Origins
On July 1, 1961, Dick Dale played his first gig at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California. Seventeen people showed up, most of them his surfer friends. Within four months, he was selling out the 4,000-capacity venue every Saturday night. The kids danced something called the Surfer Stomp, and Dale played loud enough for them to feel the music in their chests.
Dale, born Richard Monsour to a Lebanese father and Polish mother, was left-handed and played a right-handed Fender Stratocaster flipped upside down. Unlike Hendrix, who restrung his reversed guitars, Dale left the strings as they were, heaviest at the bottom. He strung his gold Strat, nicknamed “the Beast,” with gauges from .016 to .060 and attacked near the bridge with heavy picks, producing enormous tension and a biting, metallic tone. His picking was a rapid-fire alternating technique he described as “a heavy machine-gun staccato,” learned from watching his uncle play the oud.
He kept blowing up amplifiers. The 10-watt Fender amps of the era couldn’t handle his attack, so he brought the destroyed units back to Leo Fender’s shop in Fullerton. Fender, fascinated rather than annoyed, used Dale as a stress tester. Together they developed the first 100-watt guitar amplifier, the Dual Showman, with an 85-watt transformer that peaked at 100 watts, paired with a custom 15-inch JBL D130F speaker. Dale blew those up too. Fender kept building.
Then came the reverb. In 1961, Fender introduced the standalone Reverb Unit, model 6G15: a small box housing a Hammond Type IV spring reverb tank, two preamp tubes, and a power tube. Spring reverb had been developed decades earlier by Bell Labs for Laurens Hammond’s home organs. Fender repurposed it for guitar, and Dale made it central to his sound. The result was a wetter, more sustained tone, a dripping, cavernous quality that suggested water, space, and motion. Spring reverb and surf guitar became inseparable.
The Music
Dale’s September 1961 single Let’s Go Trippin’, released on his own Deltone Records, is generally considered the first surf rock record. It hit number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1962, two months before the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ charted. But the track that defined his career came from somewhere much older. At a concert, someone challenged Dale to play an entire song on one string. He remembered his Lebanese uncle playing Misirlou, a folk song from the Eastern Mediterranean whose origins trace back to the 1920s, on a single oud string. Dale rearranged it at vastly increased tempo for electric guitar. His 1962 version, played on one string with tremolo picking at near-impossible speed, became the genre’s signature piece.
The scene expanded fast. The Bel-Airs, five high schoolers from South Bay, Los Angeles, recorded Mr. Moto almost simultaneously with Let’s Go Trippin’, its flamenco-influenced intro broadening the sonic palette. The Chantays, five students from Santa Ana High School, recorded Pipeline in 1962 with an unusual mix: bass guitar, electric piano, and rhythm guitar up front, lead guitar and drums recessed. It reached number 4 on the Hot 100. The Surfaris, four teenagers from Glendora, needed a B-side for Surfer Joe and cooked up Wipe Out in fifteen minutes at Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga. Drummer Ron Wilson, seventeen, played a solo that was actually a cadence from his high school marching band. Their manager Dale Smallin provided the cackling intro over the sound of a snapping board. It reached number 2 in the summer of 1963, held from the top only by Stevie Wonder’s Fingertips.
The Ventures, from Tacoma, Washington, predated the California scene. Their 1960 version of Walk, Don’t Run hit number 2 nationally and established them as the best-selling instrumental group of all time, with over fifty albums and thirty-seven chart entries. Lead guitarist Nokie Edwards developed a clean, precise picking style that influenced virtually every instrumental surf band that followed.
Vocal Surf and the Peak
The second wave was vocal. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had studied music theory and could arrange tight four- and five-part harmonies for himself, his brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Their 1963 single Surfin’ U.S.A. was so closely modeled on Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen that Berry received a songwriting credit after legal action. It reached number 3. Wilson’s obsession with Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, particularly the Ronettes’ Be My Baby (which he said he listened to over a thousand times), drove increasingly layered productions. By 1966, Pet Sounds had left the beach entirely, but the foundation was surf harmony.
Jan Berry and Dean Torrence’s Surf City, co-written with Brian Wilson, became the first surf song to reach number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1963. For a brief window, surf music was the dominant sound in American pop.
It ended fast. On February 7, 1964, the Beatles arrived in the United States. By the end of that year, one-third of all top ten hits were by British acts. Instrumental surf virtually disappeared overnight. The Beach Boys adapted and survived; most others did not.
Revival and Afterlife
Surf rock refused to stay buried. In the 1980s, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, a Toronto trio, applied punk energy to Dick Dale-style instrumentals and became the house band for the sketch comedy show The Kids in the Hall. Man or Astro-Man?, formed in Auburn, Alabama in the early 1990s, fused surf guitar with science fiction themes, theremins, and Tesla coils. Satan’s Pilgrims, five musicians living in the same house in Portland’s Ladd’s Addition neighborhood, started playing early-sixties surf in 1992. Los Straitjackets, a Nashville band, performed in matching black suits and Mexican lucha libre wrestling masks that guitarist Danny Amis had bought outside arenas in Mexico City.
Then Quentin Tarantino opened Pulp Fiction with Misirlou in 1994. Dale’s thirty-two-year-old recording, played over the opening titles, reintroduced surf guitar to a global audience. Tarantino said that using Misirlou as the opening credit “just says you’re watching an epic.” The soundtrack also featured the Tornadoes, the Revels, and the Lively Ones, sending a generation back to the source material. Dale toured actively for the next two decades until his death in 2019.
The genre’s real legacy is the equipment. Dale and Fender’s partnership produced the Dual Showman amplifier, the standalone spring reverb unit, and the heavy-gauge Stratocaster setup that became the foundation of loud electric guitar. Every rock guitarist who has plugged into a Fender amp with reverb is playing an instrument designed, in part, to keep up with a left-handed surfer from Balboa who kept destroying everything Leo Fender built.
Essential Listening
- Dick Dale and His Del-Tones – Surfer’s Choice (1962)
- The Beach Boys – Surfin’ U.S.A. (1963)
- The Ventures – Walk, Don’t Run (1960)
- The Surfaris – Wipe Out! (1963)
- The Chantays – Pipeline (1963)
- The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)
- Dick Dale – King of the Surf Guitar (1963)
- The Astronauts – Surfin’ with the Astronauts (1963)
- The Trashmen – Surfin’ Bird (1964)
- Man or Astro-Man? – Experiment Zero (1996)
- Los Straitjackets – The Utterly Fantastic and Totally Unbelievable Sound of Los Straitjackets (1995)
- Satan’s Pilgrims – Plymouth Rock: The Best of Satan’s Pilgrims (1997)