“I don’t know how to play a goddamned scale. I don’t know what a 13th is, or an augmented ninth. I could give a shit. All I do is make the guitar scream with pain or pleasure.”
So said the late Dick Dale to Guitar World‘s Alan di Perna a number of years ago.
The late surf guitar king was not a man of technical prowess, but he didn’t need to be. The song that launched him to six-string immortality, Misirlouwas led by an iconic riff that was less a song-starter than a hell-raiser – the sort of guitar buzzsaw that Johnny Ramone (a big fan of Dale’s) would perfect a decade and a half later.
The Stratocaster was Dale’s weapon of choice, and subsequently became the sword with which the vast majority of self-respecting surf-rock guitar-slingers armed themselves.
Indeed, Dale was not only a Fender man to his bones, he had a close working relationship with Leo Fender himself.
Dale was fast to adopt the Strat, which hit stores in 1954, and said that it was Leo Fender who turned him onto it.
Having met Leo at Fender’s headquarters – then located in Fullerton, California – Dale recounted of their first meeting, “I said, ‘Mr. Fender, I’m Dick Dale. I’m a surfer and I have no money. Can you help me?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Here, try this guitar.’
“I grabbed it, and when I turned it around, held it upside-down backwards and started playing ukulele chords, Leo almost fell off his chair laughing.”
And the close collaboration didn’t end there.
As Dale’s popularity grew in the early ’60s, and he found himself playing to ever-larger packs of rowdy teens, the Fender amps at Dale’s back began to buckle under his demands.
To the rescue, once again, came Leo Fender.
The groundbreaking inventor tasked the groundbreaking guitarist to essentially stress-test ever-updated versions of the company’s Showman amplifier, which had initially been released in 1960.
It’s said that Dale went through around 100 speakers before the JBL D130F 15-inch speaker finally proved strong enough to handle the guitarist’s abuse.
And so went guitar amplification from there…
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