Dick Dale is King of the Surf Guitar, no question. 

It is one thing to be a shredder, to be a technically proficient guitar player or have extraordinary amounts of soul, but it something else completely to be able to claim to be King of anything. Well, not only did Dale pioneer the surf rock sound, but he also pioneered rock music in general, and has even been referred to as the "The Father of Heavy Metal" by Guitar Player magazine. This sounds like a big role to fill, but Dale’s been there for years. 

It all started back in the mid-1950s, when Dale was the first to turn Balboa, CA’s famous Rendezvous Ballroom from a jazz nightspot to a rock nightspot, packing the place out with eager young dancers and surfers looking for some loud music and a good time. In 1956, Dale was approached by guitar and amplifier wizard Leo Fender, who asked Dale to try something out for him. 

Fender handed Dick Dale the first Fender Stratocaster guitar and a Fender amp and asked him to put it through its paces. Dale, a left handed player, took the right-handed guitar, flipped it upside down, transposed the chords in his head (It was a trick Dale tried to teach Jimi Hendrix, but he just couldn’t get it; thus Hendrix’s famous right handed guitar with a left handed neck.) and played away. It was the start of a whole new movement in music—the electric movement, and the beginning of what is now rock music. Of course, it wasn’t all that easy. Fender and Dale’s biggest problem was that they couldn’t get a amplifier to hold up under the thunder of Dale’s furious output, and in his early days, Dale blew almost 50 of Fender’s amplifiers in short order. 

"You gotta understand, there were no real bangers back then," said Dale via telephone from Southern California. "There were only country and blues players; there were no rock players. It was just guys like Chet Atkins, playing through small amps and six- and eight-inch speakers. They weren’t built to take what I was playing." 

So Dale and Fender set about making an amp with a tube that could handle the output of the Strat, and then contracted the James B. Lansing speaker company to build a speaker that could handle the wattage of he their new amplifier. What they ended up with was the Dick Dale Single Showman Amp. 

The amp employed the Fender/Dale tube that peaked at 100 watts, which ran the now-famed 15" JBL D-130F speaker, and with this setup, Dale was able to really kick out the jams. But it just wasn’t enough. Fender had the Triad Company craft an amp tube that peaked at 180 watts, and then coupled it with two 15" JBL speakers, creating an amplifier for Dale the likes of which had never been seen before. 

Dale became known as the King of Surf Guitar, a title handed to him by his surfing buddies at Balboa beach who, according to Dale, also named many of his early songs. After the release of his first record, Surfer’s Choice—an album that was first to feature a surfer in action on the cover (Dale, himself), and sold 88 thousand copies within months of its release—Dale decided that he wanted to add a little oomph to his vocal output onstage and started messing around with vocal enhancing. He ended up taking apart an old Hammond organ he had, pulled the tank out and rigged up to his microphone to it; he had just created reverb. A short time after that, he wondered what his guitar would sound like run through the tank reverb system, so he rigged it to fit his amplifier. That sound is now a staple in almost every musician’s box of tricks, and has become a signature surf guitar sound, though it did not appear on Surfer’s Choice, the quintessential surf album. 

With all of this technical and musical innovation backing the legend of Dick Dale, it is easy to see why he is known as the King of Surf Guitar, and why he still maintains a strong following of loyal fans, including modern rock and pop musicians. 

And while Dale is perhaps most famous for his past musical exploits, it is his current life that gives him so much joy. He has a very tight family, and is immediately attached to his wife and son. In fact, Dale is quite the doting father. He teaches his son, 12-year-old Jimmy Stix, the rights and wrongs of life with a voracity that is unyielding. Young Jimmy studies martial arts, as his father has done all of his life, is a vegetarian, as is his father, and has been taught from day one to be kind to other people and animals. Dale feels that this discipline gives Jimmy—as it gave him—a different outlook on life from the average person. 

"If you get [kids] to think like that at this age, as they grow up into maturity, they will have a good foundation," said Dale. "There’s only two pure things in this world, and that’s a baby animal and a baby child. They don’t have the greed, the possessiveness, the fear, the bullshit, the egos. What they become is what you do to them." 

