While his music featured most famously in Pulp Fiction, echoes of Dale’s sound can be heard across the rock spectrum
In theory at least, Dick Dale should have been a long-forgotten figure. He was the self-proclaimed King of the Surf Guitar, and surf music – particularly in its instrumental, twangy-guitar-led variety – was a brief fad: one of the passing fancies with which American pop occupied itself between the waning of the first wave of rock’n’roll and the arrival of the Beatles.
Those famous surf music advocates, the Beach Boys, had completely abandoned the genre within a couple of years of their debut single, cannily turning their attentions first to cars, then to the more general vicissitudes of teenage life; Dale’s career should have been over when Capitol Records dropped him in 1965.
And yet, Dick Dale wasn’t a forgotten figure. For all the sound he more-or-less singlehandedly invented should have been locked in time, a memoir of a forgotten, more innocent America, it wasn’t. You could hear echoes of his style – fast, very loud and heavy on the staccato picking – in a subsequent generation of virtuoso guitarists: Jimi Hendrix was a fan, but you really noticed his influence a decade later, when heavy metal came to be defined by the frenzied playing of Eddie Van Halen. At the other end of the rock spectrum, there was the Cramps: for all their devotion to the outer fringes of rockabilly, they audibly would not have sounded the way they did had Dale never picked up a guitar.
His original recordings had an afterlife that the man behind them couldn’t possibly have imagined when he entered the studio. Listeners to John Peel’s Radio 1 show in the late 80s became accustomed to hearing Dale in among whatever new indie sensations the DJ was playing that week; when Peel moved to the more cosy environs of Radio 4 to present Home Truths, he took Dale’s breakthrough 1961 single Let’s Go Trippin’ with him as the theme tune. When Quentin Tarantino used his 1962 cover of a traditional Mediterranean song, Miserlou, as the opening theme to his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, it revealed Dale’s music to a new audience, too young to remember the brief period when the King of the Surf Guitar could sell thousands of albums.
Dale’s guitar style was not born out of the standard rock and roll lineage: born in 1937, he was a fan of country music, but he was also of Arabic heritage: he was born Richard Mansour, watched his uncle playing the oud, and for all surf music came to represent a kind of sun-kissed white-bread version of American youth, the scales upon which his playing was based had a distinctly Middle Eastern cast.
He may well have been the first person to realise the electric guitar could be used not merely as a melodic instrument, but a bludgeon. At the height of his early 60s fame, he worked in collaboration with Leo Fender in the creation of ever-louder amplifiers: “When it can withstand the barrage of punishment from Dick Dale,” noted Fender, “then it is fit for human consumption.”
He enjoyed a brief period of mainstream fame, riding the surf fad: unlike four fifths of the Beach Boys, Dale actually was a surfer. Thereafter his commercial success declined, although he remained an inspiration: when Hendrix announced “you’ll never hear surf music again” during his definitive performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, it was apparently intended as a nod to Dale, who was fighting colon cancer.
Whatever the changing fads in rock music, Dale continued to be a live draw: towards the end of his life, suffering from renal failure, diabetes and damaged vertebrae, he continued playing live in order to pay his medical bills. He told one journalist he wanted to die onstage “in an explosion of body parts”. It would have been a fitting end for a man who worked out, before anyone else, that the electric guitar wasn’t merely a musical instrument, more a weapon of visceral power.
The Guardian
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