Godfather of surf rock found a new audience via Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction

Dick Dale, who has died aged 81, was the progenitor of what become known in the 1960s as ‘‘surf music’’, a sub-genre of pop whose most famous exponents were the Beach Boys; he belatedly achieved wider recognition when Quentin Tarantino used his track Misirlou as the opening theme to one of the key films of the 1990s, Pulp Fiction.

Although mainstream success did not come to him until late in his career, it could be argued that Dale did more than many betterknown guitarists to shape the direction of rock music. His influence lay not so much in what he liked to play, which never gained more than local popularity in his youth, as in the style of his attack.

In order to express the power of the waves and the adrenalin rush he felt when surfing, Dale became in the late 1950s the first electric guitarist to play much faster and much, much louder than had been heard before.

Dale worked closely with Leo Fender, who used him to test the potential of his new Stratocaster guitar, and the firm Lansing, which built him customised speakers and amplifiers, important developments in music technology from which later rock acts such as Cream and Jimi Hendrix benefited.

Hendrix, moreover, was directly influenced by Dale, whom he had met as a teenager while working as Little Richard’s bassist. Both he and Dale were left-handed but played right-handed guitars, and Hendrix got Dale to show him how to place his fingers to make certain chords.

When Dale was thought to be mortally ill with cancer in the mid-1960s, Hendrix paid tribute to him from the stage at the Monterey Pop festival, saying, in an aside that became well-known in the rock world: ‘‘You’ll never hear surf music again.’’

Dick Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour in Boston, Massachusetts. Of Lebanese extraction on his father’s side and Polish-Belarusian on his mother’s, he grew up listening to country music and Arab music (Misirlou is a Levant folk tune).

As a boy, he taught himself trumpet, harmonica and then the guitar, transposing the chords for his left hand in his head rather than reversing the strings, a choice that accounted for his distinctive sound. His principal musical influence, however, was the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa.

When he was a teenager, his family moved to California, and after leaving school in Los Angeles he took work in an aircraft factory. His chief interest, however, was music, and having formed a band, the Del-Tones, he began to draw big crowds to concerts. Young acts who opened for him included the Righteous Brothers and the Beach Boys.

Unlike these groups, Dale’s music was largely instrumental, heavy with staccato and

So worried was the local council by the noise made by Dale ... that he had to be given a special licence to play concerts.

later with reverb. So worried was the local council by the noise made by Dale (who was given his stage name by a disc jockey) that he had to be given a special licence to play concerts, and his audience of surfers were allowed into the ballroom only on condition that they wore ties.

Despite this restriction, Dale’s cachet was such that he appeared in most of the short-lived spate of beach movies, including Muscle Beach Party (1964), and he also had a cameo in Let’s Make Love (1960), as a rocker whose hair is ruffled by the film’s star, Marilyn Monroe.

However, he never achieved national success, being overtaken first by the Beach Boys, then by the British beat bands, and finally, in 1966, by cancer. The illness effectively put an end to his career, and he moved to Hawaii to recover. There he married his first wife, Jeannie, a dancer.

For some three decades little was heard of Dale. Then in the early 1990s he was rediscovered by college audiences after an admiring profile in a San Francisco newspaper. He released two well-received albums, and came to the attention of Tarantino. The global success of Pulp Fiction (1994), and its accompanying soundtrack, led to greatly renewed interest in Dale, and in 1995 he played his first concerts outside America.

Away from music, Dale was something of an eccentric, whose conversation included rants against central government and descriptions of extraterrestrial landings. He numbered archery and karate among his hobbies, and in his 60s he gave up surfing to concentrate on snowboarding. He married for a second time, to a woman 30 years his junior, and remained an energetic stage performer, still wielding his Stratocaster – ‘‘the Beast’’ – until this year.

By early 2008 his cancer had returned and he underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but the following year he was back on the road. He continued to perform at venues across the US to pay for medical bills. ‘‘When I die,’’ he said, ‘‘it will be on stage in an explosion of body parts.’’ In fact, he died in hospital.

He is survived by his second wife, Lana, and by the son of his first marriage, Jimmie, a drummer who sometimes toured with his father. –