Winamp Wednesday: There Are No Words
So let us Venture forth...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Ventures, “Walk Don’t Run”
One of the older kids said it best when he said “do you have a strutting song?”
This was at the start of junior high, walking the halls with one of the high-school kids while we prepped for a school theater production. A building I always knew to be overrun with rambunctious children was eerily silent. He turned to me and asked if I had a song that played in my head when I strutted. Honestly at this point, at all of twelve years old, I wasn’t sure I had ever strutted at all. What did it look like? Was it something only the in crowd did? Was there an in crowd and would I ever get there—
“Like this”, he said, and proceeded to hum the theme to Doug. His gait down the senior locker hallway said nothing less than “keep on truckin’”; it was one of the cooler things I had ever witnessed. All at once I got it. You needed a melody and a rhythm that kept you moving, that fit your particular swing of things. And what stuck with me at that point was that you needed an instrumental for your strutting song. What was going to be my strutting song?
In truth I never found a single one, but rather myriad. I could have filled a backpack full of mixtapes with candidates. Each one was always faster than the example given by my upperclassman inspiration. My teenage psyche was less a fine-tuned machine and more a nitro-boosted Edsel with bad shocks and something on fire in the trunk. The chill one-two ramble of Fred Newman’s Doug theme wasn’t going to cut it. Walter Murphy’s “California Strut”? Closer. Maybe SRV’s version of “Pipeline” or Grover Washington Jr.’s “Mister Magic” if I was relaxed or exhausted.
But it always rolled back to The Ventures. This was the cool when my dad was in these same junior high years, and I had always been fascinated by that pre-Beatles sliver of the 60s where it seemed like any kind of pop music went. It all sort of felt like a summer day on Long Island, out by the beach where time seemed to stand still. “Walk Don’t Run” had a fully ironic name for me, because I could always imagine rushing over the dunes to watch the surfers break off EAB to it. That was a kind of cool I viewed from afar; I wasn’t coordinated enough for a surfboard and now my knees would protest if I got near one. But I felt at home there, walking down avenues that hadn’t changed in fifty years to the sand and the surf.
Maybe that’s why it was always The Ventures at the end. They had that perfect West Coast springy-sprong guitar that was both of a totally different time and completely warm and familiar. Like Mystery Science Theater 3000 once pointed out: “everything is better with surf guitar”. Their big-in-Japan-ness would seep into everything I would consume during this part of my life, in my anime-mad days, because you can’t throw a rock in that medium without smacking into some Venture-inspired guitar themes. I saw them in many things and yet they stayed just a little bit out of my grasp. It was all aspirational. I had to walk before I could run, I had to run before I could strut.
And all these years later, I’m still a little bit that kid in the hallway, trying to figure out which song will make me cool like that.