**** Dale: Still the king
Matthew Sigur
msigur@theadvertiser.com
• April 12, 2012
**** Dale is just about to leave for his millionth world tour.
He’s eating a submarine sandwich with “20 inches of meat” in between two thin pieces of bread with his wife, Lana.
“Rocky’s Pizza is the best there is,” Dale said over the phone. “We’ve never eaten anything that’s as pleasurable.”
Dale is, indisputably, the king of surf rock guitar. In the early ‘60s, he took the world by storm with his lightning-fast, ultra-loud, reverb-drenched instrumentals.
Decades later, his surfy, soulful take on the Greek folk song “Misirlou” pushed him back into prominence when it was included on Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack.
But even without that bounce, his sound never lost relevance. To this day, he’s still playing — fast, loud, and with the guitar upside down and backwards.
Dale is also indisputably one of the most interesting characters I’ve talked to. His dialogue is almost too cool.
“They said I’m louder than Motorhead,” he said about his signature transformer speakers. “I told Leo Fender I wanted two of those big speakers, peaking at 180 watts. I told him that’s where my people’s ears bleed.”
He’s trained in karate at a Shaolin temple — where “the master wouldn’t let you hit the drum until you could enunciate the rhythms and speak it.”
Stories like this are important to describing Dale’s sound.
Part of Dale’s speedy sounds comes from his love of Gene Krupa’s drum — “I wanted my guitar to sound like his drums,” Dale said.
The other part comes from what he heard throughout his life — the drums at the Shaolin Temple, and raising lions and tigers.
“The lions would scream when they would see me,” Dale said. “They would go ‘Wahh,’ and I started imitating the lions and tigers in my music.”
And, of course, there’s the surfing — “There’s surfing in a big tube. I would take sounds from the ocean,” he said.
For Dale, it was never about listening to all different types of music and seeing what he could pepper into his songs.
“I don’t listen to it,” he said. “I never did like musicians or people in show business. I can’t stand talking to a can of beers.”
No, it was and still is about playing with discipline, timing and perfection.
This May, he’ll be 75 years old. He still loves to play, but he’s on tour because he’s a sick man. He needs money for medicine. Dale has battled cancer and various illnesses the past couple of years. However, Dale finds the humor and fun in all of it.
“I feel like I’ve been here to be Johnny Appleseed — to sprinkle all the humor to the cancer patients,” Dale said. “It’s like a motorcycle club at the shows. I’ll ask them, ‘How many times have you been cut open?’”
If sickness does threaten again, he’ll keep going just like he did before. **** Dale’s personality is just like his music — full of disciplined, loud, fast attack.
“When I die, it’s not going to be in a rocking chair with a big belly,” he said. “I’ll die in one big explosion of body parts on stage.”