A Totally Tubular Surfing Playlist
Songs to surf—or boogie—to
The Beach Boys (1963) in a Billboard advertisement. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Body Content
What goes best with surfing-related stories, besides sun, sea, and sand? A surfing soundtrack, of course!
Our Spotify playlist of surfing classics also pairs well with recent stories like Harry Gesner’s ocean-inspired architecture or artist Raymond Pettibon’s surfboard.
Gesner’s son, Zen Gesner, an actor who lives (and surfs) in Malibu, steps from where he grew up with his maverick father, selected several tunes. “These are songs likely to have been played on a tape deck in the backyard of our beach house—Sandcastle—during a hot summer afternoon in the late ’70s or ’80s, after Dad and I had surfed some beautiful waves just down the beach,” he says.
Harry and Zen Gesner
Photo: Courtesy of Zen Gesner
A Black Flag song on the playlist references Pettibon, who designed the band’s flyers, album covers, t-shirts, and zines in the late ’70s to mid-’80s (his older brother founded the group). The rest simply embody the surf music of the early ’60s.
A quick surf music primer
It’s easy to picture surf music coming straight from the Beach Boys. But the genre was largely initiated by a Lebanese American surfer originally from Massachusetts. Born Richard Monsour in 1937, we know him better as Dick Dale.
Monsour grew up listening to Arabic music and Hank Williams. He played the ukulele, and his uncle taught him Arabic instruments like the darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum. When Monsour’s family moved west, he started going by Dick Dale at country and western bars to blend in. He also became an avid surfer.
Dale soon formed a vision: to transmit the force, feeling, and sound of being one person against the ocean. Using reverb (an electronically produced echo effect), he evoked the wet echoes of crashing waves, and his heavy guitar strings unleashed such powerful vibrations that they sometimes blew out speakers. Some of his work featured then popular rock ‘n’ roll and blues, but Dale snuck in plenty of material unique to his heritage, blending Middle Eastern scales with an R&B rhythm.
Guitarist Dick Dale performing at the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, on May 28, 2005. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons
Most of the stereotypes we associate with surf music today are thanks to Dale’s vision. Around his heyday, dozens of surf guitar groups sprang up in Southern California and other parts of the United States, including the Beach Boys, whose brand of pop came to be called “the California sound.”
Listen to a selection of these songs below.
