Dick Dale is
the undisputed “King of the Surf Guitar.” But his laundry list of modern
musical advances doesn’t stop there: in the 1950s, he utilized his Polish and
Lebanese roots to become one the first guitarists to combine non-Western scales
with country, R&B, and blues. By 1960, after his waveriding peers had already
anointed him master of the oceanic domain, Dale’s machine gun-like, staccato
six-string picking blazed the path for early rock ‘n’ roll. And a fortuitous friendship
with Leo Fender led to the development and fine-tuning of Fender’s legendary
Stratocaster guitar model — when the crowds turning up for Dale’s
infamous early ‘60s Southern California surfer stomps reached into the
thousands, he convinced Fender to build him the first truly powerful
amp/speaker combo, blowing up 50 prototypes in the process.
And if
you’re a big fan of reverb, you’ll be happy to know that when Dale realized his
vocals were coming off flat and dry compared to his trademark “wet” guitar sound,
he disassembled a Hammond organ, removed the reverb unit, and had Fender create
the very first guitar effects pedal. It’s no wonder then that in addition to his
50-year reign as the “King of the Surf Guitar,” Guitar Player Magazine also dubbed Dale the “Father of Heavy
Metal.” And boy, does he have the personality to back up such a lofty title
— longtime exotic animal trainer, avowed vegetarian, pilot, architect,
environmental activist… EasternSurf.com caught up with the 74-year-old legend via phone at his Southern California home
for one hell of an interview, letting the legend rip for almost an hour about the
influence of indigenous peoples, the prodigious talents of his son Jimmy, and
the transcendent power of his music.
ESM: How was your Memorial Day, Dick?
Dick Dale: Everything was fine —
just give me a new body and I’ll be OK.
ESM: Why do you say that?
DD: I’ve been dealing with cancer and
destroyed bladders and kidneys — and now they just hit me with the fact
that I’m a full-blown diabetic. Your blood glucose level is supposed to be
between 80 and 120, but mine was 600. And the doctors didn’t even see it. My
wife Lana was the one who found it. The doctors were like, “Oh my God, he can
go into a coma and die at any minute! Don’t let him go on tour! He can’t go on
tour!” Christ, I just did 23 concerts all over Canada and back with my son Jimmy!
We just came back from Vegas and I had to sit on a stool, but I just ripped the
place apart. They put me on a pill to try to battle the blood deficiencies, and
I got it down yesterday from 600 to 532 points. I suppose I’m going to have to
take that just to try and stay alive.
ESM: Your first big hit “Misirlou”
was adapted from an Arabic folk song. Where did that influence come from?
DD: All the music I play stems from all
the indigenous people on the planet. My mother’s grandparents came from Poland
when they were 20 years of age, after they had gone to school in Russia. My
granddaddy taught me how to plow with a single blade and a mule, way back when
we lived off the planet Earth, eating cucumbers and potatoes and everything
else that you could grow. My father’s side of the family came from Beirut,
Lebanon, so my real birth name is Richard Monsour. “Dick Dale” was given to me
in Southwest L.A. by a 500-pound disc jockey named T. Texas Tiny when I was
playing country music with Johnny Cash before he ever wore black, Tex Ritter,
and Gene Autry.
As for “Misirlou,”
my uncle on my father’s side back in Boston used to play it on an oud, and then
I learned to play it on guitar. Every instrument I’ve learned to play was by
ear — first the ukulele, then the piano, then drums, then guitar —
and [jazz drummer] Gene Krupa was my first big hero that taught me my rhythm.
The name “Misirlou” means “the Egyptian,” and it’s an Arabic love song that’s
played very slowly so belly dancers could come in and dance to it. The words
mean, “Where are you my sweetheart?” So when I came to California and I was
playing what I considered rockabilly, this kid asked me to play something on
one string, and I said, “OK, I’ll come back tomorrow and do it.” I turned
around and said, “God, what am I going to do?” I started playing “Misirlou,” although
it was kind of slow. So I said, “Why don’t I speed it up and use the Gene Krupa
method?” I did it fast, and that’s the beginning of the story.
ESM: Another major part of your early
story involves Leo Fender of Fender Guitars. How did your fortuitous
relationship with him come about?
DD: Leo was like a second father to me.
In 1954, he created the Stratocaster guitar, just after finishing up the
Telecaster, which he made for country players. So I went up to him with my dad
and said, “Mr. Fender, I’m a surfer, and I don’t have any money and I’m playing
at a place called the Rendezvous Ballroom with this old guitar that I got from
a pawn shop. Can you help me out?” He was like Einstein — he never had an
outgoing personality, and he was so sensitive looking. But we had a couple of
things in common — he loved boats, and my family had a boat, a cabin
cruiser. I used to watch him spend all day drawing the interiors of cabin
cruisers. We’d sit in his living room listening to Marty Robbins on a little
10” speaker, and finally he said, “Here, I just made this guitar, the Fender
Stratocaster. I want you to play it and tell me what you think.”
