surfers' choice

King of the surf guitar Dick Dale started a tidal wave of imitators with the quintessential staccato swell of this trailblazing debut. Dick Dale and his Del-Tones recorded 'Surfers' Choice' live at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California with some overdubs added in the studio with producer Jim Monsour. It was originally released on Dale's own Deltone label and was later picked up by Capitol Records.

Dale reveals: "It was in the fifties, not the sixties, like all the magazines say. They don't know the whole true story anyway— they weren't even born! I crack up. I've always been kind of silent about everything, but now that everybody's starting to try to make money off it, I don't want kids to spend money on the wrong thing. You got books out there with all these different kinds of guitars that have nothing to do with the sound that Dick Dale created. The sound is a Stratocaster guitar. It's the solidity of the wood— the thicker the wood, the bigger and purer the sound. It was a Strat. Not the Jaguar, not the Jazzmaster, all these things we created later, for different reasons. Even the reverb—reverb had nothing to do with the surfing sound, and here they got 'em on the cover going 'That's the wet, splashy sound of reverb.' No! We created the reverb because Dick Dale did not have a natural vibrato on his voice. I wanted to sustain my notes while singing. So we copied the Hammond organ, which had a tank in it. We took the tank out, rewired it, and had an outboard reverb! It was for the vocal. Our first album, 'Surfers' Choice', sold over eighty-eight thousand albums—locally! That's like more than four million today. Dick Dale was already established as King of the Surf Guitar, and that album did not have reverb on it. It wasn't even invented!...In the fifties, you couldn't get a license to play in the high schools and junior highs—you could only dance to horn bands. They thought anybody who played guitar was evil. We said, 'You want your kids out in the street or would you rather have them in one big place?' They said, 'They gotta wear ties!' Who the hell ever heard of surfers wearing ties? They finally gave us a permit to reopen the Rendezvous Ballroom, which was a whole city block. Opening night we had seventeen surfers in their bare feet—wearing ties. We had a box of 'em and handed 'em out to keep the city happy. And the surfers would say, 'Man, you're the king!' So that's how the name 'King of the Surf Guitar' came about. Dick Dale has never named anything himself. Dick Dale was strictly a product of the grassroots then, and now boom!—it's happened again. Especially because of 'Pulp Fiction'—that just took it right over the top. Movie's done over one hundred million. I just got a platinum album for it."

'Surfers' Choice' charted at number fifty-nine on the album chart. Dale describes the surf guitar sound: "Well what it is, is the meaning of the sounds of the waves, like the echo and the sounds of the tube and my finger would be in the wall and I could hear it go chhhhhhhhhhh! And I’d take my strings and go weeeeeeer! Up high and then you get that rumble just before you’re going to be flung over, you know right before you’re going to go over the fucking falls and get slammed down, all that rumbling and all that stuff like that they associated the heavy Dick Dale staccato picking tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk on those strings, it sounded like the barrel of a goddamn wave...The rhythm that you get is the same thing. The rhythm in that water – nothing comes close to that. Nothing. The rhythm of a beautiful glassy wave matches the rhythm of playing music on an instrument and not only that, but the ferocity of Mother Nature’s ocean is the same thing when you hear my guitar growl…The ferocity when you just get into a gnarly wave that just wants to chew you up and spit you out – that’s my guitar when it starts getting angry. So I tell people, I’m not a guitar player. I don’t know what an augmented ninth or thirteenth is, and I don’t give a shit. I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure, and that’s what it does."







http://www.dickdale.com/

"Misirlou"

'Surfers' Choice'

full album:

All tracks composed by Dick Dale; except where indicated

Side 1

"Surf Beat"

"Sloop John B" (Carl Sandburg, Lee Hays)

"Take It Off"

"Night Owl" (Tony Allen)

"Fanny Mae" (Buster Brown)

"Misirlou Twist" (Chaim Tauber, Fred Wise, Milton Leeds, Nicholas Roubanis)

Side 2

"Peppermint Man" (Alonzo Willis)

"Surfing Drums"

"Shake 'n' Stomp"

"Lovey Dovey" (Eddie Curtis, Nuggy)

"Death of a Gremmie"

"Let's Go Trippin'"

bonus tracks

"Del-Tone Rock"

"Jungle Fever"

"Misirlou" (traditional)

"Eight Till' Midnight"

"Lovin' on My Brain"

"A Run For Life"