His Music

Consider how Dick Dale's guitar rumbles and echoes, simulating the sound of swelling and crashing waves. He made a conscious choice to do this. The guitarist tried to capture the feeling of surfing waves in his music because he was also a surfer. Dale insisted that the rhythm of surf rock, and specifically how it imitates the flow of the ocean, is its secret. Growth of Dick Dale His technique was so far ahead of its time that it couldn't be supported by early 1960s guitar technology. He favored an outburst of noise to catchy riffs. Others would pick up on that theme and develop wholly fictitious sonic settings, while yet others would apply that rebounding reverberation in a manner that alluded to the turbulent flow of surf rock. Dick Dale, though, wasn't a vanished person. The music ...