Interviewer: So if you could talk about this, this power of nature in your work, in the sense of animals, and the surf.
Dale: You know music, music is an attitude, and, and it's an attitude in a way that to be able to do anything in life, is an attitude.
Dale: And that's how you approach it, and what you think about it.
Dale: In the same way with my music when I play, and how I develop the sounds that I developed.
Dale: As I say it started with the Gene Krupa feeling that drivel jungle, tribal sound.
Dale: Then it went into as I, I raised lions and tigers for, for thirty years, all my life.
Dale: Ah they had, they had such a, a, ah relationship with understanding their power that you cannot control their power.
Dale: Ah when I watch a lion go through stainless steel pans with his fangs, his canines, ah they have 2200 pounds per square inch when they bite.
Dale: Ah the human is no match for that.
Dale: 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.
Dale: I've got 18 stitches through, over the course of my skull from that.
Dale: I've dragged under the coral, under the ground, into the coral.
Dale: I've opened my eyes and seen it coming to me, in huge mounds.
Dale: Ah, you are such a, a weakling, such a nothing, and that's what you really are.
Dale: Now you learn to do with one the force.
Dale: And the force would be, go with the force.
Dale: 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.
Dale: And their roar matched the roar of the wave, like [guitar].
Dale: That's a roar.
Dale: That's a real roar.
Dale: 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].
Dale: You can just, it's coming over the top of you.
Dale: Now, I get chills just playing it, as I'm talking about it.
Dale: Because you get into it.
Dale: Whenever you do something, don't do it a hundred percent, do it a hundred and fifty percent.
Dale: And that's the basis of my sound.
Dale: It matches the animals, it matches the ocean and it also matches thirty years of martial arts.
Dale: Being able to go through an object, and think through it.
Dale: Thanks to Ed Parker.
Interviewer: I wanted to get a sense of, a lot of this music seems to be based around the Rendezvous Ballroom, in Balboa, California.
Interviewer: Can you give us a sense of what the scene was around the Rendezvous Ballroom? Is that where you first played this kind of music?
Dale: The Rendezvous, the Rendezvous Ballroom, well, a lot of people ask me, they say, what it was like then, you know, they said, well, what was life like then.
Dale: You know, what was the feeling ah, the ambiance around you.
Dale: That was an era, where people could still go and walk down the street, you could take a surfboard, and leave it on the beach.
Dale: And come back a week later, it'd still be there.
Dale: You could go into the mountains, and camp without some wacko shooting you in the back of the head, while you're sleeping.
Dale: You could walk down the streets of L.A.
Dale: without that problem.
Dale: And, and that's so sad, that's what I write about in my music today.
Dale: And the children, the children are the same way.
Dale: The American Indian how they were driven off the land with their children watching their parents die, the same way with our children being raised with trash families the same thing.
Dale: You say what was it like back then.
Dale: The families were nice back then.
Dale: The families raised their kids with the heritage of their, respecting their heritage.
Dale: So when people came in, the only thing I had to worry about is somebody drinking a can of beer.
Dale: Or, the old days, they called it T-Bird.
Dale: We didn't worry about the drug world, you know, and things like that.
Dale: And when they came in, and I just said to them, look here's a ballroom, that Stan Kenton, every big band that was in, in the world performed at.
Dale: This ballroom, encompassed a whole city block, and it held 4,000 people.
Dale: They closed that ballroom, because jazz, it was the jazz era, jazz had ended its era, and Stan Kenton was the last to be in it.
Dale: Fact, they lost over 80,000 dollars trying to bring jazz back.
Dale: And the city closed it.
Dale: It was at the end of a peninsula that was three miles long.
Dale: They called it the great white elephant, nobody would ever go there again.
Dale: My dad, he was a precision machinist who was brought out to California by Hughes, he saw a talent in me playing, and he went and spoke to the people and said, can we open it up, and they said, go ahead open it up.
Dale: The city would not give permits.
Dale: We talked to the city, they gave us permits, we opened it up.
Dale: The first 17 surfers, the first 17 people that came to this ballroom were surfers.
Dale: And within 4 months time we had over 4,000 people a night.
Dale: And it was the most fun loving time that ah, I just pray that we can do that once again, someday.
Interviewer: Can you talk about your first night playing there.
Interviewer: There's a story about it.
Dale: The first night.
Dale: The first night at the Rendezvous, this is kind of cute because my big hero in singing and, and music even though I was raised listening to every style of music.
Dale: I listened, the, the rhythm and blues I loved, I listened to the, where it was just nothing but a stand up base, a drummer, a guy playing on a keyboard, you know, and ah, ah saxophone.
Dale: Then I listened to Hank Williams.
Dale: And I liked country music because country music gave the, the heart and soul of, of people's everyday life.
