Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar, Is Dead at 81
By Emily S. Rueb and Jon Pareles
March 17, 2019
Dick Dale, who was known as the King of the Surf Guitar and recorded the hit song “Misirlou,” which was revived on the “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack, died on Saturday at a hospital in Southern California. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by Dusty Watson, a drummer who played live shows with Mr. Dale. The cause was not immediately known.
Mr. Dale was a surfer, sound pioneer and guitarist whose unusual, percussive playing style and thick, thunderous music earned him the nickname the Father of Heavy Metal, and influenced the Beach Boys, the Cure, Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix.
Sam Bolle, a bassist who played with Mr. Dale’s namesake band, Dick Dale, for about 15 years, described him as “an aggressive and ferocious” musician who played like one of the lions he raised at his home.
“I played a gig with him about a month ago,” he said, and “he was still slaughtering people with volume.”
Mr. Dale was born Richard Monsour in Boston in 1937. He developed a musical signature that was influenced by the traditions of his Lebanese father and Eastern European mother, and the flamboyant big-band drummer Gene Krupa.
After moving to California as a child, Mr. Dale defined the sound of surf guitar as a musical expression of the elemental surge of the ocean, with its savage waves, its volatile crosscurrents and its tidal undertow. He played melodies that crisscrossed the beat with the determination of a surfer riding across choppy waves, forging a triumphant path above deep turbulence.
“Surf music is a heavy machine-gun staccato picking style to represent the power of Mother Nature, of our earth, of our ocean,” he told The New York Times in 1994. His almost constant tremolo created friction so intense that it melted his guitar picks and strings as he played.
“The staccato is so fast it heat-treats the strings,” he said. “They turn purple and black and they snap. And when I play, you’ll see a flurry of plastic — it just falls down like snow. I used to think it was dandruff. But I grind so hard that the guitar picks just melt down.”
His quest for a sonic impact to match what he had felt while surfing also led to innovations that would change the technology of electric guitars and amplification.
Mr. Dale in 2015. He called the surf music he played “a heavy machine-gun staccato picking style to represent the power of Mother Nature, of our earth, of our ocean.”CreditMatthew J. Lee/The Boston
Leo Fender, one of the electric guitar’s trailblazers, worked closely with Mr. Dale to create a guitar sturdy enough to withstand his style — Mr. Dale called it the Beast — and an amplifier that could crank up loud enough to fill a dance hall.
“Leo and I went to Lansing Speaker,” Mr. Dale said in 1994, “and we said, ‘We need a speaker that will not burn, will not flex, will not twist, will not break.’”
In the fast-changing 1960s, instrumental surf rock reigned briefly on the charts, and the Beach Boys used it as one foundation of their pop songs. Mr. Dale’s brash playing also found a fan in Jimi Hendrix, among many other guitarists, and, decades later, among a generation of indie-rockers who prized his untamed sound.
Chris Darrow, a multi-instrumentalist recording artist who has been in the music industry for 50 years, first saw Mr. Dale perform at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach in the early 1960s.
“The intensity and volume of the performances were such that the wooden building seemed to lift off the ground when he played,” Mr. Darrow said in an interview with the music journalist Harvey Kubernik. “Until the Beatles came along there was nothing that drove the audiences as wild like Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. He was boss.”
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“The only real surf guitarist for me is Dick Dale,” he added. “All the rest are imitators.”
In 1963, Mr. Dale’s music was catapulted onto a national stage when he performed “Misirlou,” an adaptation of a traditional Arabic song, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” That same song re-entered the mainstream in the 1990s, as the opening anthem for Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster film “Pulp Fiction.”
Mr. Watson, who played live with Mr. Dale for over a decade, said Mr. Dale had been sick for a while, but that “he’s such a bull,” he thought he would “power through it.”
“He’s an incredible loss for music,” he said.
Mr. Dale’s survivors include his wife and manager, Lana Dale, and his son, Jimmy.
For years, Mr. Dale struggled with health issues, including bouts with rectal cancer and renal failure. But he performed through the pain.
“Don’t worry about yesterday and don’t worry about tomorrow,” Mr. Dale told California Rocker, an online music publication, in 2015. “Don’t worry about yesterday because it’s used. It’s either good or it leaves you feeling bad. And don’t waste time or energy worrying about tomorrow. I could have a stroke and be dead. That’s why they call it the present. It’s a present.”
For him, music was medicine.
“I have to perform to stay alive,” he once said.
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