Why is The Very Best of The Ventures on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Surf’s up.
Some stats & info about The Very Best of The Ventures
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Surf Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – not rated!
- When was The Very Best of The Ventures released? 2008
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #646 out of 1,000
The Very Best of The Ventures on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does The Very Best of The Ventures mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
As I get into a little bit in my entry on Thunderbirds Are Go – TV Themes For Grown Up Kids (#866 of best 1,000 albums ever), I’m a sucker for a great TV theme song. And for my money, there are very few that are more iconic, striking, and evocative of a time and place than the theme for Hawaii Five-O. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen a single episode of Hawaii Five-O (and I’ve watched a lot of TV in my lifetime from eras past and present) but it doesn’t matter.
The Hawaii Five-O theme song represents The Ventures, an instrumental rock band with a surf rock tilt from Tacoma, Washington at their very best. What’s really fun about The Very Best of The Ventures is how packed it is with covers of other TV show themes and popular rock songs from the 1960s.
“Secret Agent Man” is fabulously groovy and swinging, produced decades before a guy named Mike Myers would conjure up the idea for Austin Powers and turn it into an iconic (and shagadelic) franchise.
It’s also really fun that The Ventures not only take on songs by The Beatles, but ones that you would be very unlikely to predict. Case in point is “Eleanor Rigby,” which like the original brilliantly leverages string instruments, but The Ventures rock it up quite a bit more than the original.
And then for pure surf rock bliss, check out “Diamond Head.”