Dale: You know, why'd you leave me today, every body just loves to growl, and there are, there're happenings that happen to 'em.
Dale: We're all sensitive.
Dale: So I loved that.
Dale: Besides some guy used to beat me up all the time, and, and ah, I'd sing to my girl friend, why'd you leave me today, that kind of a thing.
Dale: Well, anyway, when I went to, came to California.
Dale: I got on that stage, the opening night of the Rendezvous, and I'd developed a style of strumming, it was like a ah, instead of going [guitar], country, I went [guitar].
Dale: I used to do that style, because I didn't have any guys to play with me, so I had to make my guitar sound big.
Dale: So I called it Rockabilly.
Dale: I, I put Rock to this country sound.
Dale: So I'd singing these Hank Williams songs with a Rockabilly punch, and then, the first people that came were 17 surfers, that I was surfing with.
Dale: And some little kid about 9 years old.
Dale: And he sat at the edge of the stage and looked up at me, and he goes, God you're really neat, you're really neat.
Dale: He says, can you play ah, a song on one string.
Dale: Now, I never heard of that in my life.
Dale: I said, what am I going to play on one string.
Dale: You know I was always doing the, Dick Dale strumming, that pumping strumming.
Dale: And I said, and this is where that heavy staccato thing started.
Dale: There was a song called Miserlou, that back in Boston, Massachusetts, on my father's side of the family, because they, they were born in this country, but they were of descent of, from Lebanon, where the Arabic music came from.
Dale: And then my mother's side, they were born in Poland.
Dale: And my mother was born in Massachusetts also, and ah they had the polka.
Dale: So I was learning all this music, but I remember a song called Miserlou and a man playing on a ma-, on an instrument called an Oud, with a chicken quill and it was going, like that, and the song Miserlou kind of went like this to start with, it went, it, it was real slow, it goes, the beat was, like that, it went like [guitar], that kind of a beat.
Dale: And then the song would go [guitar sound], like that, and then it would go [guitar] that’s the beat.
Dale: And the belly dancers would come out.
Dale: And then I says well, you know I can't play that and make it sound big, how am I going to do it, and I go, I go like this [guitar].
Dale: That there, didn't give them a chance to hear, any, any empty spaces.
Dale: And that was the birth of the Dick Dale machine gun, ah staccato surfing sound, ah whatever you want to call it.
Dale: Whether you want to call it the, the surfing sound, or the, the sounds of the animals of the world, or the, the mar-, martial arts sound.
Dale: The kids named it, king of the surfing guitar, 'cause we were all surfing together.
Dale: And that's how it was born.
Interviewer: Sometimes in your music I hear the sound of the West in a way.
Interviewer: Coming to California did that influence, was that part of what that surf culture was.
Interviewer: In a way it's almost the sound of open spaces.
Interviewer: Not unlike what you live in now.
Interviewer: Is that a part of that or ...?
Dale: My, ah the, the, the song, the things that I play, and that I create, and the sounds that I create.
Dale: I'm, I get involved with an area, a place.
Dale: For instance, I used to fly my plane to the top of the mountains and the hills, into Mexico.
Dale: And the people in Mexico would take me, it would be seven miles down into the ocean.
Dale: So they would put me on their carts, you know, and they used to call me, Ricardo Ricardo Corzon de Lion, Richard the Lionheart.
Dale: So I, ca., I'd go I, I was so, so amassed with their the flavor of their, their ancestry, and the way they raised their children, that I would write songs, and, and have a, a Spanish flavor.
Dale: Mexican flavor, whatever, the groups that I was near.
Dale: Same way with the Arabic, the Egyptian flavor.
Dale: Same way with ah, the Hava Nagalia, the Jewish flavor.
Dale: Only I would put it with a driving, just a, everything in my life has been driving, from listening to the Gene Krupa.
Dale: The, the Spanish music, I would, I would do Esperanzo, I'd go ah, [guitar].
Dale: It's, I like that.
Dale: When I play the trumpet I like to play like mariachi music and then I get into, the sound, you say the, the West ah, people say well, it sounds like open spaces.
Dale: Yeah, it's a, it's a feeling of freedom, like when you get a sound that goes ah, that goes ah [guitar] that sound.
Dale: It's just a.
Dale: Just a driving sound, and it comes from the thickness.
Dale: You see, a lot of the sound also, comes out of here.
Dale: Most guitar players ...
Interviewer: Dick could you give us a tour of your guitar.
Interviewer: Give us a little bit of the history on it.
Interviewer: Is it an original from the time?
Dale: Most people when, when they ask me about my guitar.
Dale: You know most guys like, Howie Avardi is a very dear friend.
Dale: He's got about 176 guitars.
Dale: He has them.
Dale: 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.
