"My bass player Ron Eglit used to say “Lookit, the monitor speakers are startin to smoke!” and I’d say “Shut up, keep playin.”
LR: We’re interested in where can the guitar go and what we came to was that we wanted to talk to guitar players, innovators and sort of bring back to life the stories of how the instrument became what it is and hopefully that can inspire future guitarists.
Dick Dale: Well, they’ve been putting into the history books the real story of Dick Dale and Leo Fender and the whole thing is that, when I came to CA in 1954, Leo had made the Stratocaster. And before the Stratocaster, he made the Telecaster and that was for what we called chicken plucking for country players. I cut my teeth on Hank Williams and everybody. In fact, I played on a country record, where it was guys like Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizell, Johnny Cash. In fact, Johnny Cash used to have my wife Lana sit on his lap in Florida, St Petersburg, Fla for four months and sing with him.
LR: Oh, that’s fun...
DD: He [Cash] wanted to adopt her because her grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee and he was Cherokee. So I played with all those people and when I came to California, I had been surfing. I started surfing down in Balboa and Huntington Beach and I bought a guitar from an old hock shop, you know, a pawn shop.
I started off with a ukulele back in Quincy, MA and I was holding it upside down and backwards. Because of my rhythm I was playing on drums, by learning on drums from the Gene Krupa, I wanted to strum the guitar like he would play on the drums, but the book didn’t say “turn it the other way, stupid, you’re left-handed,” so I was holding it upside down and backwards forcing my fingers to go where they weren’t supposed to go.
That was the difference between me and like when I found Hendrix, he wasn’t Hendrix then--he was playing bass for Little Richard in a little bar for 20 people in Pasadena, Ca. And then he would come to see me and I would show him slides and things but he couldn’t play the way I was playing, he played on a real left-handed neck and it was strung for a left-hander, where I play on a right-handed neck just held upside down and the difference was, Leo and I changed the knobs to the bottom and everything. But I went to Leo Fender, or my dad and I went to Leo and I said “My name’s Dick Dale and I need a guitar,” and I’m playing at a place called the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa where Stan Kenton had played and they had closed it down. They were gonna tear it down.
At that time people weren’t allowed to play the guitar and charge money for a concert because they didn’t want people to come to see a guitar player playing because they said it was the devil and evil music. They would always have horn bands, so when they had a graduation they would rent out the Rendezvous Ballroom, that’s how I discovered it cause I heard the music being played one night when I was down there and they would have these horn bands. So what I did was, my dad and I would have secret meetings because we wanted to rent the building and we wanted to play some music there.
I was playing in a little coffee shop, it was adjacent to part of the building and it was called The Rinky Dink Ice Cream Parlor and that was in Balboa, right on Main Street. On Balboa Blvd. going straight on down, it was a peninsula 3 miles long and I turned around and they said they wouldn’t give us a permit because “oh you play guitar”, you know, stuff like that, “that’s evil music.” We made meetings with the fathers of the city, the council, the parent/teachers association, the police departments, the fire departments and we did it at night, we had all the heads come in one night. They didn’t want anybody to know what was going on, there would have been all these protestors, and I told them, I said “Look, would you rather have
all your people in one building so you can keep an eye on them and see what they’re doing or would you rather have them out in the street drinking T-Bird?” T-bird was a wine, it was called Thunderbird. I said “otherwise you’re gonna have everyone running around in the streets and the police will be working overtime.” So they said, “Well, they’re gonna have to wear ties if you’re gonna do that” and I said “who ever heard of a surfer wearing ties?” So I
I called the guys I was surfing with and said “Hey I’m gonna play at the Rendezvous” and there was about 17 of my surfing buddies and those were the guys who came to a building that held 4000 people.
LR: Yeah, right (laughing). So was the band made up of surfers too?
DD: No. In fact the guy who started me surfing had just got a surf board to paddle out in the water to be cool (laughing). And how it started was: I had met Billy, he was playing on the piano. And I love boogie woogie on the piano, because piano’s my favorite instrument, out of all of them. And so he was playing in the coffee shop when I went to get ice cream from the Rinky Dink Ice Cream Parlor. And the door was open adjacent to that folk singing room and he’s rehearsing and I sat with Billy.
