Dick Dale (born Richard Anthony Monsour on May 4, 1937) is an American surf rock guitarist, known as The King of the Surf Guitar. He pioneered the surf music style, drawing on Eastern musical scales and experimenting with reverberation. He worked closely with Fender to produce custom made amplifiers, including the first-ever 100-watt guitar amplifier. He pushed the limits of electric amplification technology, helping to develop new equipment that was capable of producing distorted, “thick, clearly defined tones” at “previously undreamed-of volumes”. The “breakneck speed of his single-note staccato picking technique” and showmanship with the guitar is considered a precursor to heavy metal music, influencing guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. (More from Wikipedia)
Among other things, the 1994 film Pulp Fiction served to reintroduce one of the founding fathers of the surf sound, Dick Dale (real name: Richard Monsour), whose signature instrumental masterpiece, “Misirlou” (released in 1962 and officially by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones) is included on the soundtrack. The song is of Greek origin with Middle Eastern influences and dates from 1927; phonetically, the title is the same as how the word “Egyptian” sounds in the Turkish language. I once heard Dick Dale describe his fierce guitar technique as playing the instrument as though it were a set of drums.
The Allmusic piece on Dick Dale by Steve Huey begins: “Dick Dale wasn’t nicknamed ‘King of the Surf Guitar’ for nothing: He pretty much invented the style single-handedly; and no matter who copied or expanded upon his blueprint, he remained the fieriest, most technically gifted musician the genre ever produced. Dale’s pioneering use of Middle Eastern and Eastern European melodies (learned organically through his familial heritage) was among the first in any genre of American popular music, and predated the teaching of such ‘exotic’ scales in guitar-shredder academies by two decades. The breakneck speed of his single-note staccato picking technique was unrivalled until it entered the repertoires of metal virtuosos like Eddie Van Halen, and his wild showmanship made an enormous impression on the young Jimi Hendrix.”
(December 2014)
