Pop/Rock » Rock & Roll/Roots » Hot Rod

Hot Rod is simple, instrumental music that sounds exactly like surf rock -- the only difference is, hot rod has the sound of revving engines and screeching tires overdubbed above the cascading music. There were no national hot rod hits -- the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean may have sung about cars, but those were rock songs, not hot rodding songs -- but it was a cult favorite during the early '60s and it maintained a following for several decades. Once the CD reissue boom began mining the vaults for obscurities in the early '90s, hot rod earned a new cult audience among rock collectors, as rarities and long out-of-print hot rod records were reissued on labels like Sundazed, One Way, and Del-Fi.