Guitarist known for Pulp Fiction who popularised the surf rock sound of the 1960s

Born: May 4, 1937;

Died: March 16, 2019

DICK Dale, who has died aged 81, was an American guitarist who popularised the surf rock sound in the early 1960s through the dynamic, reverberating chime of his playing. He and his band The Del-Tones’ 1963 second album was called The King of the Surf Guitar, and it was a title which Dale himself traded upon – not unfairly – for the rest of his life.

Although his output spanned the harmony-led pop of The King of Surf Guitar to the breezy bar-room blues of his biggest hit Let’s Go Trippin’, Dale’s career has been defined by his 1962 track Misirlou, which was revived by Quentin Tarantino in 1994 as the opening theme of Pulp Fiction.

Known for the careful selection and pairing of forgotten classic tracks with typically attention-grabbing scenes, Tarantino was responsible for the 1990s’ resurgence of the tie-in film soundtrack compilation as a pop cultural artefact in its own right. The album which accompanied Pulp Fiction was a hit among film fans, students and music lovers, and Dale’s heart-racing descending guitar line was at its centre, married to blazing trumpet interludes which gave the sense of a Spaghetti Western taking place in the heart of the city, its characters wild and out of control; perfect for Tarantino’s output, in other words.

Yet the song itself was actually Middle Eastern in origin, much like Dale himself, who had Lebanese ancestry on his father’s side. Misirlou (the name apparently translates roughly as Egyptian Girl) was composed in 1927 by Tetos Demetriades, a Turkish-born Greek musician who had by this point relocated to America, from a Greek rebetiko-style song he remembered from childhood. Nikos Roubanis, also a Greek, recomposed it in a light jazz style in the 1940s, and the song was well-heard at the time in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Dale, a rugged Californian surfer and guitarist, also remembered the song from his own younger days when his uncle played it on an oud, and as the story (possibly an apocryphal one) goes, turned to it when he was asked during a show if he could play a tune using only one string. Whatever its origin in his repertoire, Dale recorded the song for his first album in 1962, and it became a hit amongst the music-loving surfer communities of California; from there, it isn’t hard to see how the song became known by the Beach Boys, who recorded a version for their 1963 second album Surfin’ USA.

When he first emerged on the Californian scene in 1961, Dale’s playing was revolutionary, a combination of the Eastern musical scales he learned from his father and uncles, his use of amplifier reverb to create a raw and destabilising sound, and his enjoyment of playing at high volume, a trick which gave him a passing affiliation with rock and heavy metal guitarists who came much later; Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen and the White Stripes’ Jack White were all fans. Gaining a name for himself rapidly, he played a residency at the large, shorefront Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, Orange County, and the surf sound was born there before crowds numbering in the thousands.

The surf rock scene was a relatively brief flash in the pan which was soon to be overtaken in the American consciousness by the Beatles and the ‘British Invasion’, but for a few years at the beginning of the ‘60s it shone brightly, with Dale as its most authentic star. He released a number of albums between the 1962 debut Surfer’s Choice and 1965, appeared in the scene movies Beach Party and Muscle Beach Party, and played on the Ed Sullivan show. In 1966 he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and left the music industry, upon his recovery caring for endangered animals, learning martial arts with Elvis Presley’s trainer, and (after being badly injured while swimming in 1979) championing the environment.

Born Richard Monsour in Boston in 1937, to Lebanese father James and Polish mother Fern, Dale learned piano and ukulele before the shift to guitar, and moved with his father’s work to California in his mid-teens; his stage name was suggested by a local DJ who told him it would sound more in keeping with the rockabilly music Dale was performing. He staged a small comeback later in his career with the 1986 album The Tiger’s Loose and an appearance in the 1987 surf revival movie Back to the Beach (playing opposite Stevie Ray Vaughan), before Pulp Fiction’s success allowed him to return to full-time playing and recording in the 1990s.

Dale’s cancer returned in 2008, and although treatment was successful, he said shortly before his death that he was unable to retire from playing live due to paying off his medical bills. “If I had the money coming in, I’d stay home with (his wife and manager) Lana and build a ship in a bottle," he told Billboard magazine in 2015. “But I’ve also got to realise I’ve been kept alive for a reason. People are not only coming to a concert, they’re coming to a way of life.”

DAVID POLLOCK