The Ventures - The Ventures Christmas Album (mono)

It's Epiphany, and the last of the gifts have been given. We are at the end of the Christmas season.

So what do you do when there's nothing really left to say about the holidays?

You play an instrumental album - and who better exemplifies instrumental rock than The Ventures, the best-selling instrumental band of all time.

When I found this, my inner kid was overjoyed. I loved "Walk Don't Run" and, of course, their version of the Hawaii Five-O theme. I had never heard a full album by the band, and didn't really know much about them other than they were early guitar heroes.

The Ventures Christmas Album was released in 1965 and it hit the charts, landing on the charts again in 1966, 1967, and 1968. A pretty cool feat.

The Ventures, for a period of time, had their guitars made for them by Mosrite, and these are the guitars featured on the cover of the album. Signature models, before signature models were really a thing - not counting the Les Paul, of course. It would seem that when their endorsement deal ended in the late '60s, the band went back to using Fender instruments, but those Mosrite guitars were super cool.

Finding this in the dollar bin was a coup, and it's a whole lot of fun.

It's hard to imagine now, but back in the early '60s, stereo records were still a novelty. Even Cash Box, the music trade publication, would publish charts that tracked stereo versus mono performance. The Ventures took advantage of what they could do in the studio by hard-panning their instruments into the left and right channels - there was literally no middle ground.

I'm so glad I have a stereo stylus to take advantage of this new marvel in hi-fidelity sound. Sadly, like my Elvis Christmas record and so many other early recordings, the version I found in the dollar bin was BLP-2038, the mono release.

There was no banner on the cover proclaiming it was in (gasp)... "Visual Sound STEREO."

Oh well. Beggars can't be choosers.

Despite the previous owner, some dude named Euclide who marked up the front and back with a ballpoint pen, they also really looked after the record. It was in impeccable shape after I cleaned it.

So thanks for that.

From a technical perspective, they were tasty players. As an instrumental band, these guys were handling the melody lines and then finding room to push things to the forefront. There isn't shredding, but there are times you can hear early sweeping, some decent bends, and early fuzz and distortion. The lead work was beautifully phrased and fretted.

There's a reason The Ventures are often referred to as the band that launched a thousand bands.

The classic lineup was featured on this record: Bob Bogle on bass, Don Wilson on rhythm guitar, Nokie Edwards on lead guitar, and Mel Taylor on drums. Oddly, on the early recordings it was Edwards who played bass, and Bogle was the lead player.

All of the songs presented here are clever and quirky takes on the classics, throwing little musical winks to other current songs here and there. If you listen closely on "Silver Bells," you can hear what sounds like an early talk box on the call-and-response section of the chorus. It's pretty cool.

If there's a complaint, it's that the songs are short. They didn't pad their arrangements, with most of the songs clocking in around the two-minute range. The longest song on the album, "White Christmas," is close to three minutes and is a very nice arrangement.

"Scrooge" is probably the most out-there song here, with its cartoon slide whistle, but it's also one of the most fun. The whole album clocks in under half an hour. It left me wanting more, which was better than wearing out its welcome.

I can't think of a better way to end my holiday listening for this past season.

Here's to a Happy New Year.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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