By Ed Staskus
When I saw Dick Dale at the Beachland Ballroom in 2003 I didn’t know he was dying. If somebody had told me that after the show, I would have said they were crazy. By the time he was done “The King of the Surf Guitar” had put on a set piece of steel string twang. He had a bass player and a drummer with him but he was essentially a one man band. I had to stand in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd from beginning to end. I was tired of standing by the end of the night. The Axe Man was 15-some years older than me and spent the show the same as me, standing, except he did it while putting on a three ring circus on his Stratocaster.
“I’ve been performing since 1955 and I’m going to keep performing until I die because I’m not hoping to die in some rocking chair with a beer belly,” he said. “I’ll never die., not that way. I’ll just explode, right before your eyes, onstage.” He spent 60-some years performing before he went up in smoke.
What I didn’t know was he had been diagnosed with cancer more than thirty years earlier. When that happened, he went to Hawaii for sunshine and treatments. It sidelined him for years. “You know what the doctors call me to this day? They call me ‘The Cancer Warrior.’” He stayed in trim through thick and thin, playing his guitar upside down and backwards. He was born into this world a lefty.
Before Jimi Hendrix was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was the bass player for Little Richard. He was in Little Richard’s back-up band the Upsetters. “We were both left-handed, Jimi and me, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. He used to say, ‘I patterned my style after Dick Dale.’”
Dick Dale cut his teeth and made a name for himself at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Orange County. The ballroom was built in 1928 and had long been a swing and big band music hall. He started playing there in 1961. Seventeen people showed up at his first show, all of them surfer friends of his. Less than a year later thousands of fans were attending his nightly gigs. The shows were called “The Surfer Stomp.”
The Rendezvous Ballroom burned down in 1966. It happened the day after the Fresno band the Cindermen performed there. Although it was a suspicious coincidence, nobody blamed them.
When the surf guitar craze died down in the mid-60s, Capital Records declined to renew their contract with Dick Dale. His father Jim and he went back to pressing their own singles. The British Invasion was in full swing. The Beatles were on the throne. The Monkees were on the horizon. Dick Dale took a back seat. “You’ll never hear surf music again,” Jimi Hendrix sang on his 1967 song “Third Stone from the Sun.”
In the 1970s Dick Dale suffered an accident on his surfboard that almost cost him a leg. It took him a long time to recover. He stopped performing until he got his feet back under him. He scored his first comeback in the 1980s when he was nominated for a Grammy alongside Stevie Ray Vaughn for their cover of the Chantay’s “Pipeline.” It was back to the beach for the surfman and his Stratocaster.
Satan’s Satellites opened for him when he came to Cleveland. When they were done stirring the pot it was time for the mainline. Dick Dale was dressed like a cowboy, mostly in black. He had an aquiline nose and his hair had gone white. The Stratocaster being driven to a reverb-heavy frenzy in his hands was yellow. The guitar was nicknamed “The Beast.” It was fitted up to be played loud, with thick gauge strings. “I called them cables,’’ he said. “That’s what gave me my fat sound.’’ He was compelled to use heavy picks to make an impact on the strings. His staccato picking led to him go through dozens of picks every show. He kept them in his back pocket. The Stratocaster didn’t have tone controls. It had a master volume and a toggle that activated the neck and middle pickups.
“My philosophy is the thicker the wood, the thicker the sound,” he said. “The bigger the string, the bigger the sound. My smallest string is a 14 gauge.”
Dick Dale wasn’t born “The King of the Surf Guitar.” He was born Richard Mansour, the son of a Lebanese father and a Polish mother. He learned to play the piano at an early age and moved on to the ukulele. His uncle played the oud and the tarabaki and taught them to his nephew. In his teens he bought a used guitar and it was off to the races. He blended tarabaki drumming into guitar playing, developing a picking technique he called “the pulsation.” When his family moved to southern California, he learned to surf on weekends. He took his board to the beach from sunup to sundown. One thing led to another and the Middle Eastern music he had grown up with became the emerging genre of surf music.
Surf music popped up seemingly out of nowhere in the late 1950s. It didn’t morph out of anybody else’s sound. The first wave was instrumental surf, played by the likes of Manuel and the Renegades, Eddie and the Showmen, and Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Dick Dale pioneered the surf sound, folding his boyhood influences in with rock-n-roll, a spring reverb, and rapid alternate picking. His 1961 song “Let’s Go Trippin’” was a big hit and launched the popularity of the new beat.
The second wave was vocal surf, coming out of the mouths of bands like the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and Ronny and the Daytona’s. It was the kind of music meant to stir the hearts of teenage girls and get them to buy records. “Little surfer little one, made my heart come all undone, do you love me, do you surfer girl, surfer girl my little surfer girl,” is how the Beach Boys put it. They weren’t above repeating “surfer girl” four times in one verse.
Dick Dale wasn’t an old geezer, but he wasn’t a young geezer, either, the night I saw him perform. He was in his mid-60s, an inch or two shorter than six foot, and looked fit as a fiddle, although a little thick around the middle. He wasn’t fiddling around, though. He looked like the kind of guy who knew his way around. He looked like he might have a blade somewhere on his person. He looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to get into a knife fight with in a phone booth.
