Summary.
Dick Dale invented surf music, and that would be enough to guarantee his
place in the history of music, but he also coined an influential guitar style,
a style that wed the frantic pace of folk-rock, the sound effects of
psychedelia and the fury of punk-rock years before any of these had been
invented.
Full bio.
(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
(Translated from my original Italian text by Ornella C. Grannis)
In 1960, the first musician to put to music the excitement of
surfing, Californians' favorite sport, was a guitar player from
Los Angeles, Dick Dale. Richard Monsour, born in Lebanon, raised
in Boston, owned of a record store in Huntington Beach. His
instrumental
Let's Go Trippin
was the great novelty hit of the
summer of 1961. Dale's Del-tones served as the liaison between
instrumental rock, surf music and garage rock
(Surf Beat, Surfin' Drums, Shake'n'Stomp).
Surfer's Choice (Deltone, 1962) is his historical debut album. The songs were phenomenal, full of a
nearly punk fury, driven by nearly psychedelic reverberation and
emphasized by the red-hot sax solos of Steve Douglas.
Leo Fender, owner of a guitar store in the neighboring Fullerton,
entrusted Dale with his invention, the Fender Stratocaster. Dale's
ideas and the sound of the new instrument, with a reverb unit purposely
built for it, gave birth to the classic style of surf music. Dale became
a virtuoso of the Stratocaster: he played it with the frenetic picking
of the mandolin, he played it upside down, he played it with all sorts
of sound effects. He was the inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix's histrionics.
Hendrix was one of Dale's fans, also a lefty and also passionate about
amplification. With the passage of time Dale became the king of
instrumental music, as confirmed by his second album
King Of The Surf Guitar (Capitol, 1963).
Link Wray and Duane Eddy were among his many
disciples.
Mr Eliminator (Capitol, 1964)
and
Summer Surf (Capitol, 1964)
were the last albums.
In 1965 Dale dropped from the scene, disgusted with the music industry
and sick with cancer, but reformed the Del-tones in 1970.
King Of The Surf Guitar (Rhino, 1989)
is an anthology of the golden age.
When the Middle Eastern sounding
Miserlou, his 1962 hit, was used as the
soundtrack for Quentin Tarantino's film "Pulp Fiction", Dale was rediscovered and began to record
again.
Tribal Thunder (Hightone, 1993)
contains a spectacular number,
Nitro. A punk spirit propels the ferocious performances in
Unknown Territory (Hightone, 1995),
from
Ghostriders In The Sky to California Sun.
Calling Up Spirits (Beggars Banquet, 1996)
includes a couple of
old songs,
Mr Peppermint Man and The Wedge.
Dick Dale died in 2019 at the age of 81.
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