I’m going to make your ears bleed…
It was in a pretty small Chicago club and we had a stage side table, dead centre. In fact I could rest my feet on the stage we were so close. One of the first things we noticed upon sitting down was that there were little packages of those foam ear plugs sitting on the tables.
The speaker stacks were a ‘respectable’ size and they also had mic’s in front of them presumably wired into the house PA system. I nodded at this to Linda and Renee; just to sort of acknowledge the fact that this was probably going to be loud.
We sat through the obligatory opening act. A pretty tight guitar based instrumental outfit, sort of in the tradition of Link Wray. This was all well and good, but we were eagerly anticipating the headliner. The King of the Surf Guitar… Dick Dale.
The King of the Surf Guitar
The opening act eventually finished and quickly moved their stuff of stage. A couple of young fellas positioned themselves behind a drum kit and bass guitar. Then the man himself slowly shuffled himself onto stage and plugged in his Strat. And dig this… the amp and reverb he was plugging into were the original units he built with Leo Fender way back in the early 60’s.
All that old man shuffling was mostly an act. He leans into the microphone a bit and says…”I’m gonna make yer ears bleed”. And that was that. He just launched into the most intense and energy filled evening of guitar playing I have ever seen. Beyond the single note staccato style, Dick Dale has a very unique way of playing. It’s not just that he is left handed. There have been many great left handed guitarists out there. Jimi of course comes to mind, and Tony Iommi. Originally Dick Dale played a right handed guitar upside down before switching to a left hand model. The cool thing was however that he plays it strung upside down. Seeing this up close as we were, looked really strange. He also does a lot of stuff where he plays with his fingers over top of the fret-board as opposed to underneath. Additionally there was a lot of percussive stuff he was doing on the strings. The young fellow on the skins was his son Jimmy. During one song he gets beside him and they do a drum duet. But what was really crazy was after playing the drums he keeps the sticks in hand and comes back to centre and to the bass player. The bass man holds the instrument flat and Dick starts wailing away on the strings with the drum sticks, including some nifty slide action. Then the bass gets flipped upside down and he begins hammering away on the back side, the vibrations, which of course get transferred to the strings and pickups. It was bad-ass good.
He played his ultra-classics like Let’s go Trippin’, and Misirlou and a whole bunch of other stuff, some of which I had never heard before. He plays at breakneck speed and you just gotta keep reminding yourself that this cat is somewhere in his 80’s.
I don’t know if having the ear plugs on the table was the venue’s policy or Dale’s. All I know was that it was a good idea and well used. Even so it was a bit hard to hear the following day.*
*Note: We all love head-banging music from time to time. Loud music and hearing damage go hand in hand. Hearing loss is no joke, and for the most part is irreversible. So please be prudent when listening to music.