Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Tuesday Tuneage
The Ventures - "House of the Rising Sun"
1964


So this week's tune came up on my iTunes jukebox recently and I thought it would be fun to write about it. Easier said than done. I typed the header above and then got to the year and realized I didn't know what year it was released. Big deal, I thought, I'll just go to allmusic.com and do a search. Problem is that searching by the song brings up every artist who has recorded "House of the Rising Sun", which is like a hundred thousand and searching through Ventures albums isn't the answer as they have released a couple million of those (and that might be if you include anthologies.)

Such needle-in-the-haystack wishes weren't good enough for me, and being the private detective-in-waiting that I am, I thought of a better way to figure out the release date: I dug through all my old cassettes, where I knew I had a Ventures anthology bought in the discount bins at Target in the late eighties. I found the tape, looked up the label info and what year it was released (Tridex Records, 1980) and cross-referenced this info against allmusic.com's listings. Bingo! Allmusic listed a Greatest Hits, while my cassette was titled The Best of the Ventures. My cassette is simply a stripped-down version of Tridex's Greatest Hits. So by clicking from this Allmusic entry, I was able to find out the release year of this Ventures tune. Which is the same year as the hit Animals version, which I should have been able to make an educated guess on with The Ventures - a band known for doing instrumental covers of current hits.

All I remember from this Ventures Target-bought tape was that 1) It was a hell of a lot of fun to listen to, and 2) "House of the Rising Son was my favorite tune on it by far. As my component tape deck is no longer in use (it's still there physically, sitting on top of the receiver with the turntable on top of it; but audio-wise I used its inputs on the receiver for the Roku box) I may have to play this in the boombox I use in the bathroom for its radio ... what better music to sing along with in the shower than an all-instrumentals collection?

As for why we should care about The Ventures, Jean Charles Costa in The Rolling Stone Record Guide sums up their albums the best: "Rejoice in the fact that they all sound the same ... Stiff snare and cymbal sound, pulsing bass and metallic guitars spitting out popular melodies through a wash of echo and vibrato."

In that book The Ventures are listed immediately after The Velvet Underground. After tonight's mini-adventures, I am more intrigued with The Ventures than I think I've ever been with the Velvets. Go figure. As for my late-night Tuesday Tuneage detective work described in great detail (sorry) above, the case is closed and I should be able to get some shut-eye before Writing Wednesday. But I am desperately resisting the urge to track down what I can find about the Tridex label...