Well, I
wasn’t a guitar player — I didn’t know an augmented 9th from a 13th. But
me and Leo and the gentleman who worked with him, Freddie Tavares from Hawaii,
became like the Three Musketeers. I was his guinea pig; Leo used to say, “When
a piece of equipment can withstand the barrage of Dick Dale’s punishments, then
it is fit for human consumption.” So Leo saw me playing these strings that were
not small strings — I used to call ‘em bridge cables — and when I
played the guitar I picked it up upside down and backwards. Leo just about fell
off the chair laughing, and he had never laughed before. That’s what I think
sewed us together. He said, “Why do you play like that?” And I said, “I’m
left-handed, and the book never said to turn it the other way, stupid.” And he
started laughing again.
So I kept
blowing up Fender’s speakers and amplifiers — they would catch on fire,
because when you’re pushing amperage through little wires into the cone, the
cone will heat up and actually catch flame. Leo said, “Why do you have to play
so loud?” People just didn’t play loud in those days. And they didn’t have amps
full of speakers. So Freddy dragged Leo to one of my concerts at the Rendezvous
Ballroom with 4,000 people there, and he understood why I had to play so loud.
I pioneered the first Fender Rhodes piano at the Hollywood Bowl, the first
Fender Contempo organ… anything that came out of Leo’s brain, he would have me test
it.
ESM: And from what I’ve read about your
career, you’ve done the same thing for your son Jimmy — exposing him to
live music as a baby and instilling him with that same philosophy of
experimentation. Are you just passing down Leo’s legacy?
DD: I was raised listening to every
type of music, and that’s what I started teaching Jimmy as a child. He was playing
the drums when he was 12 months old. But I’m talking about Gene Krupa rhythm,
not just some kid banging on something. I also taught him martial arts, and in
the martial arts, there’s a story. In the Shaolin temple, they never allowed
you to touch the skin of a drum for five years. Once you were no longer the
grasshopper, you learned that everything must be played on the one beat. They
don’t teach drummers that in the States; they always play on the one and, or the off beat. But Gene Krupa
played on the one beat. Why? Because he got that rhythm from all the indigenous
natives, from the Zulus and everybody else. They always put the spear in the
ground going Boom! Tick-a tick-a tock-a
tick-a tick-a tick-a boom! Like that, always on the one.
But drummers
don’t learn that; they learn on the off beat. And when they try to make an
audience clap along with a song, they try to make ‘em clap on the off beat, trying
to be fancy. But then the audience automatically starts clapping on the one. That’s
what grassroots people clap to! So I play to the audience. In the beginning, Jimmy
couldn’t do it. Now he can though — and he can do things on the drums
that I can’t even fathom. He jokes with me, “Dad, don’t get on the drums, it’s
embarrassing!” I have had the fastest-handed drummers in the world play with
me, but they screw up when they’re doing turnarounds, because they never
learned the Gene Krupa method.
The point is
that Jimmy’s taken the foundation of what I’ve taught him and he’s gone into
outer space with the heavy metal and the punk rock stuff. He could step into
any band that’s out there today and blow their minds.
ESM: Is Jimmy accompanying you on your
current East Coast tour?
DD: Yes, and then in July we’re being
flown over to Catalina Island [in Southern California] to play their casino ballroom,
which has a tremendous history — Guy Lombardo, Stan Kenton, every big
band in the world played there because it used to be the greatest vacation spot
in the world. So Jimmy and I will do a Fender dueling guitars things with their
new Dick Dale signature acoustic/electric. Jimmy will play drums first, and
then we’ll be sitting in chairs like the Smothers Brothers doing a three-hour
dueling concert. That’s going to be unreal.
But my main thing
with Jimmy is that he plays with this fellow that used to be a roadie of mine,
Laramie Dean. They’re clean-cut people. I’ve never had a drug in my life
— even in the hospital I took ‘em out of my arms, because drugs slow down
healing by 50%. No matter what the pain was, I took it, and I still take it.
Never had a drug. Never had any alcohol. Haven’t eaten red meat in 50-some-odd
years. That’s how at 74 I can still walk around and be on stage with cancer and
full-blown diabetes without taking drugs. That’s why I’m doing this tour,
because everybody in the band is clean. I’ve never picked an opening band; I can
just show up and play for a hundred times more money than I’m making on this
tour to Florida. I’m doing it because of the fact that I care about what my
son’s stepping into. When you’re traveling on the same damn bus as the rock
band and the people around you are doing drugs, slowly you can succumb to that.
