“Sound Of The Surf”

“Sound Of The Surf” is a new documentary about surf music, which had its time in the sun in the late fifties and the early pre-Beatles sixties.

It’s not about the Beach Boys, regardless of how many surfing songs Brian Wilson wrote. It’s about pioneers like Dick Dale, who packed thousands of fans into a club called the Rendezvous in Newport Beach, California, keeping the crowd dancing and stomping with rock instrumentals full of fast licks and dazzling guitar work.

Dale (who died in 2019) appears in the movie, along with other surf musicians of the era, some of whom made a comeback in the eighties when the genre suddenly got attention from bands in Europe and Japan. Then Dale’s career — and surf music in general — got another kick start when Quentin Tarantino used his song “Misirlou” to open the 1994 classic, “Pulp Fiction.”

Other than Dale, the only other bands in “Sound Of The Surf” that I was familiar with were the Surfaris (every kid in America had to know how to play the drum riff of their infectious song, “Wipe Out”) and the Ventures (who had big hits with “Walk, Don’t Run” and the theme song to “Hawaii Five-O”). But “Sound Of The Surf” gives screen time to others who rode the surf music waves, including Kathy Marshall, who started doing gigs at age 14 and quickly became known as the Queen Of Surf Guitar.

The documentary not only explains the birth of surf music, but also how it crossed over into mainstream pop culture. Hollywood jumped aboard the bandwagon with 1959’s “Gidget,” based on a novel by Frederick Kohner about his daughter Kathy, who was a real-life surfer who hung around the beach. Its success not only led to a TV series starring Sally Field, but a slew of dopey teens-at-the-beach movies, several of which starred Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon (e.g. “Beach Party,” “Muscle Beach Party,” “Bikini Beach”).

Surfing and surf music even made an appearance in the 1966 movie based on the “Batman” TV series, complete with Adam West wearing a ridiculous baggy swimsuit as the title character in a competition with the Joker (Cesar Romero). The documentary doesn’t include the footage, so I’ve embedded it for you…

I enjoyed “Sound Of The Surf,” which runs a quick seventy minutes and does a good job telling its story. My only complaint is that director Tom Duncan didn’t let us hear the songs for long enough, preferring instead to have people talking about them over the music.

I rate “Sound Of The Surf” an 8 out of 10. Available 7/1/25 via Video On Demand.