Watch ‘Sound of the Surf,’ a Documentary About the Rise, Fall and Return of Surf Music

The floorboards of the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California, rattled under thousands of stomping feet. It was 1961, and teenagers packed the dance floor as Dick Dale’s guitar screamed through songs like “Misirlou,” an old folk tune he’d learned from his Lebanese uncles and transformed into a reverb-soaked anthem. The song became the signature sound of surf rock — a track so electrifying it outlived the era, roaring back decades later in the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

Soon after, bands like The Bel-Airs, The Challengers, Eddie & the Showmen and The Pyramids surged onto the surf rock scene, while Hollywood spread the surf craze globally through movies like Gidget and Beach Party, packaging the beach lifestyle into something shiny, safe and endlessly marketable. But when The Beach Boys arrived, many of the original players bristled. “There was a big question mark over how authentic this was,” recalled Paul Johnson of The Bel-Airs. To them, the Wilson brothers and their crew were “inlanders” trying to jump on a trend, co-opting and sanitizing the raw sound with glossy harmonies and commercial polish.

All of this history comes alive in Sound of the Surf, directed by the late Thomas Duncan and completed by guitarist and historian John Blair. Through rare footage and candid interviews, the film captures not just Dale’s swagger but the spirit of the kids who invented surf rock on the fly, swapping out jazz for twangy Fender guitars and discovering how far reverb and volume could take them.

AARP members can watch the “Sound of the Surf” documentary through Oct 17.

Vision Films

Although the music’s commercial peak was brief (the Beatles and folk rock swept the charts within a few years), the sound never disappeared. Surf rock has resurfaced in revivals over the decades and still echoes anywhere guitars meet the ocean.

Director: Thomas Duncan​
Producer: Thomas Duncan​
Language: English​
Run time: 70 minutes​
Release date: 2025​
Rating: TV-PG​