King Of the Surf Guitar: Dick Dale’s Long Beach Days

Steve Propes
Mark Hendrix, left, Dale center, Mrs. Hendrix, right center, Marlow far right, Elvis in cutout.

It’s pretty much agreed that guitar rocker Dick Dale, who died on March 16, invented what is known as the surf sound by way of his aggressive guitar approach.

But in the various obits and tributes written about him since his passing, nothing has been written about how he got to the charts, albeit ignored by the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Many believe that’s because his unique body of work had its greatest success on the West Coast, mainly L.A., which probably pigeon-holed him as a regional performer.

Richard Monsour was born on May 4, 1937 in Massachusetts. “We came to California in 1954, Howard Hughes paid my dad’s way out. I graduated from Washington High School in southwest L.A. In 1955, I started playing a guitar I bought at a pawn shop. My name was changed to Dick Monsour by T. Texas Tiny, a country music DJ in Compton. We were at a Town Hall Party,” located on Atlantic Avenue, right at the town limit separating Compton from Long Beach. “He told me ‘you should be playing country songs.’ He told me ‘you can’t sing as Richard Monsour, you should have a country name, Dale.’”

Dale entered an Elvis emulator contest in Long Beach in 1957. Fellow guitarist, about five years Dale’s junior, Marlow Hendrix recalled, “my dad, Mark Hendrix was manager of the United Artists theater on Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach and was the host of “Rocket To Stardom,” a channel five talent show. “He had an Elvis contest. First place was tour of the United Artists theaters.” Of “the three top singers my dad picked, the winner couldn’t do the tour, so my dad talked to Jim Monsour, Dick’s father who said, ‘hey, he’s on vacation, he can tour.’ He came in fourth, but was the winner and did a three week tour of my dad’s theaters,” including a “Rocket To Stardom” appearance in which he sang the Elvis hit, “Teddy Bear.”

In 1958, Dale’s father began the Deltone label. “Deltone was a family label,” said Dale. “It was from money my dad saved.” Dale’s first release on Deltone was “Ooh-Whee-Marie,” a rocking vocal in an approximate Elvis style. It charted briefly on KFWB, L.A.’s only top 40 station at the time.

“I performed with Ritchie Valens in his first major show at the Long Beach Auditorium,” said Dale. “He sang ‘La Bamba’ and got a great response. He came backstage, I told him, ‘they want you do an encore.’ He went out and sang it again.”

A real surfer, Dale moved on to Balboa. “At the Rendezvous Ballroom, the city of Balboa didn’t want surfers. My dad asked them, ‘would you rather have them on streets or in a building.’ They answered, ‘Well, they must wear ties.’ So my dad went out and bought a box of ties.”

Dale caught on with the surfer crowd with his first hit, “Let’s Go Trippin’,” #4 on KFWB and #3 on KRLA. “When I was doing the music, they’d say ‘let’s go trippin’ down to see Dick Dale.’ There were 4,000 kids a night, cruising into Balboa, records playing on their car record players. They invented and named the surfer stomp, kids moving back and forth.”

Constantly dissatisfied with his big guitar sound reduced to a vinyl 45, Dale said, “I ran the Deltone Record Store across the street from the Rendezvous. When I heard ‘Let’s Go Trippin’,’ I threw it across the record store. It didn’t sound like me on stage.”

“When I opened the Rendezvous Ballroom, the first 17 kids were the 17 kids I was surfing with. They asked me, ‘can you play something on a single string?’ I chose ‘Miserlou’ and it didn’t sound full, so I added Gene Krupa-style drums, with a bass player, it went BAM!”

Number one on both KFWB and KRLA, Dale’s “Miserlou” was a raucous guitar take on the Arab folk tradition. “Miserlou means an Arabic dance, ‘where is my sweetheart’ in Arabic. I used to listen to that when my uncle played it. My other uncle played the oud, a stringed instrument. They would play ‘Miserlou’ slow for belly dancers.”

While at the Rendezvous, in December 1961, Dale arranged for the newly-named Beach Boys to open for him. However, surf music die-hards favored instrumentals, not vocal harmonies, so the Beach Boys were booed off Dale’s stage. Dale’s Rendezvous Ballroom days ended on December 23, 1961. The Beach Boys’ next appearance was at the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert at the Long Beach Auditorium on December 31, 1961.

After a short recording hiatus, in 1963, Dale signed with Capitol Records, the recording home of the Beach Boys. “In those days, they used limiters in recording sessions. That’s why I stopped recording. Any engineer who heard the big guitar sound bleeding through my guitar would use limiters; made it sound tinny.”

steve@beachcomber.news

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