So [there’s] Billy and I and my buddy, Ray, who was another biker. I was at one time the president of the Sultans of Southwest LA, a biker motorcycle club and I rode on my
1941 flathead Harley Davidson that I completely chopped it all down. At the time, I was trained as a machinist. I was doing induction brazing, that’s working the electrical impulse, and I made these 3” what I called “risers” and I combed them all up and they clamp onto the front headstock of your motorcycle so it will hold handlebars and the handlebars, I had them up to shoulder height because I felt that if you hit something or had to stop hard you want the fulcrum to go from your shoulder directly in a horizontal line to the handlebars, not an ape hanger, you know that’s way above your head, you know that’s deadly, that’s crazy, you just can’t control a machine like that, it’s just for looks. But I’m the guy that they got those risers and they would put their ape hangers on it and handlebars on it...
LR: That’s amazing ...
DD: And that’s why Harley put me in their 100 year anniversary museum book showing my flathead with my risers. Anyway, Ray and I would ride our machines and we wanted to go down to Balboa ‘cause we were living in Southwest LA and there was only one road down there and it was on the coast and that’s how we fell in love with Balboa and I fell
in love with surfing. So you know, I went up to Leo [Fender] and I had this old guitar that wasn’t a Fender, in fact it’s sitting in here in a box, looking out a piece of glass. I said, “my name’s Dick Dale, I’m a surfer, I got no money, can you help me?” And he said, “Here, I just made this guitar.
It’s a Stratocaster” and he says, “go ahead and play it, tell me what you think.” And he plugged it into one of his amps and when I picked it up, he saw me pick it up backwards and start playing, picked it up as a left-hander...
LR: Upside down...
DD: And then he saw me doing my fingers to play it and he turns around and he just almost fell off a chair laughing...he never laughed, he was like Einstein. When you looked
at him, you know, he would only say two or three words and mean a paragraph. But he took a liking to me for some reason and we used to sit together in his living room on his floor
and listen to Marty Robbins on his little old Jensen 10” mono speakers, he just did not like stereo, he did not like these contraptions that people would attach to their guitars. He wanted a straight sound. He was the one who gave Les Paul his break ...
LR: So at the time when you first saw the Stratocaster, had you seen one before?
DD: Oh no, NO. I just had this old guitar out of a pawn shop out of LA . At that time I
didn’t know any better. It looks like it’s an old time Gibson, solid body guitar but with curved wings on the top and the sides. I wanted it to look like when I was playing country on Town Hall Party in Compton, CA, it was a TV show once a week with Lori and Larry Collins.
There was a contest and I won it and I started being a weekly guest on there and they used to have all this pretty plastic, you know, these pick guards on the guitar and I said “Wow,”
so I went and repainted the guitar but up on the top of the neck on the
patent head, I stupidly sanded it down and painted it white. I used to be in art also, I could draw pictures and stuff like that, and I drew a king’s crown on the top (laughing), painted it in black, you know, and the body had beautiful plastic cutouts on the side. I’ve got it right
here as we talk.
When I bought my first guitar like around 7th grade, after my ukulele, that was a Martin or a Gibson guitar, I saw it in one of my old pictures and I said “my god, that would be worth about $100,000 right now” but you know, I sanded it all down, the last time I saw it was out in the hangar cracked and broken. But I went from that to the one I bought in the pawn shop in LA and then when I went to Leo [who] showed me this guitar and when I started strumming on it he just laughed and laughed. He said “Why do you play that way?” and that just hooked us up together.
Plus he loves boats, motor yachts, like I did and he used to design them all day long on his desk, so we just had a lot in common. In fact, his wife said with all the thousands of guitar players Leo Fender ever did things with, she said the only name I ever heard every day when he came home was Dick Dale this, and Dick Dale that and that I wanted the guitar to sound like Gene Krupa’s drums.
[But] they only had like 10-15 watt output transformers and that’s what makes your sound and that’s what gives you your power. They only had Jensen speakers that were anywhere from 6, 8, 10 inches and then they had a 12-incher and I would fry those things, I’d catch them on fire because when you’re pushing the electricity through it, the amps, it’ll heat up the two little metal wires to the cone inside, heat it and the cone’ll catch on fire. I mean I burned up the sound system in London at the Royal Albert Hall (laughing).
