Surf Music

Slap on that industrial-strength sun block. Zip up that wetsuit. Wax up that board. Or just sit back beneath a beach umbrella and let these seaworthy songs do the surfing for you. The Atlantics were the salty kings of Aussie surf music, so it's only right that we catch the first wave to the strains of 1963's "Bombora." Brian Wilson was the Shakespeare of surf, and his Beach Boys laid down the U.S. scene's national anthem with "Surfin' U.S.A.," which got everyone hanging ten to a choogling Chuck Berry beat. And from its lunatic-on-a-long-board laughter to that hot-doggin' hurricane of a drum solo, there's no more convincing case of sheer surf insanity than the Surfaris' "Wipe Out." In Next Steps, the beach-bum boys' club gets a dose of feminine mystique.

Despite all the Mermen and Beach Boys floating around, dudes don't have a stranglehold on surf music. Brian Wilson's future wife harmonized with the Honeys — whose voices sweetened hits by Brian's boys and Jan & Dean — on the-beach-is-my-bible odes like "Shoot the Curl." They were undoubtedly an inspiration to later rockin' L.A. ladies the Go-Go's, whose Moondoggie-meets-Moonraker string-bender "Surfing and Spying" tips a tail-fin to the classic surf 'n' twang sounds of the Ventures and Dick Dale. And the guitar-guided missile of '90s alt-rock astronauts Man or Astro-man?'s space-age surf theme "Super Rocket Rumble" shows that instrumental surf sounds didn't die out with the mono recording. In Deep Cuts, find out why a rockin' surf riff's worth a thousand words.

While sultans of sand like the Beach Boys were busy spreading the wave-riding word, a posse of six-stringers tore into the super-tight twang of surf instrumentals. The powerhouse picking of Dick Dale made him the Duke Kahanamoku of oceanic axemen — he was not only anointed King of the Surf Guitar but can also be seen as the Granddaddy of Heavy Metal, thanks to his pioneering successes in cranking up amps and speakers to their max. Here, dangerous Dick shows off plenty of shred on arguably the first surf song, 1961's "Let's Go Trippin'." Boy and girl, young and old alike, everybody knows that the message the Barracudas swam with all the way from London still rings true: "Surfers Are Back," and we've got an endless summer of beach-bound sounds to prove it.

Jimi Hendrix was wrong. At the end of 1967's "Third Stone From the Sun," he proclaims, "You'll never hear surf music again." We love you, Jimi, but here's a reality check: surf music will never die. Not as long as the sound that sprouted from the '60s hot-rodding, board-straddling, sun-worshipping generation keeps on capturing the ears and imaginations of would-be ocean warriors the world over. Surf music can take as many shapes as seashells on the shore — it might be the Coasters-meet-Chuck Berry-in-Malibu sound of Jan & Dean and the early Beach Boys, or the electric-carving-knife guitar safaris of the Ventures and Dick Dale. We've scoured the sands to bring you the crest — and the best — of the surf-music wave, from the original beach bums of the '60s to the pipeline poets of today, and you don't even have to get your board-shorts wet.