Here’s a fun-fun-fun little documentary about the history of surf music, a movie that remembers the surfing “fad” and enduring appeal of surf culture and the “dripping damp sound” of Fender (usually) guitars pumped through amps that had to grow up to survive at that volume.
“Sound of the Surf” is about surf music, what gave birth to it, what it evolved from, its peak years in the early ’60s, and its ’80s and then ’90s revivals.
So naturally its about Dick Dale, the Lebanese American hep cat who turned “Misirlou” into every guitar player’s wet dream and who invented the fat, thunderous sound of surf intrumentals. But it’s also about The Ventures (“Walk Don’t Run”), The Chantays (“Pipeline”), Link Wray (“Rumble”) and The Surfaris (“Wipeout”).
Duncan, like some of those who appear in his film, has died since the movie was nearly finished. But fan, historian, writer and surf band leader John Blair (Jon & the Nightriders) is here to lead us through coastal California’s Hawaian cultural appropriation in the ’50s and the music that spun out of that.
We meet the original Gidget (Kathy Kohner) and hear about the confluence of events — youth culture, “Gidget” the movie, L.A. rock radio KROQ and young “inland” people “trippin'” down to Balboa’s The Rendezvous Ballroom (Newport Beach) for instrumental music you didn’t just dance to. You “surfin’ stomped” to the rumble Dale and his legion of imitators unleashed from that stage.
You might not guess that surf music spun out of the “improvisational, like surfing” jazz that early ’50s surfers were into, with Henry Mancini’s rhythmic thump theme song to the TV series “Peter Gunn” eventually becoming the template of what was to come.
The music burst out in ’61, that bubble between Elvis and “The Day the Music Died” and The Beatles. It was gone, done in by The Fab Four, “finished” by ’65. Jimi Hendrix’s famous recorded suggestion that we’ll “never hear surf music again” in ’67 could have been a jab or a lament about a sound that was vanishing.
But whatever the music’s elusive place on the pop charts and “American Bandstand,” a generation of bands erupted from garages, and inspired generations to come.
Dale and members of his band, The Del-Tones, as well as The Bel-Airs, Eddie and the Showmen, The Challengers, Kathy Marshall, “the Queen of Surf Music,” Will Glover from The Pyramids (It wasn’t just white kids making this music.) appear here and remember the era, the craze, the landmark venues and the evolution of it all.
It helped that guitar maker and amplifier inventor Leo Fender was close by, ready to hear out suggestions and modify amps to suit the speaker-shredding sound, and survive it.
It’s great seeing and hearing Dale repeat the story he told everybody who interviewed him (including me) after his “Pulp Fiction” inspired ’90s comeback, about how he knew this Middle Eastern song from his youth and thought giving it a manic, guitar-driven “Gene Krupa drumming” beat was a good idea, one more time.
And it’s always fun hearing old surfers and old surf music musicians rag on The Beach Boys, the guys who coopted and sanitized their sound — gave the songs lyrics and put out landmark songs and albums romanticizing and appropriating the culture that California surfers themselves were the first to appropriate.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Dick Dale, Kathy Marshall, John Blair, Bill Medley, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (Flo and Eddie), Will Glover, Kathy Kohner, Quentin Tarantino and Jello Biafra.
Dale and legions of popularizers of the music appear in Thomas Duncan’s film. Journalists and TV hosts, musical contemporaries (Bill Medley) and figures and bands who took up and revived the music, from Los Straightjackets to bands from Japan and Eastern Europe appear and talk up this phenomenon, where it came from and how it keeps coming back.
Credits: Directed by Thomas Duncan. A Vision Films release.
Running time: 1:10
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