Surf Music

"Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy that surfed. This is the music he listened to after a long day of Surfing."
Jim Pash, The Surfaris, 1991

A Southern Californian genre of the early Sixties, surf rock celebrated not just catching the perfect wave, but such carefree adolescent phenomena as the sun, beach, parties, girls and hot rods.

The surf music had two strains, vocal and instrumental. Jan and Dean started vocal surf music off in 1959 with their hit "Baby Talk" and followed with such genre classics as "Surf City" and "Deadman's Curve," all featuring their trademark high harmony vocals and bouncy denatured Chuck Berry guitar riffs. The Beach Boys came along soon after, scored a series of mammoth national hits, and soon eclipsed Jan and Dean in both popularity and significance.

Instrumental surf music featured throbbing tribal tom-tom tattoos and trebly, metallic, twanging guitar riffs: the Ventures' "Walk Don't Run," the Duals' "Stick Shift," Dick Dale and the Del-Tones' "Miserlou." Thanks in large part to the prolific Ventures instrumental surf rock has proven to be one of rock's more influential subgenres. Surf rock's influence can be heard in the music of Blondie, the Go-Go's, the Raybeats, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Cramps, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and many other musicians, including U-2 the edge. It made a splash again on the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction (1994), which included a song by Dick Dale.

Surfing the sport of Hawaiian kings was introduced to California at the turn of the century. In 1959, the sport received a boost from the movie Gidget, a tale of a young girl who spends a summer on the beach and falls in love with two surfers.

The innovations of two surfboard companies, Hobie Surfboards in Dana Point, and Sweet's Surfboards in Santa Monica, further popularized the sport. Hobie Alter and Dave and Roger Sweet replaced the heavy wooden board with a lightweight polyurethane foam strip coated with fiberglass and glossed with a polyester resin that could be handled more easily, an important consideration in the teen market.

Almost immediately, young people in Southern California started to buy the plastic boards and take to the waves. Surfing soon became an established craze in Southern California.        

Surf music is a genre of rock music associated with surf Surf culture, particularly as found in Southern California. It was especially popular from 1958 to 1964 in two major forms. The first is instrumental surf, distinguished by reverb-heavy electric guitars played to evoke the sound of crashing waves, largely pioneered by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. The second is vocal surf, which took elements of the original surf sound and added vocal harmonies, a movement led by the Beach Boys.

The new legion of predominately male teenaged surfers began to develop their own culture, dressing and speaking in a distinctive way. At high school the bleached-blonde surfers wore Pendleton shirts; sandals; white, tight, and somewhat short Levi's; and baggies - very large, loose, boxer-style shorts. After school they jumped into oversized station wagons with wooden sides (woodies), which transported their polys (surfboards), drove to the beach and dashed to the ocean. They ran with their sticks (surfboards) into the soup (foaming water near the beach) and tried to catch a wave. Some would only "fun surf" on the three-to-six foot waves. The more daring surfers would carry their "big guns" (surfboards designed for riding tall waves) into the water, pick up a "hairy" wave (a fast wave that is difficult to surf) and "shoot" (ride) it, sometimes "hot dogging" (performing tricks) to impress the "bunnies" (girls) on the shore. All surfers showed disdain for the poorly skilled or fraudulent, to whom they referred  as "gremlins" or "kooks."

Surfers listened to their own music that originated with Dick Dale and his Del-Tones. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Dale (Richard Monsour) grew up on the Southern California coast and joined the hordes of young surfers. A guitar enthusiasts, Dale had released a few in distinctive singles on his own label in 1960. Dale worked closely with Leo Fender, the manufacturer of the first mass produced, solid body electric guitar and the president of Fender Instruments, to improve the Showman amplifier and to develop the reverberation unit that would give surf music its distinctively fuzzy sound.

Rendezvous Ballroom

During the summer of 1961, Dale and his band unveiled the new surf sound during weekend dances at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California

Dick Dale and the Del-Tones released records for the surf crowd. In September, 1961, "Lets Go Trippin'" topped the California charts and edged toward the national Top Fifty. Dale followed with "Surfbeat," "Surfing Drums," and "Shake 'n' Stomp," and in 1962 produced the classical surf instrumental, "Miserlou." In early 1963, Capitol Records signed Dale and called him the King of the Surf Guitar. The same year he appeared in William Asher direct movie Beach Party, and by 1963 had become a California celebrity.

By the end of 1963, surf music had become a national craze.