Dick Dale

Dick Dale is the one true king of surf guitar, the ne plus ultra, the sine qua non, alpha and omega, everyone else pack up and go home. The least of his accomplishments is documented in his appearances in '60s beach movies in which the renegade picker sports a hoop earring -- placing him about a decade ahead of the cultural curve with regard to male fashion accessorizing. With the release of his first single in 1961, "Let's Go Trippin'," he created an entire genre, surf music, as well as one of the most unique and influential guitar styles in rock & roll history. Among Dale's notable acolytes was Jimi Hendrix, who, as a guitarist in Little Richard's band, caught one of Dale's shows in the early '60s and, according to reports, spent a great deal of time afterward questioning Dale about his sound and style. In "Third Stone From the Sun," on Are You Experienced?, Hendrix signs off one poetic interlude with the words, "You'll never hear surf music again." That quote has been widely interpreted by critics as Hendrix's way of kissing off a moribund genre, but in fact it was an homage to Dale, whom everyone at the time (except Dale, apparently) thought was in the terminal stage of rectal cancer.

Dale's achievements are measured in far more than hot licks, though. Hendrix is acknowledged as having given birth to the guitar-effects industry, but Dale's sonic innovations of the early '60s set the stage for everything to come. Working closely with Leo Fender, founder of the Fender Electric Instrument Company, Dale, insisting he needed a "louder, thicker sound" for the crowds he was playing to in spacious ballrooms, pushed the development of an amplifier that would break all known sonic barriers. After Dale had tested and blown up dozens of prototypes, Fender made the first 85-watt output transformer ever used in an amp, and dubbed it the "Dick Dale Transformer." All that was needed, then, was a speaker that wouldn't disintegrate under the assault. Fender and Dale struck up an alliance with J.B. Lansing (of JBL speakers), who, after some initial skepticism, took Dale's specs and developed a 15-inch speaker that was the marquee component of the legendary Showman amplifier. Impressed but still pushing the envelope, Dale had another 15-inch speaker built into the cabinet, and thus was born the Dual Showman, one of the most popular amplifiers in history. When Dale unapologetically refers to himself as "the king of loud," it's hard to argue with his assessment. He was also one of the pioneer end users of the legendary Fender Reverb Unit, which he used initially on his vocals; later he plugged his Strat into it, producing a steamroller effect on audiences.

A multi-instrumentalist and first-rate surfer, Dale was in the vanguard of a sport beginning to attract a new, younger generation of fanatic hodads and gremmies, as well as civilian hangers-on who emulated the real athletes' fashions, language, and carefree attitude toward everything but surfing. The music Dale played and the culture he was immersed in were separate but equal entities until the late '50s, when he and his father reopened the grand Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, CA, formerly a big-band palace, and began drawing thousands of teenagers there and to similar venues he played in other areas of Southern California. In 1961, Del-Tone released the instrumental single "Let's Go Trippin' " (the title was slang for "going to see someone"), and it not only made Billboard's Top 100 singles chart, it stayed there for nine weeks. Its dominant features were a chorus shouting, "Let's go trippin'!" at the start, Dale's trebly, glissando-rich guitar lines spitting out the melody, and a wailing saxophone solo from one of the Del-Tones, Dale's backing band. In November 1962, Del-Tone released an album, Surfer's Choice, recorded live in the studio, that cemented Dale's image and sound. "He's the choice of surfers all over Southern California and all over the world because he's one of them. He plays their kind of music and surfs right along side of them," say the uncredited liner notes; the cover and two photos on the back of the album depict Dale riding a wave with the same panache he brings to his musicianship. Then the music speaks: It's a relentless, unforgiving assault, full of exuberant war whoops; ferocious drumming; razor-edged, double-picked guitar, heavy on treble; piano interludes that have a honky-tonk feel; and ballsy sax retorts to Dale's guitar juggernaut. Surfer's Choice contains Dale's most famous song, but in a version quite different from the one that found new life as the vibrant opening track of Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction. "Misirlou Twist" features violins screaming in response to Dale's breakneck picking, surging orchestral sections that add a Wagnerian grandeur, and a chorus of horns blaring in the background. The "Misirlou" of Pulp Fiction fame was released as a single in May 1962 and became a #1 single in Los Angeles in early 1963. In "Let's Go Trippin'" and Surfer's Choice, surf music found its genesis; in "Misirlou," its instrumental masterpiece.

Dale's second album, King of the Surf Guitar (not to be confused with the Rhino overview listed in the above discography), includes a swinging take of Leiber and Stoller's "Kansas City" and a rough-and-ready workout on Ray Charles' "What I Say." For the folkies, Dale delivered a tender reading of "Sloop John B" on Surfer's Choice; his country roots began showing on King of the Surf Guitar -- "You Are My Sunshine" and "Riders in the Sky" are on the same album that featured one of his fiercest vocals, on Hoyt Axton's "Greenback Dollar," another folk standard, and a brisk rendition of "Hava Nagila," a "Misirlou"-like exploration of Middle Eastern melody.

Dale's audience was a niche group -- he never sold albums or singles in numbers even remotely comparable to the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. In 1965, after five albums and diminishing commercial appeal in the wake of the British Invasion, Dale walked away from the music business. A year later, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and given only a few months to live. Surviving against all odds, he set out on a program of personal growth -- embracing issues such as environmentalism and endangered species while also nourishing his own burgeoning spirituality -- and eventually began performing again, in 1970, with a new group of Del-Tones backing him. In 1975, he rerecorded some of his early classics for GNP Crescendo, on an album released as Greatest Hits. Having lost nary a step during his self-imposed retirement, Dale's playing was rich and expressive as ever. However, he was more than 10 years past the original recordings of many of the songs, and had retooled several of them with radically new arrangements. The "Misirlou" here, for example, bears little resemblance to the original single or album-track cuts from 1961, and Dale's singing is a bit more restrained than it had been; "Sloop John B." sounds fairly tepid in comparison to the Surfer's Choice version.

Two excellent compilations of the classic Dale performances from the '60s are available on Rhino. King of the Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale & His Del-Tones from 1989 offers 16 tracks covering the 1961-1964 era; throws in a rare promotional-only 12-inch track from 1986, "One Double One Oh!"; and closes with a spectacular version of "Pipeline," the Chantays' surf classic, that Dale recorded with the late Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1987 for the Back to the Beach soundtrack. Otherwise, the fare is strictly vintage, from Surfer's Choice and King of the Surf Guitar, primarily: "Let's Go Trippin'," "Misirlou," "Surf Beat," "King of the Surf Guitar" (with background vocals by the Blossoms, whose membership included Darlene Love), "Hava Nagila," "The Wedge," "Mr. Eliminator" -- the lingua franca of surf music, in short.

In 1997, Rhino released a more ambitious Dick Dale overview via Better Shred Than Dead: The Dick Dale Anthology. Featuring 39 cuts on two discs plus a detailed booklet recounting Dale's life and career and valuable session info, the set includes, from the early years, the Del-Fi demo that became his first Del-Tone single, "Ooh-Whee Marie," and two other rare early Del-Tone singles; and from the later years, several choice cuts from Dale's '90s studio albums for High Tone and Beggars Banquet, along with some cuts from the now-deleted 1983 live album, The Tiger's Loose, and an album-closing treat by way of "In-Liner (Surf Beat '97)," a song Dale wrote and recorded for the CD-ROM game Rocket Jockey.

A year before Pulp Fiction revived his career, Dale made some noise on his own with a formidable return to the recording studio for Tribal Thunder; his work for the past decade has been remarkably consistent. As Dale himself would say: Pray for surf! (DAVID MCGEE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide