RIP Dick Dale

Dick Dale, Guitar Legend who pioneered surf rock, dies aged 81 | Daily Mail Online

 

Was lucky enough to see him in 2014 at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He alternated rambling anecdotes with fabulous shredding guitar instrumentals. Always played the Cape in the summer for as long as he could tour. RIP to a great musician.

 

Dammit. A hero from my past. Dick Dale, Jan & Dean, the Beach Boys. My music. RIP, sir.

 

Dick Dale was one of the toughest interviews I ever slogged through. It was a few years after he got famous again for Tarantino using him. Every question I asked was answered with “well, if you had read dickdale.com....” I thought he might have been having a bad day. Later learned he was like that on pretty much every interview.

 

Two legends just tearing the shit out of this one:

 

Clip from "Back to the Beach," featuring Lori Loughlin as Frankie and Annette's daughter.

 

This is a great piece of writing.

Dick Dale, the Inventor of Surf Rock, Was a Lebanese-American Kid from Boston

“It is hard not to wonder now what it must have felt like in that room: the briny air, a bit of sand in everyone’s hair, Dale shredding so loud and so hard that the windows rattled. He was messing around with reverb and non-Western scales, ideas that had not yet infiltrated rock music in any meaningful way. Maybe you took a beer outside and let his guitar fade into the sound of the surf. Maybe you stood up close, near a speaker, and felt every bone in your body clack together.”

 

Thanks for posting that. That was really good.

Dick Dale playing a dance hall on the beach at Balboa in '61... I'm not sure I could think of a time and place where I'd rather be.

 

Other than the Cavern Club in 1962 or the Clear Lake Ballroom in 1959 ... certainly Balboa would be in the top 5.