What genres or bands/ musicians influenced surf rock? Obviously it's a form of rock n roll and was birthed out of 50s rock, but I feel like there's much ore to it. It's almost like there's some flemenco, or country, or some jazz in the guitar style. Does anyone know what specifically would have influenced surf rock out new and old outside of the genre of rock?

Welcome Rome. I'm sure you'll get some good answers eventually. However, as you can see from Klas's post, a few pedants on the forum get offended by the term Surf "Rock" and prefer Surf "Music" and will respond with sarcasm.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

I am now playing trumpet with Prince Buster tribute band 'Balzac'

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

Hi Rome, Maybe this will help you determine the influences on the development of surf music. Here's a link to my Classic Instrumental Surf Music Timeline – Surf’s First Wave

https://surfguitar101.com/forums/topic/31843/?page=1#p426008

I created this timeline to help me understand the history of the first wave of instrumental surf music within the context of early Rock ‘n Roll, including early instrumental rock, as well as pop culture as influenced by the baby-boomers coming of age.

I also wanted to see a timeline of the release of key surf tracks. I used the December 2016 SurfGuitar101 / North Sea Surf Radio Classic Surf Top 101 poll to identify the surf tracks that I would include in the timeline and Billboard’s Year End Top 100 to identify non-surf tracks. I was interested in the order in which tracks entered the public consciousness to determine how they were influencing each other.

-Tim
MyYouTubeChannel
My Classic Instrumental Surf Music Timeline
SSS Agent #777

Ariel wrote:

SilverFlash, that's a amazing list, great work. Haven't seen it before, thanks!

Agreed! I missed that the first time. Great work, Tim!

I didn't notice anyone mentioning The Ventures! I would have to add that.

Also, I would point out the following acts: Indo-rock (like the Tielman Brothers), The String-A-Longs, Duane Eddy, The Shadows, Joe Meek/Tornadoes, Henry Mancini, Link Wray, Bill Justis, The Spotnicks, Bill Doggett, The Fireballs (heck lots of the Norman Petty acts), and...oh plenty more.

Instrumental pop was actually a thing in the late 50s and very early 60s. Hard to believe in this era of The Voice and American Idol, especially if you ignore disco chart hits, soundtrack themes, and acid/techno/bass-and-drum/EDM-types of electronica. (Then of course there were the panoply of big band and jazz hits of the pre-rock era.) If you don't ignore those, then it seems plausible.

Were John Blair to weigh in on this, we could sort this out most analytically. Maybe he will?

SSIV

Last edited: Nov 04, 2020 16:32:02

Paul wrote some more interesting stuff here too:

https://surfguitar101.com/forums/post/226800/

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This quote from Paul Johnson’s news article may be the best definition I’ve seen: “surf music is best understood as the west coast regional variation of the larger rock-instrumental form, which had enjoyed enormous acclaim nationwide all through the prior history of rock ‘n roll”.

Having been a child, growing up in the upper Midwest, at the time, the distinction was a bit less obvious. From the perspective of a kid in Minnesota, California was cool cars, beaches, drag racing and warm winters. Most of what I knew about California was from the artwork on model-car boxes, or what I saw in Hot Rod Magazine. Then there was TV and movies, which meant the Beverly Hillbillies, and movies. It seemed that a lot of TV and movies were set in California. I use the name California, because it was all the place, if you went by what was presented on TV. For all I knew, the Beverly Hillbillies walked to the end of their driveway and directly to the beach.

In all seriousness, the perspective of someone 1,900 miles away, it was more like being a spectator and we probably were more likely to associate The Beach Boys or Jan & Dean with surfing than the music. As Paul mentions in this article, https://surfguitar101.com/news/story/724/, they started out playing the Rock instrumentals and found themselves gaining the attention of surfers, whom identified the sound of that music with surfing. That leads me to think that the Fender reverb unit had a lot to do with all of this. From what limited experience I have on Pacific coast beaches, I know that the roar can be quite persistent. It’s no huge leap of imagination to link that to the sound of a 6G15, cranked up.

