BOB BOGLE:BOB BOGLE (75), whose driving, twanging electric guitar made the group he co-founded, the Ventures, the most successful instrumental band in rock'n'roll history, and whose recordings of Walk, Don't Run and Hawaii Five-O propelled the group to the top of the charts in the 1960s, died Sunday in a hospital near his home in Vancouver, Washington.
Robert Lenard Bogle was born in 1934, on a farm near Wagoner, Oklahoma. He left home at 15 to become a bricklayer and began to play guitar.
He played lead guitar on the Ventures' first big hit, Walk, Don't Run, in 1960. The record sold more than 2 million copies, rose to No 2 on the pop charts (behind Elvis Presley's It's Now or Never) and secured the Ventures' place in music history.
The band went on to record dozens of hits, including a 1964 remake of Walk, Don't Run that hit No 8 and the 1969 theme to the TV series Hawaii Five-O, which peaked at No 4. The Ventures' rumbling guitars and thundering drums helped launch the "surf music" craze of the 1960s and exerted a strong influence on the Beach Boys, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival and guitarists Steve Miller, Joe Walsh and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
When the Ventures were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, Fogerty said during the presentation that Walk, Don't Run "started a whole new movement in rock'n'roll. The sound of it became 'surf music' and the audacity of it empowered guitarists everywhere."
At the height of the Beatles international fame in the mid-1960s, the Ventures outsold them in Japan. They sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
"We couldn't go out of our hotel rooms or browse in department stores without being recognized," Bogle once said of their fame in Japan. "It was very strange to us. Cars would stop when we crossed the street."
The Ventures continued touring and making records - more than 250 in all - and for years everything they touched turned to gold. From 1960 to 1972, they had 37 albums on the Billboard charts. They recorded supercharged instrumental versions of TV and movie theme songs, including Batman, The Man From UNCLE, Secret Agent Man and the James Bond opening theme, and made rock'n'roll versions of music by Bach, Mozart and Duke Ellington. Even a music instruction album they recorded hit the pop charts in 1965.
"We always like tunes with a little more substance," Bogle told The Washington Post in 1998. After a decade of diminished popularity, the Ventures were rediscovered during a surf-music revival in the early 1980s, and in the 1994 director Quentin Tarantino used their snarling Surf Ride - a tune co-written by Bogle - in his film Pulp Fiction.
Survivors include his wife, Yumi.
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Bob Bogle: born January 16th, 1934; died June 14th, 2009