The ‘Cowbunga Surf Box Set’ looks like a surfboard. There are even textured speckles on the front that mimic a surfboard’s texture. Rhino, in general, does a great job with box sets. This one was pretty much well done overall. And my guess is that it exists because of the ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Quentin Tarentino’s nod to surf and hot-rod music.

When most people think of ‘surf’ music they usually come up with ‘The Beach Boys’, and this of course would only be the early Beach Boys (and certainly not much beyond ‘Pet Sounds’). OR – Dick Dale (the king of the surf guitar!) comes to mind. For the most part I do like the early Beach Boys stuff, and it is represented in the box, but I LOVE the mostly instrumental and heavily reverbed music of ‘The Lively Ones’, ‘The Sentinals’ and ‘The Astronauts’. I’d take ‘Pipeline’ over ‘Surfin’ USA’ any day. Most of the set focusses on the 60s, but the last disc covers 20 years of surf as it changed through the 70s to the 90s. ‘The Mermen’ get a nice nod with a live rarity.

When I worked at Blue Note Music selling guitars, we had this great used and pieced together Fender Strat and a Music Man Twin Reverb knockoff that had a great California surf sound. It would have cost me probably $300 for the pair, but I was barely scraping by with tuition and rent. The both of them sat there for months and I would play them pretty much whenever I wanted, but I was so heart broken the day I came into work to see them missing. I never did find such an ideal surf guitar / amp combo again… something about the pickups in the guitar and the spring reverb just matched on those two pieces… oh well… Still, when I picture myself finally getting another band together, it is always a surf group playing dense, modal melodies over pounding drums.