Reading Paul’s article has given me new perspective on Surf Music. It comes down to viewpoint, or as Einstein would have said, frame of reference. Had you approached me on my 8th birthday, in Minnesota, and asked me what Surf Music was, I would have said The Beach Boys, and this makes sense from a frame of reference which had no way of knowing what was actually going on in Southern California, at that time. If you had asked me where surfing was happening at that time, I would have pointed to the southwest, in the general direction of California, and I would have been right. The distinction between Huntington, Doheny, Malibu, etc. would have been lost on me, at that time. Likewise, I would have lumped Dick Dale, the the Chantays, etc. together with Duane Eddy or the Ventures. The factors which distinguished these as not being Surf Music were essentially invisible from my location and ranges of experiences, at the time. The first time I saw the Pacific was nearly 3 years later.

Then there’s the thorny issue of music recorded by session musicians. The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical puzzle about a famous wooden ship, kept as a museum piece. As individual boards deteriorated and were replaced, at which point was it no longer the Ship of Theseus? Likewise, if someone were to venture to coastal, Southern California in 1962, and copy a Surf tune, which they took back home and played that song, is it still Surf Music?

By one definition, it is a copy of Surf Music, but what if that person is an avid surfer and drives from Yuma, AZ to go surfing every other weekend? I don’t mean to indulge pointless scenarios, but this serves to illustrate the point that the tighter you try to nail down the definition, the more slippery it becomes. While Surf Music was initially a phenomenon of the Surf Culture of Southern California, it grew far beyond those roots and became a national phenomenon, but the frame of reference was different.

Likewise, if a mature session guitarist played a Surf song, is it still Surf Music? From the perspective of someone in a SoCal Surf band, the answer would be no, but from the perspective of a kid in Minnesota that heard Pipeline earlier in the day and wanted more of the same music, The Marketts were just fine.

It all comes down to definitions, and frame of reference. I loved hearing Duane Eddy on the radio, when I was quite young. I loved the Ventures, I loved Apache, I loved Pipeline and Wipeout. I still do. About 1/3 of the material Clutch Draggin’ and the Lug Nuts plays, is Surf. Much of the rest would be non-instrumentals from the early to mid ‘60s. We started out playing local car shows and Surf was very popular at those gigs.

One other thought comes to mind, which may well be lost on someone born in the sixties and beyond, is the role of instrumental music at the time that Surf Music emerged. Lawrence Welk had Top 40 hits at the time and was hitting the Hot 100 into the mid ‘60s. For guitar based songs, played by younger artists to venture into instrumentals was a bold step. Most of the instrumentals up to that time had been played by orchestras, or Big Bands. For some kids to show up with guitars, a bass and drum, expecting to be taken seriously was a real change in direction. Most amazing is how well it caught on.

Throughout the rest of the ‘60s, twangy guitar with reverb and/or tremolo became a staple in instrumentals that made no claim of being, in any way, related to Surfing. These might take the form of lush orchestral arrangements with a twangy electric guitar playing the melody. The original “Charade”, as used in the movie, started with a sparse arrangement of percussion with an electric guitar playing the melody. It then grows into a much more lush orchestral arrangement, ending up with the guitar playing the melody with the orchestra in the background. Before Surf Music, that was a very unlikely pairing. Beyond that, the Ventures were quite prolific in the ‘60s, with an audience far beyond the youth market. My father, whose tastes in music were quite conservative, loved The Ventures. Likewise, there was the Spy genre, the Space genre and Western soundtracks.

I would see this as a “long tail” effect of Surf Music. Not so much derived from Surf, but the basic guitar sound grew into other genres. Surf sort of paved the way for this expansion, although, to be fair, you could credit it back to Duane Eddy just as easily. Perhaps the best thing to say would be that the popularity of Surf helped bring this sound to a greater audience, and helped it make the leap from the youth market to acceptance in movies, etc.

bigtikidude wrote:

I’d say jazz was a big influence on surf.
also possibly exotica and Hawaiian music.

do you mean that I the sense of instrumental melodic lines being out front?

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

websurfer wrote:

I too found it interesting to revisit PJ' posts. Given his unique vantage point at the time this was going down, his opinions have to carry a lot of weight. I would call it a minimalist view--tightly prescribed. Perhaps it has to be to make a convincing narrative and definition. Some of what Synchro says points to inconsistencies. The threads linked to by Brian above contain similar questions by some members. I don't think PJ ever addressed them. It's likely he thought of all of that when he shared his views and had no interest in defending his opinions.

