Hey all, I’m 28 and new to the forum. I’ve been obsessed with anything related to Surf music since I was 10. Being on the younger side, I’m curious what y’all use to define surf music for yourselves. I’m sure we all agree that the recognizably wet, Dick Dale Fender sound formed is the nucleus of the genre, but the ultra-clean Challengers style and the later fuzzed-out Davie Allen branch also contributed a great deal to the aesthetic.

I know in John Blair’s discography he has a few parameters he uses to define what belongs and doesn’t and there’s always some debate over vocal tracks and car-themed numbers. Then there’s the orchestral side with Jan Berry and Jack Nitzsche, which is say nothing of the topical branches that inevitably grew out of the genre such skateboarding, skiiing, boating, and biking.

Personally I’m partial to the Wilson/Melcher-Johnston/Usher/Berry conglomerate of vocal tracks, but I’m curious what all your thoughts are on this topic? What parameters do you use to decide what falls under the Surf Music umbrella?

My Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/surf_album_covers/
Surf Route 101 (My Album Review Website): https://surfroute101.wixsite.com/surfroute101

Last edited: Jan 24, 2024 05:24:34

I think that everyone has their own definitions. I see Surf as a subset of the Instrumental Rock which emerged in the ‘50s and progressed over the years. In the early ‘60s, time, place, equipment, social trends and artists all came together in SoCal to make possible what became Surf. We had great amps, that were cleaner than what would have been available in the ‘50s, portable reverb, and some great guitar designs just about the time that surfing was gaining popularity and being noticed in the wider community.

However, these sounds spread further, throughout the US, so there were bands like Boulder, Colorado’s Astronauts and Minneapolis’ Garbage Men, who were joining from landlocked locations. There are no big waves in Boulder Reservoir or Lake of the Isles.

If you zoom out a bit, there is a lot more out there. While the US was using Fender amps and spring reverb, in the UK, The Shadows were using Vox amps and electromechanical delay units for their own clean, wet sound, but the word Surf wasn’t attached to this music.

Many Surf bands play Apache, for example, and I feel that it fits nicely with Pipeline or Penetration, but from a purist perspective, it’s not part of the Surf Music phenomenon in the US. However, I’m not a purist. I play some Shadows material and even reach back all the way to Honky Tonk, and the audiences seem fine with this.

Another example is Walk, Don’t Run, which started as a Jazz tune in the early ‘50s and became a Rock tune when the Ventures recorded it. The original was in D minor, played blazingly fast and clean, on a D’Angelico archtop, with no reverb to be heard. Yet, many Surf bands play this tune, and well they should.

As I said, everyone has their own definition. I love Surf, heard it as a child and thought it was absolutely great. Sixty years later, nothing has changed, but I also like the broader world of Instrumental Rock. While I appreciate the ties to surfing and the culture of SoCal surfers, I was doing most of my listening from either Minnesota or Colorado, and I already gave you the surf report for those areas. (FWIW, on can surf on the western shore of Lake Superior, but you had better have some polar bear DNA, ‘cause it’s going to be cold, even in summer.)

One other aspect of Surf music is the fact that a lot of early ‘60s Surf came from the Inland Empire, which is to say SoCal communities which were not anywhere near the beach. While the guys in these Inland Empire bands probably visited to oceans from time to time, they were unlikely to be part of the Surf scene on a regular basis, yet they loved and appreciated the genre; and who can blame them?

When I was still pretty young, my older sister listened to the Rock n’ Roll stations available in southern Minnesota, and when Surf songs came on, we were stoked. Maybe it was the ability to take an imaginary voyage to the warmth of Huntington Beach, while we were snowbound, or perhaps we just dug the twangy guitars, but I can clearly remember listening to hours of sappy teen angst love songs in order to be front and center when they finally played Pipeline or Walk, Don’t Run.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

DeathTide wrote:

Surfalbumcovers wrote:

what y’all use to define surf music

A few years ago I formed a theory - "classic surf" is a genre (~ 1961 - 1963) and "surf" is a musical style. A magical style that often features clean guitars, heavy reverb, and no vocals, but has a heavier side with distortion as well as a poppy vocal side, as well as many other incarnations of sound. Yes I love run-on syntax.

