Dick: Hello

AH: Hi, could I speak with Dick Dale please?

Dick: Yeah go ahead

AH: Hey how’s it going. This is Amy with the Orange County Gazette.  How are you doing?

Dick: Hey Amy what’s going on?

AH: Not Much.  So let’s get this interview started.  I heard you live on a boat in Newport Harbor, that sounds cool. Are you kind of like the pirate–

Dick: I visit my boat.  I have a private airport up here in the high desert in 29 Palms, 2,000 ft. above Palm—if you get on my webpage, DickDale.com, and go to my personal page, and scroll all the way down to the magazines and stuff like that, you’ll see one of my planes flying in.  And below that you’ll see my airport.  It’s called Dick Dale Sky Ranch.  It used to belong to the marine base, which is the largest marine base in the world.  It’s over a thousand square miles, but it’s now called Dick Dale Sky Ranch, and if you’re a pilot it’s on the sectional maps when you fly.  It’s like over a hundred acres, because the landing strips are like 4000 ft. long.  And so that’s where I live here being a pilot and I go down to my boat usually about 3 or 4 days every other week, you know to kind of kick back and just answer my email everyday and look down the harbor every—except it’s kind of weird, back in the 60s, 64/65, that’s when I had my other cabin cruiser where I used to take my mom and dad to Catalina all the time.  It’s funny; it makes the big circle, because my home was the Gillette mansion, at the Wedge, for 20 some-odd years.  And when that building was built, it was one of the only buildings on the whole peninsula which was three miles long, way back when.  It was built by Tim Gillette, of Gillette razorblades

AH: Oh wow…

Dick: If you took a tour of the boats and go down to the harbor, they’d say “Oh there’s Dick Dale’s house” and blah blah blah.  My boat is up there in the turning base, right where I used to keep my other boat.  So it’s kind of wild how life makes a big circle.  You know.  The boat I have now is twice the size of the boat I had when I used to take my mom and dad to Catalina.  So it’s two ways of life. Down there it’s one thing, and up here [in 29 palms] you can see the Milky Way at night and it’s nice and dry, I can leave my tools out at night and they won’t rust.  The wind it just bathes you, like when I walk down the runways at night with my dogs, the wind just bathes you.  My mother, I used to push her down the runway in the wheelchair, and she used to say “It bathes your body like a powder puff”.  It’s just so nice and soft and dry and warm. So it’s two different lives, which is neat.  I’ve been down in Balboa since 1950—Gosh—since 1955.  That’s when I started the Rendezvous Ballroom.  Back in the late 50’s.  We reopened up the ballroom. 

Now we’re having fun.  We’re going back on tour.  My son Jimmy and uh, their band, FCC—that stands for Forever Came Calling—Uh, Anyway they’re going to opening for me starting at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and uh, they’re going to go on tour all the way up to Victoria, Canada with me.  And coming up, shortly, in June, we start the tour June 13th, that’s when we play the Coach House together.  Then just before that they’ll be playing in the Guitar Center in San Bernadino out in the big parking lot and I’ll be over there to do autographs, questions.  And I just got to play over at the Guitar Center in Fountain Valley there, right off the 405 not too long ago which was really really neat.  It was like a Q & A.  You know?  And the families brought all their children, and we had a great great time.  Then we’ve got like three new guitars—two guitars, coming out.   One is the Jimmy Dale signature, uh, acoustic Fender and the other is the Dick Dale signature Malibu acoustic guitar, which we designed.  It was actually designed on these acoustic guitars, acoustic-electric guitars, there’s a whole neat story behind that so we’re having a lot of fun.  Oh and they’re going to put out a Dick Dale—they’re only going to put out two of them—and it’s acoustic guitar that was designed by Matt who is my director of operations, Matt Marshall, where they took my first surfing cover, my first album which was called Surfer’s Choice, with me surfing on the cover back in the 50’s and that’s going to be on the face of the guitar with a bunch of other pictures. You know it’s like a collage of pictures from back in the 50’s and 60’s.  This guitar is for collectors only and there are only about 200 of them.  And these are all coming out in about 2010.

