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Fact #42278

When:

Short story:

Dick Dale and The Del-Tones make their first appearance at The Rendezvous Ballroom, Balboa, California, USA. Dale will eventually find fame as "King of the Surf Guitars" but on this occasion, a mere seventeen of his mates turn up for the show.

Full article:

Dick Dale : 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 17 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 $100 million. I just got a platinum album for it.
(Interview in Planet Magazine, 1995)
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Dick Dale : I came to California in '54 and when I got out of school, Washington High School in Southwest L.A., I went to work for Hughes Aircraft in metallurgy and in heat treatment for metal, and then what happened was my dad said come on down to this Country bar and your friend is playing guitar, wants you to back him up. He's doing a contest, 'cause I would have never done it if it were just me.

So he got me up on the stage with him and I was backing him up strumming, and my buddy kind of panicked, left the stage and left me standing there and I said we'll you can't jump the ship, so I stood there and kept doing something. So, I had learned to play a Boogie because I used to listen to also the Black players, the old Blues. I used to sneak and just stand outside The Doors, and in those days they had just a drum, standup bass and a guy would be playing sax, and if they had an electric keyboard player, an organ, a guy would be playing organ. So that was the real Blues, the old Blues.

So what happened was I remembered that rhythm and I would do that on the strings, and the people just loved the sound because I kept it simple and then I would win the contest. But the weird part about it was that the guitar didn't win the contest. There was always someone better who could sing better and it was always a tie. So when they did the runoff I'd be like "Oh Shit, what do I do", so I'd grab my trumpet and I'd do a stripper sound, like the old Louis Armstrong, real raspy. And the people would go nuts! Then I knew that the sexual, sensual, guttural sound, that throbbing sound is where it's at.

One night I went to this little ice cream parlor called The Rinky Dink Ice Cream Parlor, it was like a Folk music club. They had a lot of Folk music clubs where people would sit with a guitar and talk and just play these Folk songs. And it was really the trend thing when people went out for gatherings, cause like I said, cities didn't allow permits. So I went in and the kid playing the piano, he was playing a boogie woogie style and I loved that. So we got together and I asked the guy if him and I and my friend Ray could play there on the weekends. He said yes.

That's where I met Leo Fender and I said my name is Dick Dale, I don't have any money, I don't really have any instruments of any sort, and he liked me and he became like a second father to me. He said take this Stratacaster, we made it last year, beat it to death and tell me what you think. And I had my little amp and I started strumming on it and started playing at this ice cream parlor. Well the three of us were getting about eight bucks, seven or eight dollars.

Then I wanted to get a drummer so I added a drummer and asked for a raise to 12 dollars, and then I wanted to get a rhythm player so I asked for a raise to about 15 dollars and the guy fired me. By then the people were starting to come from like Palm Springs which is a couple of hours away, they're all coming just to see us, so I talk to my father who is still working at Hughes Aircraft. He went and talked to the owners of the Rendezvous Ballroom, that was closed. They were just renting it out for like schools, and they said you won't get any permits, so we had meetings with the city, the chief of police, the fire department, the teachers association and said look, would you rather have your kids in one spot or out on the street.

So they said all right, we'll do something different. We'll give you a permit, but the kids have to wear ties. And I go, "Jeez, whoever heard of a surfer wearing a tie?", because I had been surfing now, surfing with a buddy and that became part of my life. So my opening night we got a box of ties and handed them out, and everybody had bare feet and ties, to make it legal.

Opening night we had 17 people, and they were all surfers I was surfing with and that was the beginning right there. Then I said, how are we going to fill this place up, because this ballroom, the last band that played there was Stan Kenton, the Jazzer and they were trying to make a comeback, because every big band in the world had played there, but when they tried to bring Jazz back a second time they lost about $80,000, so they closed it, and they called it The White Elephant and said that nobody would come three miles on a peninsula to this old building, because it was on the Balboa Peninsula three miles long.

So to get more kids to come we went to schools and asked if we could do assemblies. At 7:30 we'd have a musical review, we'd ask the principal to set it up as part of their credits. And he'd ask what we'd be playing, and when we told him guitars, he said no, it's an evil, dirty instrument. So we told him it would be about the Elevation of Music. I'd have a guy dancer in a suit and a girl modern dancer. And they let us do it. And the kids would come out of curiosity. The first fifteen minutes we'd start out with Sugar Blues and Begin the Beguine and the teachers loved it, and the kids would just be sitting there. Then the next fifteen minutes we'd play our kind of music and the kids went wild and the principal said "Get the hook!"(laughs)

So I had to go to the union, all the teachers were there and they told me I was playing dirty music. And I said don't even bother telling me about dirty music unless you can tell me what dirty music is. From then on I was a rebel. But from getting to those high school kids, within three months we had 4,000 people a night at the Rendezvous. The city made us put in 13 fire escapes. It was a complete city block, two floors. On a peninsula three miles long traffic was backed up all the way.

Rock bands of the day, The Champs, Chuck Berry, were playing through 10" speakers, stand up bass, there were no power players, no power amps. I told Leo I wanted fat, thick sounds. So Leo, Freddy Traveras, a steel guitar player who was with The Royal Hawaiians band, and me work together and came up with the Fender Dual Showman amp, with 15" speakers. That's how we created the big Dick Dale machine gun picking style.

Paul Johnson (guitarist, The Belairs) : I remember making the trek to the Rendezvous in the summer of '61 to see what all the fuss was about over Dick Dale. It was a powerful experience; his music was incredibly dynamic, louder and more sophisticated than The Belairs, and the energy between The Del-Tones and all of those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale's guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard, and his blazing technique was something to behold.