LR: (Laughing) That’s pretty badass.
DD: My bass player back then, Ron Eglit used to say they’re smoking, the
monitor speakers, he’d say “Lookit, the monitor speakers are startin to smoke!” and I’d say “Shut up, keep playin.” He goes, “Why do you have to play so loud?” and I said “Because I want the fatness!” So that’s when I changed, we realized the science of it. The thicker the wood, the fatter the sound will come out of the guitar, number one.
LR: The thicker the wood of the guitar?
DD: Yes. Freddy Taveres, who was from Hawaii, he plays the Hawaiian steel for Harry Owens who wrote all the beautiful Hawaiian songs. Freddie is the man that Leo hired to take all the nicks and crooks out of the Telecaster. In other words, you gotta beat it to death and that’s what Leo said to me, he said, “Take this. I want you to beat it to death and tell me what you
think.” So, first of all I’m not a guitar player. I don’t know what an augmented 9th is or a 13th and all that crap. I just make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure. Someone said when I played it, it looked like I was choppin’ down a tree. Another old lady said it looked like I was going through exorcism. So I had a chemistry of what I wanted guitar to sound like and it was
what Freddie told me. We were like the Three Musketeers, Freddie, Leo and I. We were the only people in the world when we were testing stuff and creating stuff and Freddie said to me, “Dick if you could put strings on a telephone poll with pickups you’d have the fattest sound known to man.” But you can’t hold a telephone poll. That’s why they carved out the back side a little bit so people with oversized bellies could hold it against their stomach but [Leo] made it a thick solid wood guitar.
What’s the next step? The next step is people would play on 6, 7, 8, 9 10-gauge guitar strings which is small, thin. My guitar strings started unwound with a 16, unwound with an 18, and unwound with a 20. Then it went to 39 wound, 49 wound and 60-gauge wound.
LR: Yeah. That’s heavy.
DD: And the critics would say ‘He plays on goddamn bridge cables” and other writers would say “They’re like telephone wires.” But the thicker the wound, and also the valley of the winding of the core of the string, the deeper the valley of that wound when you wind it... We experimented with strings and it hurts your fingers. They wanted to a jazz sound and we were making a jazz master and Leo made flat wound...
LR: Flat wound strings...Did you use those?
DD: Yeah. I’m the one who pioneered them with Leo Fender. Everything that came out of Leo’s
brain, I was his guinea pig and I was the guy who caused him to think of these things. LR: But aren’t flat wounds more of a dead dark sound? Your sound is always so bright.
DD: Flat wounds are made for jazz players. A very soft, mutated sound. That’s why Leo and I put ‘em up together to see what they’d sound like and I pioneered them, I didn’t like them but we
knew what they were for. I stayed with the round wound strings. There are companies that make the round wounds and sometimeswhen you look at a guitar string, it wounds around
the core and that’s the main stay wire. Take a look at some different companies that make their strings and you can take a knife blade and put it between each wound, do you
know what I’m saying? Just winding around the string? LR: Yeah sure.
DD: Look at how deep you can go. The deeper you can go will give you a more powerful penetration of sound. I’ve had Ernie Ball strings -- his son used to play for me and,
they’re a great family -- and I used to use his strings all the time but what would happen is I could break 2 or 3 strings in one song because I was using my Sideman pick which was a heavy gauge pick but would not bend. I would spin it around in my fingers to do certain things to get sounds and I was playing like Gene Kruppa’s drumming: 1,2,3,4...1,2,3,4...1,2,3,4.
In a Shaolin temple they never allow you to touch the skin of a drum for years until
you can tongue what you play with your hands, so trying to memorize it you learn to tongue it to get it into your brain: digga digga dagadigga, digga digga dagadigga, dagadigga da – like that but when you are no longer the grasshopper, then you’ll sound like this - (very fast) diggadiggaDAgadiggadiggadiggaDAgadiggadiggadiggaDAgadiggaDA...do you hear that?
LR: Yeah.
DD: All right, you can hear the One emphasizing first. Then that’s the way Gene Krupa would do on his snare and when he got the turnaround on the drum set instead of making it sound like oatmeal, you go 1234 1234 1234 1234 1 where you’re going to the snare to the rack tom to the floor tom to the bass drum tom. So that way the people can feel the beat. Anyone who comes to work for me, I train them this way, bass playing, keyboard playing, the drums, no matter what they do, how they accentuate. It makes you sound like 10 people when everybody is doing it together.
