What Is Surf Rock? A Plain Guide to the Music

Surf rock is reverb-drenched, mostly instrumental guitar music that came out of Southern California between about 1961 and 1964. A loud Fender amp, a box of springs, heavy strings and a right hand picking as fast as it can: that is the whole formula, and the best bands made it sound like weather. There was also a sung version about beaches and girls, and it sold far more, but the guitar records are why anyone still cares.

It lasted about three years as a craze. It never actually stopped.

Where surf rock came from

The roots are older than the name. Link Wray’s “Rumble” in 1958 showed what a guitar could threaten without a singer. Duane Eddy made twang a commercial product. The Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run” in 1960 gave every teenager in America a reason to form an instrumental combo. None of that is surf, but all of it is in surf.

Then Dick Dale started playing the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, on the Orange County coast, and the crowd was surfers. That is literally where the name comes from: music for the people who had spent the day in the water. Dale and his Del-Tones put out “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961, the same year the Bel-Airs released “Mr. Moto”, and those two are the records usually argued over as the first surf single. We are not going to settle which came first. Both prove the sound already existed before the industry found it.

The industry found it fast. By 1963 the Chantays, the Surfaris, the Lively Ones, the Tornadoes and dozens of forgotten teenage bands were cutting singles for small Los Angeles labels like Del-Fi and Downey. Bands from Colorado and Minnesota, places with no surf at all, were making surf records because that is what sold.

And then the Beatles arrived in America in early 1964 and the whole thing was over as a chart phenomenon within a year. Hot rod songs and the British Invasion took the airtime. Most of those bands broke up or turned into something else, which matters for the garage story below.

What surf rock sounds like

Four things, in rough order of importance.

Reverb. Fender’s outboard Reverb Unit appeared in 1961: a separate valve-driven box with a tank of springs inside. Set wet, it turns a guitar into a wash that drips off the end of every note. Kick the box and it crashes. This is not decoration. Strip the reverb off a surf record and the guitar part underneath is often startlingly basic, because the effect is part of the composition.

The right hand. Double-picked runs on the low string, one note trilled past the point of comfort, a glissando dragged down the neck until it turns into noise. Dale’s “Misirlou” is the extreme case. It sounds less like a guitar than a power tool.

The gear. Heavy strings, Stratocasters, and the offset Jazzmasters and Jaguars that jazz players had ignored. Amplifiers rebuilt by Leo Fender to survive Dale’s volume in a ballroom far too big for 1961 equipment. Amp tremolo chopping under held chords.

The drummer. Surf drumming pushes. Tom fills everywhere, snare driving the whole time, the sort of playing that would be called overplaying in any other genre. A polite drummer kills a surf band dead.

We go into all of this properly, myths included, in how surf rock got its sound.

Instrumental surf and vocal surf

These are two genres sharing a word. Instrumental surf is the guitar music above: menacing more often than sunny, minor keys, tunes that have to survive with no singer to rescue them. Vocal surf is the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and their imitators: harmony pop about surfing, cars and summer, with Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” reaching number one in 1963.

Our view, stated plainly: the vocal side is where the money went and the instrumental side is where the music was. The Beach Boys became great later, doing something that had nothing to do with surfing.

Who to hear first

If you have never knowingly heard surf rock, these five are the door in. They are ranked by how well they work with no beach, no film and no nostalgia attached.

1. The Chantays, “Pipeline” (1962). The best-written record in the genre. The melody sinks rather than rises, and it will cure anyone of thinking surf is cheerful.
2. Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, “Misirlou” (1962). An old eastern Mediterranean melody played as a feat of endurance. Famous because of Pulp Fiction, great for reasons the film does not explain.
3. The Lively Ones, “Surf Rider” (1963). Slow, sad and flooded with reverb. Proof the genre had more than one mood.
4. The Pyramids, “Penetration” (1964). Low, mean and full of space.
5. The Trashmen, “Surfin’ Bird” (1963). Not instrumental, barely even a song, from Minneapolis, and the bridge from surf to everything rude that came after.

“Wipe Out” by the Surfaris is the record everyone knows. It is mostly a drum break and it is the weakest of the famous ones. The full argued list, with the next tier and the records we think are overrated, is on the best surf rock songs.

How surf fed garage and punk

This is the part most surf histories skip, and it is the reason a garage punk publication covers surf at all.

When the surf boom collapsed, the bands did not disappear. Teenagers who had learned to play in instrumental combos in 1962 and 1963 were the same teenagers who grabbed a fuzz box and a snotty singer in 1965 and 1966. The Pacific Northwest had already been running the same model with harder edges: the Wailers had an instrumental hit with “Tall Cool One” in 1959, and the scene around them produced the Sonics. Garage rock grew in the same rooms, on the same Fender amps, often with the same drummers. The history of garage punk starts very close to where surf ends.

The line carries on into punk. The Trashmen’s screaming idiocy is a straight ancestor of the Cramps. East Bay Ray built the Dead Kennedys’ guitar sound out of surf reverb. Agent Orange played “Misirlou” at hardcore speed in the early 1980s. Punk wanted the tone because it is menacing, which the 1963 marketing never noticed while selling it as sunshine.

The difference in attitude is worth knowing. Surf exposes the playing; the reverb makes every note audible and every mistake obvious. Garage punk buries the playing in noise on purpose. That contrast runs through garage punk versus garage rock too, and once you hear it you hear it everywhere.

One small piece of evidence from our own corner. Across the sixteen underground radio shows reconstructed in our archive, none of them surf shows, the Ventures are the fourth most played artist on the whole network. Surf’s house band outlived the fad by being useful to everybody else.

Where surf rock lives now

Surf never needed reviving so much as rediscovering. A small purist scene kept it going in Los Angeles around 1980. In the 1990s Man or Astro-man? played it at science-fiction velocity and Los Straitjackets did it in wrestling masks with better tunes than most of the originals. Pulp Fiction in 1994 put “Misirlou” in front of millions and gave Dick Dale a second career.

Since then the sound has gone international. Laika and the Cosmonauts came out of Finland, the Bambi Molesters out of Croatia, and there are working instrumental surf bands in most countries with a decent club circuit. Plenty of them are technically better than the 1963 bands. Fewer of them can write a melody you hum after one listen, and that remains the only test that matters.

The full story of the second wave is in surf rock’s second life. If you want one record tonight, put on “Pipeline” with the volume up. If it does nothing for you, try “Misirlou”. If that does nothing either, head inland to the garage punk bands worth hearing, where the same amplifiers were put to much nastier use.