The Ventures Keep Riding a Sound Wave of Success

East is East and West is West, and it was the Ventures’ good fortune to discover more than 30 years ago that the twang is where they meet.

In 1965 the Ventures touched down for their first headlining tour of Japan. As Don Wilson and Mel Taylor tell it, the greeting they received at the airport was little short of Beatlemaniacal.

Thus began a long-running love affair between Japanese fans and the best-selling instrumental rock band ever.

In the West, meanwhile, actual Beatlemania had broken out, and the surf-oriented, guitar-driven instrumental rockers who had scored hits through the early ‘60s almost instantly wiped out. Better established and stylistically more flexible, the Ventures were able to keep up a steady streak of Top 40 albums until late in 1966, but without Japan’s continuing embrace, Wilson and Taylor say, the group never would have made it into their 37th year with a lineup largely unchanged at their peak.

Rhythm guitarist Wilson and bassist Bob Bogle, who started playing together in Tacoma, Wash., in 1959, have never stopped being Ventures. Taylor has been in the band since 1962, when he left his niche as a Los Angeles session drummer (Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” is his best-known credit) to take over from original member Howie Johnson.

Lead guitarist Nokie Edwards, whose lines helped key the Ventures’ chart success, served two hitches with the band from 1960 to 1968, and from 1972 to 1985. That gives Gerry McGee, who replaced Edwards both times, about 15 years’ tenure as the Ventures’ junior partner. Another former ‘60s session man, McGee played on the Monkees’ early albums.

Now in their late 50s and early 60s, the Ventures play Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Friday at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. The Ventures and Edwards will be together Friday at noon for a ceremony in Hollywood: Their handprints and a plaque will be planted in concrete along the Rock Walk outside the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard along with the Chantays, the Surfaris and Jan & Dean.

The Ventures say they hit it big in Japan mainly because they played “high-energy music, and it took off from there,” Taylor said.

The Ventures wrote a good deal of original material, but their knack of spotting and adapting catchy numbers from other sources led to hits. In 1960, “Walk, Don’t Run” from a Chet Atkins record became the Ventures’ signature song. When the British band the Tornadoes scored an instrumental hit in “Telstar” (1962), the Ventures remade it as the title track of their biggest-selling album.

When surf music erupted in Southern California in 1961, the Ventures had no qualms about appropriating instrumentals such as the Pyramids’ “Penetration,” the Chantays’ “Pipeline” and the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.”

“I’ve always respected the Ventures and what they play,” said Bob Spickard of the Chantays, the Orange County surf band that wrote “Pipeline” and scored a hit single with it in 1963. Having one’s song Venture-ized “has its good points and its bad points,” Spickard said. “My first reaction was, ‘It’s a compliment.’ It’s fine, because financially we did fairly well” with writers’ royalties generated by the Ventures’ album sales. “Unfortunately, a lot of people think the Ventures had the national hit [single], which they did not. I feel a little odd when people think they did the original.”

The Ventures have, in fact, been on both ends of the borrowing process: In 1962, an Orange County teen band called the Lively Ones adapted Edwards’ “Sputnik,” renamed it “Surf Rider,” and had a hit that was revived recently on the “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack.

The Ventures’ 17 Top 40 albums yielded just six Top 40 singles and after a last commercial hurrah in 1969 with the “Hawaii Five-O” theme, the Ventures focused their recording and touring efforts on Japan, where they play 80 to 100 shows a year.

Wilson and Taylor say tours of Japan have left little time or opportunity for cultivating new fans or regaining old ones in the United States. Last month, the Ventures finished work on an album of 17 songs that have not appeared on any previous releases, and Wilson and Taylor hope it will become the Ventures’ first new U.S. release of the ‘90s.

Wilson sees no imminent end to the Ventures’ long ride. “We’re so used to this lifestyle. We’re not afraid to retire, but what would I do?”

* The Ventures and the Tiki Tones play Thursday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $16.50-$18.50. (714) 496-8930; Friday at the House of Blues with the Surfaris, Phantom Surfers and the Blue Hawaiians. 8430 Sunset Blvd., 9 p.m. $20. (213) 650-1451.