LR: Yeah it does. It’s like one wave, everybody’s doing different parts of it but everybody’s traveling on the same wave, I can hear that.
DD: That’s right! I had a writer once say to me “I’ve been listening to punk rockers for year and years” and then Dick Dale came to town and he said “Now I know what I should’ve been listening to.” Because the guy on the bass is playing his thing, the guys on the guitars are playing their thing, the drummer’s playing his thing.
I want my drummer, when I go diggadiggaDAgadiggaDA, I want him to do a turnaround and land on the dot the same time I do and I want him to strike his drum the same way I strike my pick. I want the bass player to go dundunDAdundundunDAdunDA and that’s why we sound so big. When they nod their head to your rhythm, they wanna find something they can latch onto, nod to. When you just sound like oatmeal, when someone’s playing on a bass with his fingers, you can’t hear what the hell he’s playing, you cannot separate every note because it’s not in the same percussion as Gene Krupa did.
LR: I feel like traditionally with rock and roll music people talk about rhythm guitar playing and lead guitar playing, it seems like all your playing is rhythmic whether it’s melodic or background, foreground. Do you have a take on that?
DD: Yes, I teach people how to strum with the same method. I call it starting from the
root which would be the trunk of the tree. And you go up the trunk into the branches and you go out into the leaves...
LR: So would the trunk of the tree be the bridge of the guitar, is that what you mean?
DD: No, I’m talking about looking at the sound, you play it on the guitar like it’s a complete tree. So when you’re strumming, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 would be the root note you would hit and then the next note would be 5 lower in sound and the next note, the leaf, would be say a 2. So when you’re singing “Take the ribbons from your hair,” most people are just strumming the old country style strumming. They didn’t have the electric guitars and they had to strum really hard and they had high frets on their neck so they could be heard.
LR: Yeah sure. Volume.
DD: What I’ve taught people to do is let the song be heard by your voice and let the instrument be the background and the background having a percussion with the application of the rhythm so you would go “take the ribbons from your” and then “hair” would be a 10 strike, the bottom notes and go up from there: ding dit DA dup, ding dit DA – the ding is the big, in the middle is medium and DA is the lightness so that you can hear your endings vocal of the words just drifting through the air like angels in the background. That’s how you should back yourself up singing with the guitar instead of banging on the goddamn thing all the way through.
But getting back to the Strat, we turned around and I blew up over 50 of Fender’s amplifiers... LR: (Laughing) That was nice of him to let you do that.
DD: Well [Fender] wanted to know why something is going on and he wondered why I had to play loud. So when we built the ballroom up to 4,000 people a night the city made us put in fire exits because of how many people were in there. The speakers would be like 6 to 8 ft long and maybe about 5 ft high and it would have about half a dozen, dozen speakers in it and we would try all these Jensen speakers and it sounded loud while we were sitting there but then when I got on the stage the first 100 people came in it sounded fine. Then 1000 people came in, their bodies would soak up the bass response and now it sounded now very thin and Leo said when he witnessed that “Freddie, I’m going back to the drawing board. Now I know what Dick is trying to tell me.”
And then I get a phone call one time, it was 2:30 in the morning and Leo said, “Dick, I got it, I got it, I found it! I got it! You gotta come down.” He says “I made an 85 watt output transformer, peaking 100 watts because using 5881 tubes would give it that WhOOm sound, ya gotta try it, ya, ya gotta try it.” But then we didn’t have a speaker that could handle what he had created for me. So we went to JBL which is a brother of Altec, and Leo said ‘we want a 15” speaker in this cage.” They had a metal cage that holds it we called it a birdcage and we wanted about a 10 to
an 11/12 lb magnet and I wanted an aluminum disc cover so you could hear the click of my pick...
LR: Were bass players using 15” speakers back then?
DD: Nobody was using them, that’s why I’m the father of it all. Nobody had that kind of transformer. [Leo] made the first transformers for that. So the speaker people started laughing. And they said “What, you gonna put that on a tugboat?” and Leo just looked at them and said “if you want my business, make it.” So that was the birth of the first 15” D130 Lansing speaker.