Sex, drugs,
and rock ‘n’ roll? That’s bullshit. I’ve never done that. When I got through
playing, I sat down and signed every person’s autographs until they left, and
then I left and went home to my lions and tigers and raised them. Or I went
surfing sun up to sun down. Or I built houses and flew airplanes. I don’t hang
with people in show business. I don’t like musicians, and that’s what I’m
afraid of, Jimmy hanging with those kinds of people. When I go on tour, I ask
the same thing of my band — if I catch something going on, you’re fired.
And that’s it. So Jimmy will play drums for me because he’s clean-cut. My bass
player’s clean-cut. Everybody’s polite. You can’t find these kinds of people anymore
— it’s very difficult. And that’s the reason why I’m doing this when I
should be home, in bed, like the doctors say.
ESM: I understand your wife Lana also
tours with you?
DD: My wife’s a vegetarian — no
drugs, no booze, no nothing. She’s been that way her whole life, and we’ve been
together for the last four years. With her and Jimmy with me, we guarantee a
clean tour. That’s what I strive for. I can’t wait to go to Florida, because I
love Florida. That’s Lana’s place. She grew up in St. Petersburg and didn’t
leave until she came out to California to be with me. Her mom has Multiple
Sclerosis, and Lana has a tumor in her throat, and fibromyalgia, and she’s in
pain all the time. But she takes care of me like an angel and never complains
about her pain. We laugh about it, saying we’re a couple of sickies. But you
know the funny part about her? You wanna talk about karma?
ESM: Let’s hear it.
DD: When she was two years old, her mom
gave her a Dick Dale album with me holding one of my baby tigers and looking
straight at you. And she told her mother, “Mommy, one day I’m going to be with
this man for the rest of my life.” At two years old. She never contacted me all
my life. She just followed me on the news, and never got married. She said,
“I’m going to wait for him.” And she did — she never had a boyfriend or
anything. Then she saw that I was having trouble four years ago. I had two
eight-and-a-half-hour operations with three surgeons, and Lana said, “Mom, Dale
is in trouble, he’s really ill with the cancer.” And her mom said, “Contact
him.” So she contacted me, and we started talking through e-mail. Then we
started talking on the phone. And then every night for 19 months, we spoke for
six to seven hours. She would tuck me in mentally while I was dealing with the
cancer. Then we discovered Skype, where she could see me shaking every time I would
go to the restroom, and she said, “Mom, I can see there’s something wrong.”
So her mom
said, “Go to him,” and she took her own savings and asked if she could come out
to California. The first time we met, she touched me and felt my temperature
and then turned around and called the hospital and said, “Get him in right
away.” The day before I went in I collapsed unconscious, and for 11 hours they
were trying to figure out why. The technician and the doctor were looking at my
X-rays, and Lana walked right in there and said, “Gentlemen, he has three
fistulas, here, here, and here.” She pointed ‘em out and saved my life. My body
had been infected — I was over in Europe doing 40 concerts, always in
pain, and my body was completely eating away my bladder.
Then about
six months later Lana insisted that we get a big blood test, and that’s when
she discovered my glucose level was 600. She saved my life again. All this time
I should have been dead, and here I am out doing concerts. Can you imagine
that? So talk about karma — here she says she was going to be with me the
rest of my life, and 40 damn years go by and she comes out and saves me.
ESM: Wow. So she’s pretty much the
reason you’re still with us?
DD: Yep. One of the other reasons I’m still
on stage is it’s like a cancer club we have. All the children with diseases
come to my concerts when they’re allowed, and I talk to people who have had
tumors in their brains. They see me on stage and they say, “My God, you give me
the strength to keep on going!” That’s why I think I’m still alive — I
think whoever made us upstairs has kept me alive to be like a Johnny Appleseed.
People come to me and we talk about their situation. We laugh. I make ‘em all laugh.
Laughter is the greatest healing point of all illnesses. The music is nothing
but a door opener to that laughter.
UPCOMING DICK DALE TOUR DATES:
6/13 Respectable
Street………………………………… West Palm Beach, FL
6/15 Original
Café 11……………………………………. St. Augustine Beach, FL
6/16 Drake’s
Boathouse………………………………… Winter Park, FL
6/18 The
Vinyl Music Hall……………………………….. Pensacola, FL
6/20 Tremont
Music Hall…………………………………. Charlotte, NC
6/21 Hi
Tone Café………………………………………… Memphis, TN
6/24 OKC
Farmer’s Market……………………………… Oklahoma City, OK
7/2 Catalina
Casino Ballroom…………………………. Catalina Island, CA
7/3 L.A.
Guitar Festival.………………………………… Redondo Beach, CA
7/4 Huntington
Beach 4th of July Parade……………. Huntington Beach, CA
8/13 The
Coach House…………………………………. San Juan Capistrano, CA
8/28 Downtown
Ventura Block Party…………………… Ventura, CA
9/1 50th
Anniversary Concert @ Plummer Aud……... Fullerton, CA
For
all things Dick Dale, visit www.DickDale.com
