The Surf 20

Ah, the sound of surf guitar: a Fender Jaguar or Jazzmaster through the metallic sproing of a spring reverb unit set to full depth. After all, we call reverb “wet,” and surfing is certainly a wet sport, right? For many years this has defined the tone of surf and ’60s-era instrumental guitar music, but it was not always thus. As a matter of fact, the most notable name in all of surf guitar, Dick Dale, founded the sound using entirely different components, and he will tell you that the classic surf tone is something very different.

Some hardcore fans of the genre would credit the obscure garage band The Northern Lights with recording the first surf tune, “Typhoid,” in 1961, or The Bel Airs with being the first genuine surf band. Their “Mr Moto” single of 1961 is archetypal, although their sound was also heavily laced with sax and piano, not the instruments that have come to define surf music today, as viewed retrospectively (from a guitarist’s perspective, at least!). The entire genre was certainly prefigured by instrumental rock and roll and pop tunes from artists such as Duane Eddy, The Ventures, The Shadows (from the U.K.), Link Wray, Johnny and the Hurricanes and others, but many of these were tamer and, crucially, existed before the “surf” tag was coined — and didn’t entirely capture what we now think of as “the sound” anyway.

Amid all of this, though, Dick Dale arose from his roots as a country singer in the late ’50s to be hailed as the “King of the Surf Guitar” by many fans even before the turn of the decade. He created the most sensation for the sound by filling the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, Calif., and later the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, with standing-room crowds of 3,000 to 4,000 people every weekend night of the year in the early 1960s. He also arguably generated the most energy, with his furious vibrato-picked solos and frenetic musical embodiment of the whole surfer lifestyle. Dale really surfed, unlike many musicians, and at night he went out and played the guitar like a man on a two-hour adrenaline rush.