Now, they said they were 16 ohms but they weren’t, they were 8 ohms and that’s what we found out. We built a 3’ high cabinet, 2’ wide 12” deep, no portholes, we want just the speaker to pump forward and back, forward and back. Well, when I plugged the amplifier, with the 85 watter peaking 100 watts and it was like going from a VW to a Testarossa. I mean it was like
splitting the atom. I liked it for the first week and then I said, “Leo, I gotta put another Lansing in there, I’ve gotta get that fatter sound” and he said “Oh my god I gotta make another transformer and it’s gotta be 4 ohms now.”
He went back and he called me again, “Come down, quick quick quick” and it was so funny because the amps were cream [color] because at that time we were wrapping them in brown and he had to make these amp heads so fast because I was blowin’ them so he had some leftover of the cream wrap and said, “Don’t let anybody see it, people are gonna want it. They’re too impractical, people are gonna stain ‘em with coffee, ash their cigarettes on ‘em.”
A week later he calls me back and the whole damn room was filled with the cream tolex cover and that’s how all the Fender cream amps were born. And then he goes “I’ve made a 100 watt output transformer and it peaks 180 watts.” Well let me tell you something. I spent 3 days in Mississippi with an amplifier maker with a big name, Triad, who loved and respected Leo and we wanted to match that transformer with transistors. We could go electronically like that, we could go as high as 100 watts and it flattened out and it did not have the blossom over 100 watts so it was a failure. So that’s why I always use the tubes, the tubes will push it and the way he wound the transformer, he wound it totally unorthodox, half way through it he reversed the winding so Triad made that for him, that upward transformer, he gave me the last of the 7 of them.
So we went and took another Lansing. But the first ones we created, I was still jamming them, they couldn’t figure out why I was still jamming them. And Freddie would pick up a speaker and put his fingers on the speaker, back and forth, fingers on the back and his thumb on the front and when you pull it toward you and push it back it’s supposed to be clean and clear. Mine were grinding because they were twisting in the center of the cone. What was happening was that when I was picking it was confusing the signal on the speaker. The speaker would twist and jam. JD Allen said, “Look, rubberize the whole front ridge of the speaker to make it flexible so that it’ll bounce and not jam, so it’ll not be rigid.”
They did it and that was called the 15” D130F meaning Fender specifications. If you find a D130 in California, just tell them you want the Dick Dale power pack in it, they’ll know how to transfer going from the original D130 to the Dick Dale power pack, the D130F. I play through those
same speakers as we speak today from 1955. The only thing that destroys them is the aging, when they start to rot in the material of the speaker and it looks like you shot it with a shotgun.
So, we split the atom electronically for the first 85 watt output transformer peaking 100 watt and then we actually went to the moon by doing the 100 watt output transformer peaking 180 watts.
LR: And was there reverb in the amp then?
DD: No. I invented the reverb. Well, I didn’t invent it, I stole it. I stole it from Hammond. A Hammond organ. Reverb was not made for the guitar. When their Spring reverb came out they were following what I was doing. I had the reverb started for my voice. I didn’t have a
natural vibrato and I loved singing country music and I wanted my voice to sustain like when you play a piano, you hit the sustain pedal and it rings and I didn’t want it to echo. So Leo and I were trying to figure out how to do this and that’s how we came up with the Echoplex, but that didn’t do the job. I pioneered the Fender Rhodes piano at the Hollywood Bowl. I pioneered every single thing that came out of his brain.
But back to the reverb. I wanted to get my voice sustaining and everything we tried did not work. Now I had an organ at home and on a button it said “reverb”. I hit the reverb, there was a sustain on the note, so I took the whole damn organ apart and inside on the back was a can about maybe 12” x 4 1⁄2” x 1” deep that was screwed to the back of the organ. So I unscrewed it, unconnected it and found these two screens that were inside and then I went below that and there were 4 springs that held it on each. They were very, very fine springs and that’s what made that thing work. So I took that can and it says “Hammond” (laughter) and I gave it to Leo and I said “Leo, this is it. This is it!” So he went and made a box. We used 3 tubes, we had a 6K6, 7025 a 12AXT7 and we built a separate standing box just for that. And I plugged in my guitar and then I outputted into my Showman amp, dual Showman amp which only meant one thing: it had 2 speakers and it was a 100 watt output transformer.
