The Complete Guide to Surf Rock Part 1: Rock Guitar Instrumentals

Recommended music

The Complete Guide to Surf Rock Part 1: Rock Guitar Instrumentals

By 1960, rock and roll was finished. Elvis was in the army, Little Richard was getting into religion, Buddy Holly was dead, Jerry Lee Lewis was suffering the moral backlash from his marriage to a teenager, Chuck Berry was in trouble with the IRS… it was the end of a very short era. But the spirit of rock and roll lived on in a grass-roots movement of garage bands on the West Coast of America. The scene was populated by beach-bums, bohemians and outsiders who partied until dawn and lived life by their own rules. Rock and roll was saved by surfers.

Surf rock, the music that energised the rising surf culture, kept the fire burning in America in those crucial years between the end of the rock and roll boom and the arrival of the British Invasion.

In the process it laid the foundations for garage-band rock, heavy metal, thrash and grunge, while also launching the career of America’s most successful band of all time and one of the most talented geniuses in pop music history. Not bad going for a genre that lasted barely four years, from its birth around 1960 to its final petering out in 1964.

Rock guitar instrumentals

Musically, the background and inspiration behind the surf rock style came out of the instrumental hits of the late ‘50s, from the likes of Duane Eddy, Link Wray and the Ventures.

From 1958 Duane Eddy started a run of hit singles produced by the DJ Lee Hazelwood, showcasing his gritty lower register guitar twang, including Rebel Rouser, Peter Gunn and Movin’ And Groovin’, the opening of which was later lifted wholesale by the Beach Boys for Surfin’ USA. Duane Eddy was never a real surf guitarist, but his 1963 album Surfin’ cashed in on the surfing phenomenon, as did his hit single Your Baby’s Gone Surfin’.

Duane Eddy, Rebel Rouser, performed on Hollywood A Go-Go.

Guitarists Don Wilson and Bob Bogle recruited Nokie Edwards on bass and Skip Moore on drums in 1959 to form a guitar-based instrumental rock band with a unique adaptable sound. Calling themselves The Ventures, their breakthrough hit came in 1960 with Walk Don’t Run, a song they’d heard on Chet Atkins’s HiFi In Focus album.

The Ventures adapted their formula to whatever cultural backdrop was prevalent, from The Ventures Twist Party album in 1962 to Super Psychedelics in 1967. Nevertheless, their influence on the instrumental surf group scene was undeniable, and they indulged the popularity of the sound with their own album, Surfing, in 1963. One of their tracks, Surf Rider, was later resurrected by The Lively Ones on the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s cult ‘90s movie, Pulp Fiction.

The Ventures, Walk Don’t’ Run, 1960.

Link Wray Rumbles

While The Ventures and Duane Eddy were a big hit with white middle class teenagers, Link Wray was the hoodlum you locked your daughters away from. Hailing from North Carolina, he began his career, pre-rock’n’roll, with his brothers Doug and Vernon in Lucky Wray And The Palomino Ranch Hands, pedaling their own brand of rough and rowdy hillbilly music. By 1958 they had become the Ray Men, and Link had established a brash and aggressive guitar style that was to change the course of rock music.

Link’s breakthrough came with Rumble, a swaggering instrumental named after the street fighting in West Side Story. It was barred from the radio for glamourising teenage gang fighting, but became a nationwide hit despite the ban. Other hits followed, including Rawhide, and Jack The Ripper, on which Wray strangled raw and distorted sounds from his Danelectro Longhorn, creating a revolution in the sound of the electric guitar.

Link Wray, Rumble.

Link Ray pioneered a new kind of distorted amp sound and invented the power chord – Pete Townshend has said that he wouldn’t have started playing guitar at all if it weren’t for Link Wray. Certainly hard rock and heavy metal would have taken a very different course without him.

Instrumental rock tunes like these were the music of choice amongst the surf bums who were forging a scene of their own in California. This was the golden age of surfing in America; advances in manufacturing techniques during the ‘50s had made boards cheaper and postwar prosperity meant that teenagers had enough money to pay for them.

Soon a new type of music emerged to capitalise on the surf phenomenon.

Recommended recordings

Duane Eddy, Twang Thang: The Duane Eddy Anthology – all the crucial recordings from the man who revolutionised rock guitar.
The Ventures, The Very Best of the Ventures – the prototype American instrumental guitar band.
Link Wray, Rumble: Best of Link Wray – the godfather of heavy metal and inventor of the power chord.

Next week: The Complete Guide to Surf Rock Part 2: The Original Surf Bands.