Dale: I've only got one guitar.
Dale: And ah, I've only had one guitar, and it's the guitar that Leo gave me right from the beginning.
Dale: I play upside down backwards.
Dale: In other words the guitar that I play.
Dale: He gave me a right-handed guitar first, and I just flipped it upside down and learned.
Dale: That's a story in itself why I play this way.
Dale: But this is a right-handed neck, and I transpose in my head first and then I transpose down here.
Dale: Only 'cause I didn't know any better when I was learning how to play a ukelele.
Dale: The book didn't say, put your finger here stupid, and it's left-handed.
Dale: But anyway I've learned to, to play this way.
Dale: And the nobs are all up here.
Dale: And I asked Leo, I said, God, I keep hitting the nobs with my hands, and I'm cutting, you know, and then I pulled the plastic off, and then my hands would hit the, the metal, and then I started cutting my wrist.
Dale: People thought I was committing suicide or something.
Dale: Then he, Leo said, well Dick if I'm going to put the knobs down on the bottom, it costs me about 7,000 for that jig, and then I says, oooh, I cried, like you know, okay Leo, and then a week later he calls me in, he goes, here, we got it.
Dale: So they put the knobs on the bottom, what I did during my, ah when you're fine tuning instruments, you know, taking bugs out of them, this is what he wanted me to do, was to, to just beat on the Stratocaster.
Dale: I, my neck is a quarter of an inch in width, in playing width, smaller.
Dale: Very thin, it's very narrow.
Dale: And the strings, strings that I used, like Freddy Traveras, from Hawaii.
Dale: He was the man who was, like we were the three musketeers.
Dale: Leo and Freddy and myself.
Dale: And when it came to ah beating up these things.
Dale: And ah Freddy would tell me, he'd explain to me, 'cause he was hired mainly to perfect the telecaster.
Dale: So he would say Dick if you could put strings on a telephone pole you'd have the purest sound in the world, but you can't hold the telephone pole, so he says, the thicker your string, the bigger, the better the sound.
Dale: So, most guys play with 7 gauge, 9 gauge, things like that.
Dale: My gauge, smallest gauge is a fourteen gauge.
Dale: It goes to an 18 gauge, stainless.
Dale: And then it goes to a 38 gauge, 48 gauge, to a 50, to a 60 gauge.
Dale: And a lot of critics call them ah bridge cables, you know, they call them clotheslines, they call them ah the last one called it a coat hanger.
Dale: Well, that gives me my big sound.
Dale: When you see all the white all down in here.
Dale: This is a stiff pick, a very stiff pick.
Dale: But because I do this, I go ah [guitar], because I do that all the time, I'm going [guitar], with the big heavy pick, and the big heavy strings, it's like and then taking your fingers, these guys play with sissy strings by the way, because they're too small.
Dale: These are the big strings.
Dale: That's why my fingers look like that, because it's like taking your fingers and putting them on a grinding wheel, or on, on the concrete.
Dale: It grinds the pick down, more than 50% of the pick, and when it starts grinding down, ah it, my it, it, it hangs up in the string, so I throw them out to the crowd, and as I play I'll throw a pick out like that, and I'll reach down and pull out the next bullet, see.
Dale: And, but this all white is from the residue.
Dale: i used to think it was dandruff falling down in the spotlight.
Dale: But it wasn't, it's the pick melting.
Dale: So that's one of the secrets.
Dale: The other one is I reverse this pick up in the beginning, so that it gets a bigger bite.
Dale: And when this string is from here to here, most, on your other guitars, your string's from here to here, goes, this, when it's, it's reversed on the head.
Dale: This goes all the way down, so the longer the string, gives me a real fatter sound.
Dale: The new Dick Dale Signature Stratocaster that's out now, by Fender, is the duplicate copy of this.
Dale: You cannot buy this neck anymore.
Dale: It's got to be hand made.
Dale: And this guitar was hand made.
Dale: All the Strats were hand made in the beginning.
Dale: And ah, this is a three-position switch.
Dale: This was the original.
Dale: When I used to play, I used to put it in between, to mute.
Dale: If I had a, if it was here, you had one sound [guitar], then, see where it mutes right there? It takes this pick up and this pick up.
Dale: It takes this pick up and this pick up.
Dale: And gives it a free sound for [guitar], Marie Elena, Maria Elena is one of those beautiful Spanish sounds I used to love to play.
Dale: It took these two pickups together.
Dale: And I'd got in the habit of being able to really do that fast when I played, and so Leo said, Dick we should make more positions, and I goes well yeah, that'd be cool.
Dale: So they came out with the Dick Dale 5 position switch, which is on all the guitars now.
Dale: I put it on here, but it was just too much to think about, and I didn't want to confuse it, so I left this on and I put this switch.
