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Thread: Dick Dale: 'King of Surf Rock' guitarist dies aged 81

  1. #1

    Dick Dale: 'King of Surf Rock' guitarist dies aged 81

    https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47606592

    US rock guitarist Dick Dale, whose song Misirlou featured over the opening credits to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, has died aged 81, reports say.

    Dale, who is known for creating a style of music associated with surf culture referred to as surf rock, died on Saturday evening, The Guardian reports.

    His genre of music, launched in the early 1960s, inspired numerous electric guitarists and his career spanned more than five decades.

    The cause of death is not yet known.

    Dale's live bassist, Sam Bolle, confirmed the news to The Guardian.
    Dale, real name Richard Anthony Monsour, was born in Boston in 1937. His instrumental music was influenced by his Lebanese heritage.

    As a young boy, he tried to learn the trumpet, and also the ukulele, thinking he might follow in the footsteps of country singer Hank Williams. But he then bought a guitar for $8 from a friend.

    When he was 17, his family moved to southern California, when his father found work in the aerospace industry and Dale became a keen surfer.

    In 1961, he started to play live in the beach town of Balboa, south of Los Angeles, where he developed his percussive style of playing, initially on a right-handed guitar, despite being left-handed.

    A year later, he performed his version of Misirlou - a Greek folk song - on the Ed Sullivan Show. More than three decades later, Tarantino made the song famous again when he used it at the very start of Pulp Fiction.

    In an interview with Vice News in 2012 aged 75, Dale describes his battle with cancer and diabetes, and the reason why he continued to perform against the advice of doctors.

    "They say I should never be on stage, I shouldn't be playing," he says, adding: "My medical bill is over $3,000 a month to buy supplies I have to get for my body."

    He also praises his wife, Lana, in the interview as "the one who brought me back".

    He is survived by Lana and his son, Jimmie.







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  3. #2
    RIP


    I listened to him for a while because the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

  4. #3
    Dick and the Del Tones . May he RIP .
    Last edited by oyarde; 03-17-2019 at 08:07 PM.
    Do something Danke

  5. #4
    It blew my mind when I found out that Misirlou was written in the 1950s. That was so ahead of it's time and still rocks. RIP from a fellow surfer.
    ...

  6. #5
    RIP :'(
    Quote Originally Posted by Torchbearer
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    Hear/buy my music here "government is the enemy of liberty"-RP Support me on Patreon here Ephesians 6:12

  7. #6
    RIP
    "Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration is minding my own business."

    Calvin Coolidge

  8. #7
    https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/70432...end-dead-at-81

    His high-energy interpretation of an old song from Asia Minor, "Misirlou" (Egyptian Girl), became the most famous song of surf rock: He had learned the tune from his Lebanese uncles, who played it on the oud.

    "I started playing it," Dale, who had started out as a drummer, told NPR in a 2010 interview, "and I said, 'Oh no, that's too slow.' And I thought of Gene Krupa's drumming, his staccato drumming... When we went to California, I got my first guitar, but I was using this rocket-attack, Gene Krupa rhythm on the guitar."
    Dale's collaborations with guitar inventor Leo Fender also made sonic history. "I met a man called Leo Fender," he told NPR, "who is the Einstein of the guitar and the amplifiers. He says, 'Here, I just made a guitar, it's a Stratocaster. You just beat it to death and tell me what you think. So when I started playing on that thing, I wanted to get it to be as loud as I could, like Gene Krupa drums. And as I was surfing, when the waves picked me up and took me through the tubes, I would get that rumble sound."

    Fender and Dale also worked together on amplifiers, Dale told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1993. "I wanted to get a fat, thick, deep sound," Dale remarked.

    Fender kept trying options, but Dale still wasn't satisfied. "We kept on making all these adjustments with output transformers, with speakers," Dale told Fresh Air, "and that's how I blew up over 48 speakers and amplifiers. They'd catch on fire, the speakers would freeze, the speakers would tear from the coils ... So he went back to the drawing board came up and invented the Dick Dale Showman amplifier, and the dual Showman amplifier with the 15 inch Lansing speaker. That was the end result ... along with the creations that we did on the Stratocaster guitar, making it a real thick body because the thicker the wood, the purer the sound."

  9. #8
    http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_...567C96FC53F9A6

    When you get into a wave, and you, you're paddling out to a ten foot wave, or eight foot wave, fifteen foot wave, ah it is so incredible what it, what nature does to you, and as it is taking you down that wave and you get to the bottom of that wave, if you would have missed that wave, nobody knows what it's like until they've been put through a board physically, and the board breaks in half. I've got 18 stitches through, over the course of my skull from that. I've dragged under the coral, under the ground, into the coral. I've opened my eyes and seen it coming to me, in huge mounds. Ah, you are such a, a weakling, such a nothing, and that's what you really are. Now you learn to do with one the force. And the force would be, go with the force.

    And the same way when I would play on my guitar, I would get the sound like my African lions, when they would turn around and roar, at five thirty in the evening. And their roar matched the roar of the wave, like [guitar]. That's a roar. That's a real roar. And then when the wave was coming over the top of my head, and I'm coming through a tube and I stick my finger into the wall of the wave, and my ear is right up against the water, and you can just hear a, and the lace that was coming over my head would go [guitar]. You can just, it's coming over the top of you. Now, I get chills just playing it, as I'm talking about it. Because you get into it. Whenever you do something, don't do it a hundred percent, do it a hundred and fifty percent. And that's the basis of my sound. It matches the animals, it matches the ocean and it also matches thirty years of martial arts. Being able to go through an object, and think through it. Thanks to Ed Parker.
    Like Hendrix, he was left handed and simply turned a right handed guitar upside down.

    Most people when, when they ask me about my guitar. You know most guys like, Howie Avardi is a very dear friend. He's got about 176 guitars. He has them. In fact when I do a concert a lot of times, the guys will say, all right where's your stash, where do you want your stash, I go, my what? And he goes that wh-, that's all the guitars, you know that they like to set up on the stage. I've only got one guitar. And ah, I've only had one guitar, and it's the guitar that Leo gave me right from the beginning.

    I play upside down backwards. In other words the guitar that I play. He gave me a right-handed guitar first, and I just flipped it upside down and learned. That's a story in itself why I play this way. But this is a right-handed neck, and I transpose in my head first and then I transpose down here. Only 'cause I didn't know any better when I was learning how to play a ukelele. The book didn't say, put your finger here stupid, and it's left-handed. But anyway I've learned to, to play this way.
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 03-18-2019 at 12:26 PM.



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  11. #9
    When I was doing concerts full time one of my best friends in the industry got a gig mixing for him. I was very jealous. I've always wanted to see him live
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst

  12. #10

    Don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

  13. #11
    Original version of that song:




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