Well put Daniel

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

I assume you mean 'define by features', not parameters. Parameters are numbers.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart [1964] in a different context (being asked to 'define' hard core pornography), but that general intellectual model is my take on trying to categorize any type of music, or any art in general:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

The problem, IMO, with trying to categorize art into types is that there critical, intangible aspects that create important and non-trivial exceptions that will always defy any proposed taxonomy. Add to that totally different perceptions of what the various descriptions even mean. For example, what is meant by "clean"? How "clean" does it have to be? There are many different ways to think about aspects of any proposed features, and they almost always vary, depending on the person thinking about them.

IMO, the way these types of categorizations frequently happen is that groups of people get together and decide, "These are Type X, and those are not Type X.", and sometimes quite arbitrarily. Various rationales are used, but frequently style labels are basically marketing labels. And inevitably, there are different groups who have conflicting definitions.

As an example: I believe that, on this forum, most people would not call The Ventures a surf band. But I believe that outside the specialized surf music community, many people consider them a surf band. And in fact, if one was to categorize their early music by features (clean, reverb, twangy, etc.), they would probably fit. Personally, I would say, "The Ventures have played surf music, but I wouldn't call them a surf band." But in the end, I stick with, "I know it when I hear it."

The Delverados - surf, punk, trash, twang - Facebook
Chicken Tractor Deluxe - hardcore Americana - Facebook and Website
The Telegrassers - semi-electric bluegrass/Americana - Facebook

Daniel touched on Surf as a style, as opposed to Surf as a genre. In the early days, Rock n’ Roll was thought of as a treatment, or a style, and not a stand alone genre and Rock n’ Roll artists would sometimes play a Standard as Rock n’ Roll.

A song is a concept, but you can give it different treatments. If you played Good Hearted Woman over a Rock beat, it would sound similar to Surf. It’s tough to know where to draw the lines.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

I mean I think we’re all in agreement about the Ventures not being a surf band

Yeah, but I guess my point was that, if you define (in this case surf) music by features, then (at least the early) Ventures would be surf music. I mean, they hit every point that most of us point to - e.g., clean guitar, heavy reverb, melodic, percussive, no vocals, and so on. They even had an album entitled "Surfing".

So obviously, there's something else besides musicological features. I think, to a large extent, it's simply that the greater community of people who play surf music decide that something is surf music, which is a recursive definition. That is a very different approach than a feature-based taxonomy.

This all fits with my sense of where things are. There are lots of things that (growing up through the first wave, albeit on the east coast) don't sound much like surf music to me, but obviously are accepted as surf music. And yet the Ventures are not. I have no problem with that, and this is true in many other styles of music - country is the most obvious example. But I think it points out how futile it is to create a genre or even style taxonomy based on musicological features. Communities of some sort decide what's what, and it's simply that they decide.

The Delverados - surf, punk, trash, twang - Facebook
Chicken Tractor Deluxe - hardcore Americana - Facebook and Website
The Telegrassers - semi-electric bluegrass/Americana - Facebook

“I think, to a large extent, it's simply that the greater community of people who play surf music decide that something is surf music, which is a recursive definition. That is a very different approach than a feature-based taxonomy.”

Exactly. I played Surf tunes when I was first learning guitar, and I had no affinity to actual surfing, growing up on a snowy hillside in southern Minnesota. I had been to the Pacific once, and I don’t know that I had ever seen a surfboard, in person, even when I visited the Pacific beach. Interestingly, we did have a beach of our own, in Minnesota, in fact we had quite a few beaches nearby, but the closest was a bend in the river called Sandy Point, and high school kids flocked there in the summer, to sunbathe, drink beer, socialize, etc. No surfing would have been possible, but in other ways, it was quite similar to the beaches of SoCal. It was an attraction to visit, and there was an ad hoc “community” which gathered there, but most of us just thought of it as hanging out at the beach. If Pipeline came on the radio while we were hanging out, all the better.