“I can be a mean maniac,” he said. “Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked them on the side of the head.” He knew how to whack hotheads, having raised wild animals for many years on his ranch. “When I was surfing, I would get a rumble sound,” he said. It was the sound he tried to capture on his guitar. “At the same time, I was raising forty different exotic animals. So, when my mountain lion, he’d go, ‘Waaah!’ I’d imitate that on my guitar. When my African lion wanted his dinner, he’d go, ‘Ooowwwahhhhrrrgh!’ They were matching the sounds of what you go through when on a 15-foot wave.”
He started the show at the Beachland Ballroom with “Misirlou,” an old Middle Eastern song originally known as “Egyptian Girl.” It was from where his father and uncle came from. He learned it as a boy from his uncle who played it on the oud. “I started playing it,” Dick Dale said, “but I said, ‘Oh no, that’s too slow.’ And I thought of Gene Krupa’s drumming, his staccato drumming. When we moved to California, I got my first guitar, but I was using this rocket-attack, Gene Krupa rhythm on the guitar.”
The reason Dick Dale was in Cleveland was the movie “Pulp Fiction.” The director Quentin Tarantino used the song “Misirlou” in his mid-90s movie and just like that “The King of the Surf Guitar” was back in the spotlight. He released a new album and hit the road again. He announced from the stage he had another new album out called “Spatial Disorientation.” It sounded just about right.
The Beachland Ballroom hadn’t always been home to the most wide-ranging rock ‘n roll on Lake Erie’s south coast. The building was built in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood in 1950 as the Croatian Liberty Home. It came with a ballroom and a bar. It was where local Croatians celebrated weddings and lamented deaths. After a shot and a beer, it was time to live it up on the dance floor grooving to the gajde. A kitchen and back bar were added in 1976. During the Age of White Flight most of the Croatians moved farther east to suburban Eastlake and built a new National Home. The old building was boarded up. It became the Beachland Ballroom in 2000.
Surf music is usually played on electric guitars in straight 4/4 time with a medium to fast tempo. It is known for its use of a spring reverb incorporated into Fender amps. The Fender Reverb Unit developed in 1961 was the first to feature a wet surf reverb tone. It is the effect heard on Dick Dale recordings from that time on.
“People just loved the sound,” he said.
They loved the sound in California, for sure. “Kids called it surf music, although I didn’t call it that,” he said. “I didn’t go to Julliard. I’m into just chopping, chopping at the strings. That’s the sound, the sound of the waves chopping. The surfing sound is not the reverb. When so-called music historians say reverb’s the surf sound, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s the heavy machine gun, the staccato sound. It’s the waves.”
Halfway through the show, halfway through “The Wedge,” he grabbed a pair of drumsticks and played part of the song on his guitar’s fretboard with them. Music historians everywhere shook their heads. “Where’s the reverb?” they asked. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland stuck by their decision to not induct him into their museum. They inducted the Ventures instead. It was a wise decision.. Museums are for the antiquated. Dick Dale wasn’t museum fodder. He was a live wire. He wrote a tune called “Better Shred Than Dead.”
His staccato sound was a loud sound. Leo Fender was the man who made it loud and louder. He created the first 85-watt transformer especially for the plank spanker. It peaked at 100 watts. Leo Fender called it the ‘Showman.’ “It was like going from a little VW Bug to a Testarossa,” Dick Dale said. The Ferrari Testarossa was a championship-winning racing car in its day. The name means “red head” in Italian, referring to the red-painted cam covers on the 12-cylinder engine. In time the ‘Showman’ became a 100-watt transformer peaking at 180 watts. Leo Fender called the new deal the ‘Dual Showman.’ Everybody hearing it called it a game changer.
“Leo is the guru of all amplifiers,” Dick Dale said. “It was him who gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.” He became Leo Fender’s quality control tester. If an amp could survive his show, it was ready to go big-time. Along the way, Dick Dale destroyed 50-some standard 30-watt boxes. “Dale and Leo would continue to work together on upping the ante, building a speaker cabinet that could house two 15-inch speakers to sustain his vicious riffage,” is how the Fender folks put it.
After he ripped through “Misirlou” to open the show, Dick Dale ripped through “Shake ‘n’ Stomp” and “Rumble” and “Jungle Fever” and “Hava Nagila” and “Banzai Washout” and “Shredded Heat.” He slowed it down for a minute playing “Caterpillar Crawl.” The drummer got to get excited on “Surfing Drums.” After that came “Tidal Wave” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” There wasn’t much banter between songs. When one was over and done with it was on to the next one.
“I’m going to play my goddamn guitar and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I’m going to make people happy. I’m going to make them forget about all their pains.” He meant get happy and forget your troubles for two-and-a half hours.
When the show wrapped up after one encore, we shuffled out into the springtime night. There was a full moon in the empty sky. My friends and I wandered along the half mile of storefronts towards East 185th St. The neighborhood had been the headquarters of the Irish Mob in the 1970s. Motorcycle gangs showed up after the Irish were gone. The neighborhood was slowly turning the corner, though. Ten years later it became the Waterloo Arts District, bustling with art and entertainment.
Dick Dale died 16 years after I saw him at the Beachland Ballroom. He was fast off the starting line when I saw him, the one and only time I saw him, all the while suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, and heading towards more cancer. What sustained him getting to the finish line was beyond me. Maybe the music kept him going. He said as much when he said, “I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That’s what my music does.”
Like the Rastaman Bob Marley once said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.
A New Thriller by Ed Staskus
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