Davie Allan & the Arrows "Apache '65" (1965)

Album: Apache '65
Label: Tower
Producer: Mike Curb

Just about every surf rocker of note covered "Apache": Link Wray, Dick Dale, the Surfaris, the Spacemen, the Venturas. (Twenty-two appeared on a 2005 CD, from the French label Magic, called Apache Mania.) But the wildest surf-identified guitarist was probably L.A.'s Davie Allan, who led the band the Arrows and made much of his name doing soundtracks for American International Pictures' twixt-mod-and-hippie exploitation movies (The Wild Angels, The Born Losers, Thunder Alley).

Allan liked to shred-he's as much a precursor of Hendrix as a contemporary of Dale or the Shadows' Hank Marvin-and the slightly retitled "Apache '65" indicates an itch to take this half-decade-old already-standard into the future a little bit. Certainly Allan's noise helps. But "Apache"'s future would come from a very different direction.