AH: Nice.  Speaking of Fender, how did you get in with Leo Fender and start helping him to build his amps?

Dick: What happened was, when I came to California in 1954/55, my dad and I, we found out about this guy named Leo Fender.  He was like Einstein when it came to guitars and amplifiers.  And, let me set it straight also, that Les Paul—Jimmy, my son has played with Les Paul—and uh, he, Les is the man who invented the electric guitar.  And then they say Dick Dale put the electricity in the guitar.  (laughs)  I think that’s why they call me the “Father of Loud”, because Leo Fender was the one who helped Les Paul, uh, solidify his relationship with Gibson, and so they were very close.  And so I went to Leo Fender and said “My name is Dick Dale. I’m a surfer. I got no money and I need a guitar because I’m playing a junky old thing, which is in the museum in Huntington Beach right now, in the surfing museum.  And I just said, “Can you help me out?  I got no money and I’m a surfer and I play guitar and I’m going to play at the Rendezvous Ballroom where Stan Kenton used to perform, and every band that was ever the largest band, you know the big bands in that era, and it held 4000 people.  It was like a full city block, and right now, it burned down, and they put condominiums there. But Leo took a good look at me and he said, “Well here.  I just created this guitar called the Stratocaster”.  He said, “Tell me what you think of it.”  So I picked it up and held it upside down backwards, because I was left handed and it was a right handed guitar. And I started playing it and he just died laughing, he rolled over in his tomb and he was laughing.  He never laughed before.  He was always like Einstein. Always focusing. 

And he loved Cabin Cruisers also.  He had Matthews and Stevens boats. I’ve got a 68 footer, now, but in those days I had a 38 footer, and he had 40 footers, he was always designing the inside of these boats the way he liked them, so we had something in common to talk about.  And then he just took a liking to me, the way I was banging on the guitar.  And he goes, “Why do you play like that?” And I said “well the book never said, turn it the other way stupid, you’re left handed”.  I was always making jokes. 

Drums was my first instrument as a kid.  I used to bang on my mother’s cooking cans with knives listening to Harry James and Gene Krupa on the big album records my dad would bring home. So then I wanted my guitar to sound really big and fat and thick like Jean coopers drums.  So in those days they already had 10/15 watt output transformers, so after I blew up about 50 amplifiers of Leo Fender’s—the speakers would catch on fire because when you turn something up so loud and the amperage goes through the wire, into, the speaker cone and it’ll heat up and it’ll cause it to smoke, and it’ll actually burst into flames.  In fact, I burnt up the sound system at the Royal Albert Hall in London. My bass player goes, “Dick, the speakers are burning!” And I go, “Shut up. Keep playing.” (laughs)  That was their sound system. I just kept blowin’ them up and he [Fender] goes, “Why do you gotta play so loud?” And then he came down and we had the Ballroom filled with 4000 people. And then he said, “Back to the drawing board”, he told his buddy, his number one man, Freddy Tavares, who was from Hawaii.  He played the steel guitar for Harry Owens who was very famous in Hawaii who did Hawaiian songs. So he said, “Freddy, back to the drawing board. Now I know what Dick Dale was trying to tell me.”  And he created the first 85 watt output transformer that peaked at 100 watts.  And then we needed the speakers so we created the first 15-inch D130 Twin speaker.  Huge.  And that’s when Dick Dale… you know you can say Dick Dale created surf music, they called it surf music because I was surfing all the time every day, but what I really did was change—take the electronics of amplifiers and speakers of music being played into these things and take it to out of space you might say (laughs). Like going from a VW bug to a Ferrari.  And that’s how that all became. And that’s why they started calling me “The Father of Loud”, “The Father of Heavy Metal”, all kinds of stuff like that.  Because I was the first power player in the world. In fact it was GQ magazine that just did an article on me in the March issue.  And their statement was “All hail Dick Dale, the original guitar Hero”.  And that was because I was the guy responsible with Leo Fender to build these huge output transformers and speakers that take them from 10 watts to like 100 watts, peaking at 180 watts finally…and that’s what I play through today.  I play through the same stuff, the original stuff that we created back then. And it goes with me all over the world.