Some things that stood out:

No surf music before the Summer of 1961
Studio creations by session musicians are not real surf music.
Paul did not intentionally write surf music. His music didn't become surf music until actual surfers called it such.
The first use of recorded reverb he recalls is The Tornadoes "Bustin' Surfboards".
Neither Mr. Moto or Let's Go Trippin' were made with surfing in mind.

To me, that last is easier to believe of Mr. Moto than of "Let's Go Trippin'" since the latter always made me think of a trip to the beach.

If I have misstated the views of PJ, that is fully my fault. Corrections welcome.

At some level, it all comes down to point of view/frame of reference. I respect PJ’s analysis. It is pretty hard to dispute with the guy that was there at the beginning. My comments were just to show that rom the frame of reference of a 7-8 year old kid in Minnesota, hearing his older sister’s music, the logical grouping looked different. I doubt that I would have even known what a surfboard looked like, at the time, but that doesn’t disqualify my opinion. I was neither a Surfer or a musician, but I was a listener, and ultimately, the listeners are the consumers.

PJ mentioned that they were endeavoring to play the Instrumental Rock of the era and the Surfers, the consumers of the music, named it Surf music. I wonder if the explosion of Surf Music happened to be one of those accidents of circumstance where Instrumental Rock, The Twist, and a growing interest in Surfing all happened at the same time and place, and right about then, reverb became available to musicians as a portable effect which could be easily taken to gigs. It was a Perfect Storm situation. Had any of these elements been changed, the outcome might have been quite different.

Reading PJ’s comments puts a lot of perspective on the matter. Up until reading these comments, I never understood why the boundaries were where they were, but now I do. The only place I would conclude differently would be the effect of time. Surf Music originated exactly as he described, and having been there at the time, he would know.

But over time, the popularity of the music increased and it grew outward. Surf Music was imitated, by Joe Saracino, but also by landlocked bands, such as the Astronauts. I’ve been to Boulder, CO hundreds of times, and seen a lot of sights, including a dead ringer for Santa Claus, a businessman that wore the full Scottish get-up (kilt included) instead of a suit, a guy that kept a pet Mountain Lion in his F250 and innumerable Hippie types, but I’ve never seen so much as one surfer. So, as I see it, matters changed as Surf Music became a national phenomenon.

Nothing is static in this world, so the Ship of Theseus is something we deal with all the time. Is the Ship of Theseus the matter of which the ship is comprised, or is it the concept of the ship? If I put a set of new tires on my pickup, is it the same truck? It’s all frame of reference. So, if some kids played instrumental rock for surfers and the surfers called it Surf Music, that is describing a situation; one which is very limited in scope. By that definition, surfers have to be present, for it to be surf music. But then, one could use that to question the Astronauts Baja, because if they came up with that in Boulder, should it be called Hippie Music?

I don’t mention this to challenge Paul Johnson, in any way shape or form. I have great respect for the man and he was certainly present for the birth of Surf Music. My point is simply that the music outgrew that particular situation. So, we’re back to the Ship of Theseus; if a person in the Midwest takes guitar lessons in 1966 and learns Pipeline, is it still Surf Music? The breakers on Lake Minnetonka ain’t so impressive.

There’s no way to come up with an absolute definition that will satisfy everyone. Paul Johnson has an excellent point, and by dint of his firsthand experience, it’s quite authoritative. But by that strict definition, a lot of what is thought of as Surf could be considered Instrumental Rock, which is exactly what the Belairs were playing when the surfers decided that it should be called Surf Music.

My personal solution is to see Surf as a subset of Instrumental Rock, and to see Instrumental Rock of the early ‘60s as being a development of Duane Eddy and his peers, but with the added element of the Twist beat, which was influencing a lot of youth-market music at the time. Surfing hit critical mass as a social phenomenon at about the same time and it’s no surprise that the Instrumental Rock of that time would be identified with Surfing. Add into the mix the development of portable spring reverb units, which added a sound which was somewhat reminiscent of the roar of the waves and you have a very unique mix of factors, which leave us with an interesting musical legacy.

In any event, I love it.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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