Show #69: King of the Surf Guitar

May 18th, 2006

Firstly, I apologize for the delay in getting this week’s show posted. My time and my PCs CPU cycles have been dedicated recently to DVD authoring. I have made many a coaster the past week or so. Anyway, I am presenting a little Dick Dale this week as he played here in Madison last weekend and the weather is taking a turn from the rainy towards the sunny.

(Photo by Randy Davis.)

Dick Dale is known as the “King of the Surf Guitar” because he invented surf music back in the 1950s. As Dale has related in many interviews, he spent his days back then surfing sunup to sudown and then would play to a packed house at the Rendezvous Ballroom out in Balboa, California. Although he’d been playing surf rock for a while with his band, The Del-Tones, his reputation didn’t extend much beyond southern California. In 1961, he released the single “Let’s Go Trippin’” and his first album, Surfer’s Choice, the following year. These recordings are considered to be initial salvos of surf rock on record.

Dale’s live performances featuring his fast staccato picking pushed the amp technology of the time. But a friendship with guitar pioneer Leo Fender and Dale’s adoption of the Fender Stratocaster led to technical innovation. From Dale’s webpage:

Leo Fender gave the Fender Stratocaster along with a Fender Amp to Dale and told him to beat it to death and tell him what he thought of it. Dale took the guitar and started to beat it to death, and he blew up Leo Fender’s amp and blew out the speaker. Dale proceeded to blow up forty nine amps and speakers; they would actually catch on fire.

A special 85 watt output transformer was made that peaked 100 watts when Dale would pump up the volume of his amp, this transformer would create the sounds along with Dale’s style of playing, the kind of sounds that Dale dreamed of.

After Surfer’s Choice, Dale’s technical demands led to the creation of the Fender Tank Reverb and his guitar sound has been instantly recognizable since. The “wet” reverb-laden sound made its initial appearance on 1962’s “Miserlou”, an old Greek folk tune that Dale revamped as a rock’n'roll song.

After a few albums and lots of live performances, Dale retired in 1965 to battle rectal cancer. Five years later, he reformed The Del-Tones and began gigging in southern California again. But his comeback didn’t really happen until 1987 when he performed a cover of The Chantays’ “Pipeline” with Stevie Ray Vaughn in the Annette Funicello movie, Back to the Beach. (The performance was nominated for a Grammy.) Eventually Hightone records signed him and he released Tribal Thunder in 1993. The following year, “Miserlou” was featured in film Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino and this increased Dale’s popularity immensely or, at least, the popularity of “Miserlou”. Unknown Territory followed in 1994 and then he moved to the Beggars Banquet label and released Calling Up Spirits in 1996. And this is where today’s show fits into the picture.

This performance was recorded on 6 April 1997 at The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is a nice soundboard recording.

Setlist:

Shredded Heat
Nitrus
Trail of Tears
Bendito
Ghost Riders in the Sky
Caterpillar Crawl
Rumble
Bo Diddley
Peter Gunn theme
Fever
Esperanza
Miserlou

Download show

Dick Dale

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3. Show #68: King's X
4. Show #61: Buck Owens
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