| In the early ‘60s, Dick Dale was worshipped by Southern California youth culture as the founding father of surf music as well as its next-of-kin, hot-rod rock—twin-pipe genres that would reel in every kid in the world with daydreams of a street rod or a surfboard and a ride to the beach. Dale was a fretboard whiz whose heavily-reverbed Fender guitar and frenzied, string-busting attack—a sound that would forever define surf music—turned exotic melodies like “Hava Nagila” into the musical equivalent of being precariously perched atop a monstrous 20-foot wave. Dale’s Newport and Balboa Beach concerts were legend in greater Los Angeles, and his records would soon influence the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix, among countless others. |
