The Best Surf Rock Songs, Ranked and Argued

Every surf list opens with the same three records, so here is ours with the reasoning attached and the sacred cows put where they belong. “Wipe Out” is the weakest famous record in the genre. “Misirlou” earns every bit of its reputation and almost none of it for the reasons people give. And the single most reliable surf act of the last sixty years turns out to be a band from Tacoma that mostly played other people’s songs.

How the ranking was made: a record scores by whether we still reach for it with no beach, no film and no nostalgia involved. That means the tune has to survive the reverb being switched off. Historical importance counts for something, but not much. Being first is not the same as being good, and surf has a bad habit of confusing the two.

The top five

1. The Chantays, “Pipeline” (1962). Recorded by teenagers from Santa Ana, out on Downey Records, and still the best-written thing in the genre. The main line descends like something being lowered into deep water and never resolves the way you expect. The instrument nobody remembers is the electric piano, which is doing half the work. Play this to somebody who thinks surf is cheerful.

2. Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, “Misirlou” (1962). The melody is eastern Mediterranean folk material generations older than Dale, who was Lebanese-American and knew it from his family. What he added was the right hand. The double-picked run on the low string is the most physically demanding playing anybody did in this music, and it sounds less like a guitar than like a machine tool. Deltone, his own label.

3. The Lively Ones, “Surf Rider” (1963). Del-Fi. Written by Nokie Edwards of the Ventures. The proof that surf can be sad. It moves at a walk, the reverb is set to flood, and it is the one record here that would work in a film about somebody losing something rather than somebody winning a race.

4. The Pyramids, “Penetration” (1964). The band shaved their heads for publicity, which is the least interesting thing about them. The riff is carried low and mean, and the arrangement leaves gaps where a lesser band would have put more guitar. Late in the boom and better than most of what came before it.

5. The Tornadoes, “Bustin’ Surfboards” (1962). From Redlands, in the desert, and not to be confused with the British Tornados of “Telstar”, who were a Joe Meek production and not a surf band at all. It is the moodiest record of the first wave, the ambient noise at the top included, and it is why Quentin Tarantino keeps getting credit for taste other people had first.

The next tier, worth your time

The Bel-Airs’ “Mr. Moto” (1961) is one of the two records usually named as the first surf single, alongside Dick Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’” from the same year. Which came first is disputed. “Mr. Moto” is also driven by piano rather than guitar, which tells you how unfixed the formula still was.

The Astronauts’ “Baja” (1963) is a Lee Hazlewood tune played by a band from Boulder, Colorado, a state with no coastline and no excuse. Dave Myers and the Surftones’ “Church Key” opens with somebody opening a beer, which is the correct amount of concept. And Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958) predates the genre entirely and casts a shadow over all of it; an instrumental that some radio stations refused to play for fear of what it might encourage.

The vocal side, briefly

The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” (1963) is two Rivingtons songs bolted together and screamed by a man from Minneapolis. It is barely music and it cannot be improved.

Everything else on the vocal side is the Beach Boys, and our honest view is that their surf records are their least interesting ones. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” is Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” with new words and Berry eventually credited. The band got great later, doing something else entirely.

What a punk radio network actually played

Here is the part we can show rather than assert. Our archive reconstructs sixteen underground radio shows that went out between 2005 and 2019, from Internet Archive captures. Between them: 7,663 tracks by 5,016 artists. Not one of those shows was a surf show.

The fourth most played artist across the whole network is the Ventures. Twenty-four plays across three shows, ahead of the Sonics, the Kinks and the Ramones.

Then look at what got played. Almost none of it is the surf canon. “Walk, Don’t Run ‘64” appears once. The rest is the Ventures covering everything else: “California Dreamin’”, “Music to Watch Girls By”, “Secret Agent Man”, “Up, Up and Away”, two Christmas records, and on a 2019 episode of The Mal Thursday Show, “I Wanna Be Sedated”. Several are logged in the playlists as beds, meaning the host was talking over them. Dick Dale, meanwhile, appears exactly once as an artist across every playlist we can parse.

That is a truer picture of how this music survived than any list of ten instrumentals, including this one. The Ventures outlived the fad by becoming a band that could play anything without needing a singer, which made them permanently useful to anyone assembling two hours of radio.

Treat the numbers as a sample rather than a verdict. Sixteen shows across fourteen years is one corner of one scene, the hosts leaned towards their own record collections, one show’s playlists do not parse at all and another parses badly, so two programmes’ taste is missing from every figure above. A surf station would produce a completely different table and we would rather admit that than pretend otherwise.

What to play next

If the top five worked, go sideways rather than deeper into 1963. The instrumental bands who picked this up in the 1990s are covered in surf rock’s second life, and several of them are better players than the originals.

If you want to know why any of these records sound the way they do, the gear is not a mystery and the answer is mostly one metal box of springs. That is how surf rock got its sound.

And if the fuzzier, ruder end of this appeals, the same teenagers with the same budgets were making very different noise two states inland. Start with the garage punk bands worth hearing.