guitar effects? Some fuzz tone here and there, certainly on Satisfaction. A pretty girl on the album cover? She’s in blurry motion, but it still counts. 

I was only ten-years old, but I figured I had the soundtrack for my first teenage dance party. All I needed was a few more years and have, like Sam Cooke sang in Having A Party, “Cokes are in the icebox/Popcorn's on the table.” Instead, my parents held what used to be referred to as an “open house” that New Year’s Day, with other couples and family. I played Ventures A Go-Go on their stereo as background party music. Nobody got up to dance. 

I really scratched my Ventures itch in the 80s and 90s, picking up a bunch of their records at several of the aforementioned flea markets. Their Christmas album, which came out two months after Ventures A Go-Go, still gets played every holiday season. The first one was still the best.