Playing Blues doesn’t make one a sharecropper, playing Jazz doesn’t make one a resident of Greenwich Village, playing Country doesn’t make one a resident of Tennessee and playing Surf doesn’t make one a SoCal surfer.

The Ventures played a fair amount of what we would think of as Surf music, but they were a bunch of guys from Seattle, and didn’t fit the image that accompanied most Surf music marketing. But the Astronauts broke the model, because as I’ve said before, there ain’t no surf on Boulder Reservoir, but somehow they are accepted as a Surf band.

It’s all marketing. The Eagles were the quintessential Country Rock band of the ‘70s, with a heavy SoCal vibe. Let’s see, Bernie Leadon was born in Minneapolis, Glenn Frey was born near Detroit, Randy Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, Don Henley was born in eastern Texas, and when they added Don Felder, he was from Florida. There wasn’t a native Californian in the band until Meisner quite and they hired Timothy B. Schmidt … from that famous surfing spot called Oakland. Yep, you couldn’t get much less SoCal than the Eagles but Glenn Frey started every show with the words “were the Eagles, from Los Angeles”. I’m not objecting, but merely pointing out that imagery used in marketing doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, but it affects public perception.

The Beach Boys used Surf imagery, but most of them were not surfers, yet, if you polled people who were around in the early ‘60s and asked their favorite Surf band, I would venture (pun heavily intended) that their first choice would be The Beach Boys and if you confined the response to instrumental music, many would say The Ventures. True aficionados might name Dick Dale and the Del Tones, the Bel Airs, the Chantays, etc. but the average American from that era might not even recognize the names of those bands.

I think that there is a tendency for people, myself included, to develop nostalgia for things that never existed, or at least rarely existed. Even the King, Dick Dale, did vocals, and played some fairly mellow tunes, such as Summer Surf. Even in my youth, I don’t think that I could have taken an entire set played at the intensity of Miserlou. We remember the Astronauts for Baja and their Surf, but before that, they were the average ‘50s Rock n’ Roll band and had vocals. We remember bands for their notable songs, but most bands had much more to offer than their biggest hits.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

Stormtiger wrote:

One of the earliest surf bands, the Bel Airs did not use reverb but Mr. Moto is definitely surf music.

As I understand it, reverb became a big issue and led to the band members going in separate directions.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

nismosurf wrote:

No vocals. At all. Therefore, The Beach Boys ain’t surf.

J

When I talk about surf music, everyone over 50 says, “Like The Beach Boys”? My answer is always that The Beach Boys are pop music that use surf iconography. They are awesome, but not surf.

Makai

Last edited: Jan 25, 2024 21:22:37

synchro wrote:

Playing Blues doesn’t make one a sharecropper, playing Jazz doesn’t make one a resident of Greenwich Village, playing Country doesn’t make one a resident of Tennessee and playing Surf doesn’t make one a SoCal surfer.

I was born and raised in Southern California. My father had moved to California from the Midwest largely to surf, but growing up I had no direct exposure to surf culture other than my location. I was always into instrumental guitar music, but did not discover surf music until I was in my late teens and, ironically, living in the Midwest. I like that I do have a surf pedigree but that my love for surf grew not out of proximity, but finding my needle in a haystack.

We remember the Astronauts for Baja and their Surf, but before that, they were the average ‘50s Rock n’ Roll band and had vocals. We remember bands for their notable songs, but most bands had much more to offer than their biggest hits.

I recently tracked down The Astronauts complete box set and was very, very pleasantly surprised by their non-surf output, which is everything except Baja.

Makai

Last edited: Jan 25, 2024 21:41:49