I'm not some great guitarist like the Satrianis and the Van Halens. I never went to school and learned music theory. When I play, I go, 'This sounds like a tiger; this sounds like a volcano; this sounds like the lip of the water coming over my head when I'm surfing.' I take people for a ride on a non-chemical wave of sound. | | | | There's a riot grrrl goin' on: Bratmobile at the Charlotte in Leicester, England, 1994.
(Greg Neate/Flickr) | | | | | | “I'm not some great guitarist like the Satrianis and the Van Halens. I never went to school and learned music theory. When I play, I go, 'This sounds like a tiger; this sounds like a volcano; this sounds like the lip of the water coming over my head when I'm surfing.' I take people for a ride on a non-chemical wave of sound.”
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| | rantnrave:// DICK DALE was a lefty, biologically if not politically. He strung his guitar upside-down, like fellow lefty ALBERT KING (but not JIMI HENDRIX), and he used unusually heavy strings. The opening riff of "MISIRLOU," his most famous song, is the sound of him mauling a .060-gauge low E string (.046 is the most common gauge, and the difference is immense) as if it were a .010-gauge high E string. It's one of the great wonders of 1960s guitar, a thundering, tremolo-swamped offering to the ocean gods. Surf music, which he's widely credited with inventing, was, to him, the sound of the ocean itself: Savage waves, volatile crosscurrents, tidal undertow, as the NEW YORK TIMES put it in its obituary on Sunday. "Like the barrel of a goddamn wave," in Dale's own words. If the BEACH BOYS, who covered Dale's seminal "LET'S GO TRIPPIN'," didn't sound savage, volatile or all that tidal, you'll note that most of them didn't surf. Dick Dale surfed. Though he spent most of his life, appropriately, in California, he was born outside Boston. His father was Lebanese, and his Arabic heritage bled loudly and proudly through his music. "Misirlou" was an Eastern Mediterranean standard, popular in Greece, Turkey and throughout the Arab Middle East long before Dale turned it into an essential piece of Western Americana. He also covered "HAVA NAGILA," faster, louder and more slippery than anyone had heard it before. He played extremely loud, always, and he played hard. He worked with LEO FENDER to develop a guitar that could withstand his battering and a 100-watt amp that could survive his volume. And then he quit, partly because of illness and partly because he hated the sound of his own records, which couldn't, and didn't, match the supernatural force of his live guitar. He sold real estate and raised lions and tigers. He made his comeback in the 1980s and was quickly discovered by a new generation of fans including STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN and QUENTIN TARANTINO. His 1993 album TRIBAL THUNDER is exactly that. And then he kept touring, and touring, and touring until the very end, partly, ironically, out of medical necessity. Having survived two bouts of rectal cancer and living with a variety of ailments, he stayed on the road, he told the PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER in 2015, because "I have to raise $3,000 every month to pay for the medical supplies I need to stay alive, and that’s on top of the insurance that I pay for." He often performed in excruciating pain. And yet as recently as a month ago, "he was still slaughtering people with volume," according to his bass player, SAM BOLLE. America, listen to your great musicians while they're alive. And, for the ocean god's sake, please take better care of them. RIP... MOBY released an album Friday via the meditation app CALM, where it will live exclusively for a month. Forty-five million well-targeted potential users. Waiting for an artist to do the smaller, hyper-targeted version of that. Like, say, releasing an album via SLACK but only making it available to select workspaces within... As marijuana laws continue to fall around the country, it's little surprise that efforts to import cannabis into the live music world are ramping up, both behind the stage and in front of it. Here's a "backstage budtender" who's building a business by giving product away in green rooms in Oregon and California, and here's a SXSW discussion about the many hurdles that still remain with reaching out to ordinary fans. High-time quote of the day, from California cannabis entrepreneur TIM BLAKE: If you go to a wine-tasting festival, and you can’t buy anything, what are you doing there?"... Research result of the day: Cheese appears to like hip-hop... Interviewer dials wrong number. Guy who answers plays along. Frankly, you've read worse Q&As... SHAWN MENDES cleans up at the JUNO AWARDS... RIP MICHAEL WYCOFF, LIL MISTER, CHAUNCEY "CHICK" CRUMPACKER and JAKE PHELPS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Mr. Dale was known for “Misirlou,” which Quentin Tarantino used as the opening anthem to his film “Pulp Fiction.” | | |
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| Back in the mid-'50s, back before surfing became a national fad, a few Californians pursued the obscure Hawaiian sport with the zeal of any small group onto a good thing. Boston's Dick Dale moved to Southern California as a high school senior in 1954, and he was soon in the water with his board every day at dawn. | | |
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| | | | | | | An early '90s riot grrrl classic from Bratmobile's debut album, "Pottymouth." RIYL: Dick Dale. |
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