LR: Okay.
DD: So I plugged my Shure Dynamic Birdcage microphone in that Frank Sinatra used to carry
with him everywhere he went, and I sounded like Dean Martin for chrissake! (laughing)
It was such a beautiful sound and I kept singing through that for a week and I said “You
know? Why don’t I plug the guitar in it and see what happens?” So I plugged the guitar in it and the rest is history. “Oh the wet splashy sound. That’s the surf sound.” No! That wasn’t the surf sound, that was a sound that I made for my voice.
LR: Yeah...
DD: So that’s a whole ‘nother story, I mean, a lot of people don’t know these stories. They said “Well where did he get his sound from, that’s the sound of the surf.” But it wasn’t! My first album didn’t have reverb on it. Surfer’s Choice. Let’s Go Trippin’. “Oh I hear a reverb.” That ain’t a reverb. I was sitting in a hall, a walkway in a building that was only about 5 ft across and it was about 30 ft long and we had a mixing board down at the very end and we had a
box that was about 4 1⁄2’ tall and about 8” deep and it was about 6’ long. I put a microphone in
there and I played through that whole big box. There was no reverb on my first album. You can hear how dry it is when you’re playin it. I had to retake it about 90 times because they couldn’t capture it.I kept blowin up their mixing machine, they couldn’t separate my sound from everything else. So that’s how that became. My sound came from how we made the
amplifier, the output transformers, the speaker cabinets and the speaker but then how’s the style of my sound created? It was created from Gene Krupa’s drums. So they could’ve said “Dick Dale, King of the Gene Krupa drum sound.”
And then the next step: I had about 40 animals from all over the world, I was trying
to preserve their breeds from being killed by poachers and that was my life. There were lions, tigers, apes, elephants. I had every animal you could think of. Fox, eagles, falcons, sea lions I would take out of the ocean and cure them from their pneumonia. Had them right in the house, right in the mansion down in Balboa. My African lion used to run down the hallway in my mobile home, jump on my bed and break it. I used to have big cinder block concrete underneath the bed so that she wouldn’t break the bed when she jumped in it, I’ve got pictures of that. When she would go down the hallway, she couldn’t turn around cause she was so damn big, she was about 400 lbs, she would turn around and break both walls because they’re nothing but plywood. When I’d come home, my mountain lion would see me and go “WoOOOOOOoww” like that, call to me because she lived in the house with me. I had acreage and I built big BIG running cages. I had telephone poles in the ground, 50 feet down the property and 20 feet across and big chain link welded with steel and that’s what they lived in. They ran up and down all the time and had a blast and that’s what I did with these animals so that they were happy, they lived their lives until they died. So I would imitate my African lion who’d see me, 5 o’clock at night, he’d go “ooooOOOOOOOHHHHWD” (Deep voice) like that, and I would imitate that.
My elephant would scream because she loved me putting fruits and vegetables down at her mouth and on her tongue. So I would imitate my fox and my falcons on my guitar, to be like a Neanderthal bird, a Pterodactyl. And I see these things while I’m playing. I keep on thinking like Jurassic Park. So to me, when I’m playing, I’m thinking of these creatures, these animals calling me.
At the same time, when I was surfing, I would be wrapped up in a tube, and get spit up, over and over, thrown down and sucked up again and thrown down again. Three and four times where I’ve been washed up on the beach unconscious from being hit on coral and stuff like that and the pressure and I got 18 stitches across the front of my skull where it opened and all kinds of stuff like that. That ocean, you know, chewing me up and spitting me out. So you can’t just say “it’s surfing music.”
Anyhow, what’s the other amplifier company, starts with an M... LR: Marshall.
DD: Marshall, thank you very much. So Marshall loved Leo Fender. They copied his exact wiring and everything BUT they couldn’t get the potentiometer that they needed for the press on switches, it didn’t capture the color of the fatness of the sound.