Dale: That, two, two together, brings them together.
Dale: So, that's what I did.
Dale: Now, I still wanted to make it simpler, so I took out my tone controls, and I just took 'em off, put plugs in.
Dale: And then I ended up going right from the amplifier, and using my tone controls, and my main power, all I use is just one volume control, and everything that, everything that I do is strictly with the hands and the pick.
Dale: So, and if I've got a, if I've got a [guitar].
Dale: That there is all done with the hands, instead of all the electronics and everything like that.
Dale: I have a reverb that I use, that extends the tone, that gives it a fat sound.
Dale: So that's basically in the thickness of the body, gives you that sound.
Dale: You can never get a hollow body guitar and make it sound like a thick body.
Dale: And, and by changing pick ups or anything like that.
Dale: You can do that with the Strat.
Dale: It is by far the Rolls Royce.
Interviewer: Dick, one of the things that we're trying to portray in this piece, is the, essentially that surf culture from that time, before it became big, what that was like? Going out in the morning.
Dale: Okay.
Dale: The, the actual, the actual feelings back in, when it, actually in the mid fifties and, and ah like '55, '56, '57, '58.
Dale: 19, it was in the nineteens.
Dale: Ah, the, the world of surfing was really, in fact I was the first person to, to use to take a, have a picture taken with me surfing on the cover, down in San Clemente, you know the pier.
Dale: John Sieverson took that picture, and we used it for commercial publication.
Dale: That, started that whole genre of a, of a, a tremendous feeling of being involved with the world of surfing.
Dale: Ah there was a place, there was times we could go surfing, in fact there was only about three guys on a wave.
Dale: I mean, ah today there's hundreds on a wave.
Dale: We even, a lot of people even stopped because there were so many on a wave, but in that day, it was so virgin.
Dale: Everything was so virginistic in, in feelings of sunlight.
Dale: Beautiful sunlight.
Dale: We had Woodies, I had a 1940 Ford Woodie.
Dale: Ah we would spend time bleaching the wood, making it perfect again.
Dale: Ah we'd all jump in the Woodie, we'd all shove our boards in the, in the Woodie, in fact Hobie Alter was the, one of the fathers of the, the surf world, and ah gave me my first board, and ah my actual first board was a Joe Clegg, and then Hobie gave me his board, and, and ah, we would shove in the back of our Woodies and then go tooling up, pack up some sandwiches and just go tooling on down the coast.
Dale: And 'cause the surf would blow out in different areas.
Dale: And as it blew out we packed up and went further down.
Dale: Further south we went, the better, the more glassier it would be.
Dale: And we would surf from sun up to sun down.
Dale: Even in Hawaii.
Dale: Ah, I'd get in the water at sun up, and, and I'd be ah out of the water, after dark.
Dale: We would, we would even shine our lights on the water at night, here.
Dale: Ah and so we could surf together.
Dale: It, it was a way of life that made your body strong.
Dale: In fact when I would go, have to go to a chiropractor for some reason, from injuring myself, ah when I'd be, in the martial arts training, ah he would say to me, you know, the only reason why you can keep going like you're going, is because you've been in the water from sun up to sun down, cause it's kept your body so strong.
Dale: And that's, it, it was cleansing us.
Dale: Wounds we had, we'd go in the water.
Dale: People would be going to work at, at five o'clock in the morning, with, with their fur collars around their coat, you know, their necks, and driving, and we'd be out in the water and we had no wet suits.
Dale: We didn't have wet suits in those days.
Dale: We used to bang on our legs because they were blue with cold, and pray, the term pray for surf, wait for the next wave to come, so that we could be paddling and get our bodies going, and take off.
Dale: And we'd stand around fires on the beach.
Dale: Just keeping warm, waiting for the next sets to come in.
Dale: It was such an, an explorative way of life, but a good life, and ah, an honest life.
Interviewer: And then you would play at night?
Dale: Yeah, and then, oh I'd get out of the water, I'd get out of the water, there was times I'd get out of the water, like at Huntington Beach, and everybody's inside, that would be the Huntington Beach Pavilion, or the Pavalon, we called it, and ah, and I'd come running up the stairs with my surfboard, still in my trunks, I'd be still be soaking wet.
Dale: I'd get up behind the stage, towel off you know, and then put on a, a T-shirt and I still had my trunks on.
Dale: I'd be in my bare feet and I'd be playing my guitar on stage.
Dale: It was crazy you know, to, to get me out, and, many times I was supposed to be someplace, I'd be in the water surfing.
Dale: It was, ah it was, it's such a ball though.
Dale: The people were happy, and people would just, became a part of it.
Dale: Even the non-surfers would come to the beaches in, and ah, be wrapped up in this way of life.
Dale: And this way of life is not there anymore.