Thunder In The Surf

Certain genres of music have a timeless appeal and the ability to cross over various lines and absorb the each others elements. Blues drifts into rock and jazz. The deep felt lyricism of folk and jingly beat of pop crosses into metal and the dusty country flavor can seem to attach itself to just about anything. But when it comes to surf music, well, it truly is a stand-alone genre. There is nothing unmistakable about the grunt, scream and high-strung runs of surf that can be mistaken for anything else. And if you’re going to talk surf music, you have to talk about the King of the surf guitarists, Dick Dale. Even at seventy plus years old, Dick Dale can make his Fender scream louder and move faster than most players half his age and younger.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1938 as Richard Monsour, his family immigrated to the United States where they settled into the Boston, Massachusetts’s area. A natural musician, Richard taught himself to play the ukulele as a child using a book a chords and a natural curiosity. What the natural southpaw didn’t realize was that he was holding the ukulele upside down and backwards. Although this was pointed out to him later, he never changed his style. He purchased his first guitar as a teenager for a mere $8. Initially he didn’t know what do with the extra strings on the guitar so he simply muted them and played the chords he had learned for the ukulele. Later, as you would expect, he mastered all six strings but continued to play the guitar upside down.

In his senior year in high school Richards’ family relocated to Los Angeles. His professional career began the year following his graduation when he won a local talent contest called ‘Rocket To Stardom’ but not for the music he would later invent but rather as a country guitarist and singer. The victory led to local gigs and appearances on various television shows like Town Hall Party. It was during this time that a local disc jockey recommended he change his name to Dick Dale thinking that it would be more appropriate for a country musician.

While his career was still in its infancy, Dale switched from playing country rhythm guitar to a more rapid-fire staccato picking style instrumental on an electric guitar. His extreme picking and attack on the strings (known to ‘melt’ picks during his performances) and his use of exotic Middle-Eastern and Eastern European scales, Dale was unknowingly creating his own brand of guitar music.

It was during this time that Dale began to engage in a hobby that would help define both his life and his style of music; surfing. What he had hoped to do was somehow create music that would capture the wild white water thunder he heard and felt when he was on his board. It didn’t take long for the talented Dale to capture and transfer the sounds from the surfboard to the fret board.

By 1957, he was playing a regular gig at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California and his fans found the venue. There is a story that to ensure that all of his male fans would meet the dress code for the Rendezvous, Dale left a cardboard box filled with neckties at the door to be passed out to his surfer fans that were ‘under-dressed’ when they arrived. Within a few weeks, Dale and the Del-Tones were playing to a packed house of 4000 fans at the Rendezvous.

By 1961 Dale and the Del-Tones had released their first album, Surfers Choice (which was financed in part by Dales father). Released privately without a label to support it, the album sold an amazing 88,000 copies. Capitol Records, rarely one to miss an opportunity, grabbed onto Dale and signed him to the label. They paid him an advance of $50,000, which in 1961 was an enormous amount for a new hire. Dale paid them back royally by striking hot with the single Let’s Go Tripping which charted nationally and clearly established ‘surf’ music as a legitimate genre. His next two hits, Surf Beat and Miserlou (later to become the ‘sound’ of the immensely popular film Pulp Fiction) cemented Dale’s reputation as a hit maker. By the end of 1961, Dale had hit it big. 21,000 fans attended his show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

Dale worked along side Leo Fender while seeking a way to increase the sound and volume of his guitar work. But there was an added wrinkle. They needed to find a way to increase his output all the while creating a guitar / amp rig that could withstand the phenomenal abuse that Dale would impose on his gear during a performance. Leo Fender himself built the guitar that eventually became known as ‘The Beast’, a specially designed Stratocaster that could withstand the Dick Dale abuse. But the amp was a different story. Dale is said to have blown up 48 amps while he and Fender fiddled with the design specs. Some would simply blow up on stage. Others would actually twist the mountings for the speakers while in their cabinets and others would catch fire during his performance. But the quest for sound led Fender to Lansing Speakers and eventually the creation of one of Fenders most beloved creations; the Fender Twin-Reverb.

Twin side-by-side speakers enabled guitarists to adjust their tonal settings differently for each channel, making a bigger sound with interference patterns and phasing effects. It was also a monster of an amp, the only amp that was able to give Dale the crash and thunder he wanted to convey.

Dale and the Del-Tones set off a national craze and was indirectly responsible for helping create other legends like The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and The Ventures and was partially responsible for a host of early 60’s beach movies and a fascination with the beach / Southern California life style.

But like so many before and after, the initial arc was quick and severe. Dales career was hurt by his resistance to touring nationally and for the rise of the British Invasion. When the Beatles and The Rolling Stones captured the imagination of American youth, Dale saw his audience begin to shrink. In 1967, Dick Dale was diagnosed with rectal cancer. He stopped performing and moved to Hawaii to recuperate. Dale survived the ordeal and returned briefly to performing on a much more limited level. He also refused to record again saying in an interview “I quit recording because they could never capture my guitar the way it should sound. It’s so much more powerful and stronger”.

Despite having essentially ‘retired’ from music, Dale turned a small real estate investment into a successful venture and, in turn, used his wealth to buy a 40-acre estate in Southern California and his own music club. By 1976, Dale had essentially quit the music business completely and spent his time focused on his family and his collection of wild animals. He did again return once again to music in 1980 when he recorded and released one final album before hanging up his guitar again.

In 1988, Dale made a cameo in the beach spoof ‘Back To The Beach’ starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon (where he recorded an instrumental duet of Pipeline with Stevie Ray Vaughn) but again walked away from music. In the early 90’s, at the urging of a friend, Dale returned to San Francisco to perform. To Dales surprise, the gig was sold out, as were the next five shows. Given the warm and enthusiastic response, Dale jumped back into the music scene.

Dragging ‘The Beast’ and his cranked up rig back out on the road, Dale found a rather eclectic fan base waiting for him. Both aging boomers who remembered him from his initial screaming entry to the scene to youngsters who weren’t born until after one of his many retirements, greeted him at each show. But it was more than just the surf that inspired him. This time around, Dale caught inspiration from his menagerie of animals (which included Siberian tigers and African lions). “I’d think about the force from my mountain lion. My African lions, they’d roar at 5:30 and the ground would shake. I would feel that when I played on my guitar, and I would imitate that,” Dale told an interviewer.

In 1993, Dale released Tribal Thunder and a follow up Unknown Territory in 1994. The reviews were solid and fans were flocking to the gigs. Dale even appeared on the Warped Tour in 1996. By 2001, Dale released Spacial Disorientation on the Sin-Drome label. Dale still tours with both his wife and his drum and guitar-playing son joining him on stage.