So I was in the middle of this big store that featured that Marshall am, they had the biggest Marshalls going. So I said “the problem I have is that I gotta spend 10 to 15 thousand dollars to ship my equipment to Europe when I play, I gotta find an amp to use.” So I thought “Why don’t I just cheat and use a Marshall cause they’re over there and all I have to do is go over there and rent ‘em.” So the guy at the store was workin’ on my head, my dual Showman, lotta people were in the store talking to me and Marshall had a big display so I thought “I wanna try the biggest Marshall they got.” So my guy brought in my dual speaker cabinet and I plugged it into their number one big Marshall and I started playing it and I really put it through the works and I thought “Well, you know what? If I just change a couple of settings, I can live with it and nobody will know the difference maybe.” You know, I was just trying to find a way out.
LR: Yeah.
DD: When they brought my dual Showman in, we AB’d it with a Marshall and the minute I hit
that dual Showman everybody in the store went “No F’n way, man”.
LR: (laughter)
DD: “No way,” you know, like that. You know, that Marshall just did not have that color.
LR: The intensity, the power.
DD: The color, the fatness. Because output transformers only favored one thing. They only favored highs or mids or lows . Nobody had transformers that favored highs, mids and lows.
LR: Right.
DD: That’s the way Leo wanted it. And he made the Dick Dale output transformer, that’s what they called it, and it had all three. And that’s what is missing all the time when I use somebody else’s amp head.
LR: What about distortion?
DD: I’m the one who created distortion in the beginning... Nah, I take it back. Not distortion. I
created feedback. LR: Right.
DD: I’m the first guy to do that. Because I went and hooked up 6 dual Showmans with their speakers, wrapped them all in a semi-circle behind me when we first created them and I plugged it in and when I hit that note, my feet, I levitated off the ground...
LR: (Big laughter)
DD: It was in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. And I just immediately went back to my single and then I went to my doubles where I have dual amps, one on each side of the stage and dual speakers and my sound from both sides, because you can’t control the volume properly.
LR: With the dynamics..
DD: Yeah, because what I do is, I turn my volume all the way up and I regulate it all by what’s coming off the amplifier and I switch to the output, which is closest to the saddles and I’ll switch to the center and I’ll switch to the one that’s close to the neck.
LR: Mmmhmm...
DD: And then what I did was on the Strat, we had a 3 position switch and when I used to play Latino stuff I wanted it to have a pretty sound, so I learned how to flick the switch between, we’ll call it the number one pick-up, the one closest to the neck, and the number two pick-up in the middle. I was able to switch it right on the camber (laughing).
I mean, it’s really hard to do because it tends to slide off and go to either pick up or the other one, you know.
LR: Right.
DD: I used to jam my hand down and then do it with my thumb and hold it and it would stay
there and it mixed the first pick-up and the second pick-up together. LR: Now this was before the 5 position pick-up...
DD: That’s the Dick Dale one. I’m getting to that...
LR: Yeah (laughing).
DD: And after that, Leo says, “What are you doing? I’m watching you do that...” and I said,
“Oh, I wanna connect this one to this one.” So he says “Why don’t we just make you a Dick Dale 5 Position Switch?” I says, “Alright.”
So he made the switch, I got out my guitar and we put it back, put it in, and it drove me friggin’ crazy because there were so many positions I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doin’. BUT it stayed in production so I took my 3 position back and then I rewired inside, I cut another hole and I put just the toggle switch so that when I hit that toggle switch, if my pick-up switch on my 3 position is in the #1 position?
LR: In the neck position, yeah.
DD: Yeah, OR it’s in the second position in the middle. If I’ve got it clicked to either one of those, when I flick my toggle switch it’ll put ‘em both together no matter what. And so he used to ask me what that was for and I said it’s my ejection switch.
LR: (laughing) Yeah. Did that inspire the Jazz Master?
DD: Yeah, we did those guitars for people that couldn’t afford to get a Stratocaster.
And you get the dual Showman with a hundred watt output with a 100 watt transformer peaking 180 watts, you get the D130F 13” and you put it in a 3 ft high cabinet because we had 4 ft highs, 5 ft highs and what happened with those, they tend to over boom. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t tight enough.
LR: You would lose the articulation.
DD: We stayed with the 3 ft high. And a couple of things Leo didn’t know or didn’t realize because I’m experimenting. Like for instance, you never put an amp head on top of the speaker. Why? Because the pounding, I mean you could put a bottle on your speaker and it would always fall off in the mid tones, so that vibration breaks the tube, you’ll blow tubes like you won’t believe. So I always tell everybody “Put it on the floor.”
