Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Surfin’ to Space and Back

Surf Guitar and Outer Space are two great tastes that taste great together

Today’s theme for the Tune Two-Fer: Space Surf Guitar!

Although I’d heard examples of it previously, the first time I became aware of combining surf rock and sci-fi was on Space Mountain at Disneyland, when it debuted the soundtrack with Dick Dale doing a space surf version of Carnival of the Animals. It seemed like such a novelty, even though it made perfect sense: the “golden age” of surf music roughly coincided with the popularity of sci-fi B movies and TV series.

“Out of Limits” by The Marketts is the most obvious example I’ve heard; a frankly shameless surf guitar riff on the Twilight Zone theme.

I admit that I’d always just assumed that combining space and surf guitar was a novelty the Pixies invented, on Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde. In my defense, if you compare their cover of “Cecilia Ann” on Bossanova with the original by the Surftones, it does sound like the song had spent decades Earthbound until the Pixies added otherworldly organs and echoes.

The above links are from Apple Music; here are the Spotify versions, if that’s your thing:

3 thoughts on “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Surfin’ to Space and Back”

    1. Thanks for the suggestion! I tried to get into them in college because Joel Hodgson would mention them frequently on MST3K, but I just bounced off of everything I heard.

    2. I should mention: I like the song that you linked to better than anything else I’ve heard by them. I notice that that album isn’t available on any of the streaming or online services I use, but the tracks from YouTube are pretty great. I wonder if I was just listening to the wrong stuff when I tried to get into them before?

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