Jimmy Stix, at the ripe young age of 12, is using a computer, co-piloting his dad’s plane (the Dale ranch has a private airstrip, and Dale has a private plane), and is a bona fide rock drummer. He is the youngest musician to be sponsored by Zildjian Cymbals and has his own fans nationwide, having appeared on the front and back covers of drum magazines, on MTV, The Rosie O’Donnell show, and the West Coast leg of the Warped Tour. He has been on the road with his dad since he was ten days old, and on the drums since he was one year old. He is, without a doubt, Dale’s pride and joy. Jimmy Stix’s penchant for the drums, said Dale, comes from his father’s attraction to the instrument. As a child, drums were the first thing Dale learned how to play. 

"Drums was my instrument and Gene Krupa was my hero," said Dale, speaking of his first music exploits. He then referred to the martial arts and spoke about drumming as a discipline. "In the temples, they never allow you to touch a skin—a drum head—for five years, until you can tongue everything you play. When you can do that, you are already projecting into your arms what you are going to play from your brain. Most drummers today don’t do that; they try to memorize, and then when they get lost, they get really fuckin’ lost." 

Professionally speaking, these days, Dale is a busy man, but he seems to find time to be active and spend every free minute with his family. But at this point in his career, Dale is something of a living legend among his fans, and that has brought him many accolades. 

Disneyland uses Dale’s "Ghost Riders" during the Disney / N.A.S.A. film about the history of N.A.S.A., and is then played through out the Magic Kingdom’s ride. This past May, Disneyland opened the new Tomorrowland, the theme park’s biggest deal in quite some time. Just before the event, Disney CEO Michael Eisner faxed Dale and asked him to perform at the opening ceremonies, on top of Space Mountain. Dale agreed, but it proved to be a hair-raising experience for him. 

"I thought they were going to take me up there on an elevator, but I had to climb up this ladder about five stories, up and down. It was unbelievable. I just thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?!’ Then, about 30 feet up, my arms and legs were shaking, and I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m gonna fall to my death.’ It was amazing," said Dale, who made the climb in cowboy boots with his famous gold Fender Strat, "The Beast," slung over his shoulder, and then played on a small platform to a huge crowd. "So I’m up there with a Telex transmitter, looking straight across at the Matterhorn. It was huge." 

And even though it was a harrowing situation, it was also a pinnacle point of Dale’s life. "That has to be the most titanic thing that has ever happened to me, next to the passing of my mother," he said. 

Probably the most instrumental thing in launching Dale back into the mass-market limelight was the use of his song "Miserlou" in Quentin Tarantino’s epic film Pulp Fiction. According to Dale, Tarantino approached him backstage at a concert and told Dale that "Miserlou" was an inspiration to him, and that he wanted to use it as an instrumental part of the film. "It’s like the good, the bad and the ugly all rolled into one, man," Tarantino told Dale about the song. 

"It blew me away," said Dale about the first time he saw the film in a private screening in Los Angeles. "Next thing I know, I was flown back to New York for the grand opening, and the next thing I know, it wins the Cannes Film Festival and makes 300 million dollars, and I’m playing to huge crowds all over the world." 

And Dale tours on a regular basis. He just finished the latest in a long succession of national and European tours, an outing on which he covered 11,000 miles, played 35 shows, and did it all in a month and a half. His upcoming tour will bring him through Chico this Wednesday, June 22. 

"We’ve got a couple of surprises that we’re doing, that we’ve done all across the tour. Right in the middle of all that Dick Dale, jammin’, meat grinder stuff, we sit down with a beautiful C. Fox acoustic guitar—my bass player has one too—and play a couple of songs, acoustic set-wise, and people just go crazy. They all want it on the next CD." 

The songs just might be there, too, but there will certainly be that big Dick Dale sound fans are used to. Dale, who usually records at a chicken ranch in a makeshift studio that has 30 foot ceilings, helping to provide the overall aural grandeur of his recorded sound, wants to record his next album in his own airplane hangar. 

"It gives me a big, fat sound, but I want to do it in my hangar," said Dale. "I want to be able to do it at my leisure. Every time I get these ideas, or a thought comes to mind, if I don’t put it down immediately, I’ll forget it. Everything I do, I do on the spur of the moment." 

Dale may do everything on the spur of the moment, but he is most definitely in it for the long haul, and still has a ways to go before he’s done.