LR: Yeah.
DD: The other thing was that the position bass was made for rock and roll, and the jazz bass... when they put that nice pretty beautiful chrome cover over the strings where you’re
picking, that looks so nice when it’s polished but they didn’t realize it creates a type of a overtone, it’s like cupping your hand over it or something. I tell everybody, take the cup off because when you’re playing, you wanna take the palm of your hand and rest it right
on the saddles where the strings come up through the bass. That way you can mutate it, let it ring, you can do all kinds of things with it plus when you’re picking, you can use the base of the palm of your hand, you go up and down as it’s on the guitar without you holding it up in the air, going up and down with the pick like a lot of ‘em do. You can brace it and that’s how you can get it so tight.
LR: So in your picking for the guitar, are you oftentimes picking real close to the saddle to get that effect?
DD: My hands are laying on the saddle, they’re laying just behind the saddle, because when I want to mutate it, like that thing I created on Let’s Go Trippin’, then I move the palm of
my hand so it’s touching the strings as they’re coming out of the saddle
With those Ernie Ball strings, I was breaking 3 strings a song, I was breaking 60 gauge strings ...
LR: Right, because there was so much tension.
DD: We just didn’t know why until these three college kids were standing right in front of me
on the stage and I brought the picks down, you know, half way down...I put a
pick holder up there and you could see the pick dust falling in the light of the spotlight, it was amazing. And the kids were looking at my guitar and they said, “Look! Your strings are turning black, they’re turning black, turning purple!” They were turning black coming out of the saddles so I changed from the saddle that came with the guitar, put in a stainless steel saddle. It still did the same thing. And then I took the string out and looked at it when it broke, and it
was purple and black and the string was annealing from the heat, from the vibration, ‘cause when you take a coat hanger and you go back and forth and back and forth, it’ll snap, correct?
LR: Yeah?
DD: All right. Well, the picking going diggadiggaDAgadigga, like that, causing it to vibrate so much on the steel, it heated it up, causing it to anneal. That softens the metal and that’s why they broke. So I sent them back to Ernie Ball’s and I said “Look what’s happening to your strings,” and they said “You shouldn’t play it that way!” (laughing)
LR: (Laughing) They were more sane than Fender.
DD: (Laughing) Yeah, well, Fender used to do their own winding. But what happened was I started using another company that heat-treated their strings differently and I could play a whole concert and they would last without breakin’ one. But then I went a step further.
there’s a company called Graph Tech out of Canada, and I found out that Graph Tech took the heat...
LR: What are they made out of?
DD: Graphite. And people used to say “Oh no, you’re not gonna get the same ring like you do on the steel and I said “What the hell are you talking about? All you gotta do is change the goddamn setting on your guitar and treble, turn your presence up and you got the same sound.”
LR: Yeah, totally.
DD: And that’s what I did. So I could go now using Graph Techs, for 3 concerts and then I would
have to change my strings. LR: Yeah, that’s impressive.
DD: So now what I’m doing is Dunlop has really gotten into their strings and they really are Dick Dale music lovers and they said “Dick, try our strings.” So I’ve been using
their strings, I’ve been using their picks but I’m cheating a little bit now because I’m not using a 60 gauge string, I’m using a 58 gauge string...
LR: (laughter)
DD: (laughter)
LR: And what size pick are you using?
DD: Still using the Sideman pick which was the heavy gauge.
LR: So you use the glossy one, not the tortex, the matte one...
DD: Oh no, I use the glossy ones, cause I move the pick around in my fingers. LR: Yeah, right.
DD: Yeah, for doing certain things but I’m using a medium so it has a little bit of flex in it. But I still grind them too, but it’s easier for me to play, I’m 78! (laughing)
LR: That’s so cool. We’re gonna try and come to the Whisky A-Go-Go show in LA.
DD: Oh, that’s gonna be great. The Whisky-A-Go-Go. I did that way back in the beginning. Waaaaaaaay back in the beginning and to me it’s like digging a historical piece out of
the ground and holding it in your hand.
LR: That’s great! I really appreciate that. And I really appreciate you sharing your stories and I hope it inspires the kids! That’s the goal.