Surf Beat is the first book to tell the story of the birth of surf
music, and its persistent survival and reinvention in the face of
decades of dismissal as a mere cultural aberration. Conventional wisdom
posits that rock 'n' roll languished in the period between 1959 and
1963. Yet in that four-year stretch between Elvis joining the army and
Buddy Holly's death, and the emergence of the Beatles, a musical
revolution took place in Southern California that would influence all
electric guitar forms that followed it. They called it surf music, and
in Surf Beat, the genre finally gets its day in the sun. Surf music
authority and author Kent Crowley uncovers the story of the initial
emergence of surf music as first a local, then a national and
international phenomenon, and its subsequent waves of popularity through
the ensuing decades.