Dick Dale, nicknamed “The King of the Surf Guitar,” died Saturday at age 81. He practically invented “surf music”. He was in all those 60’s Beach movies playing the electric guitar in the sand with no amp (?) (Movie magic)
Born Richard Monsour, Dale is credited with inventing the surf guitar sound during a lengthy early 1960s residency at the Rendezvous club in Balboa, California and for releasing the first surf-rock single, “Let’s Go Trippin’,” in 1961. It was his highest charting single nationally, at number-60, although “Miserlou,” which added strains of the music of his Lebanese heritage to his surf sound, was probably his best known — especially after it was revived in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1995.
Dale’s career had two prolific periods recording-wise, 1961 through ‘65 and, following a 1987 duet with Stevie Ray Vaughan on the surf instrumental classic “Pipeline” for the movie Back to the Beach, the mid-’90s. During that time, he released three hard-rocking albums that updated his original surf sound and found him a new audience that kept him on the road for the remainder of his life.
