R.I.P.: Dick Dale, Acclaimed Surf Music Guitarist

Dick Dale (May 4, 1937 – March 16, 2019)

Dick Dale, who was known as the King of the Surf Guitar and recorded the hit song “Misirlou,” which was revived on the “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack, died on Saturday at a hospital in Southern California.

He was 81, according to The NYTimes.

His death was confirmed by Dusty Watson, a drummer who played live shows with Mr. Dale. The cause was not immediately known.

Dale was a surfer, sound pioneer and guitarist whose unusual, percussive playing style and thick, thunderous music earned him the nickname the Father of Heavy Metal, and influenced the Beach Boys, the Cure, Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix.

Sam Bolle, a bassist who played with Mr. Dale’s namesake band, Dick Dale, for about 15 years, described him as “an aggressive and ferocious” musician who played like one of the lions he raised at his home.

“I played a gig with him about a month ago,” he said, and “he was still slaughtering people with volume.”

Dale was born Richard Monsour in Boston in 1937. He developed a musical signature that was influenced by the traditions of his Lebanese father and Eastern European mother, and by the flamboyant big-band drummer Gene Krupa.

After moving to California as a child, Dale defined the sound of surf guitar as a musical expression of the elemental surge of the ocean, with its savage waves, its volatile crosscurrents and its tidal undertow. He played melodies that crisscrossed the beat with the determination of a surfer riding through choppy waves, forging a triumphant path above deep turbulence.


“Surf music is a heavy machine-gun staccato picking style to represent the power of Mother Nature, of our earth, of our ocean,” he told The New York Times in 1994. His almost constant tremolo created friction so intense that it melted his guitar picks and strings as he played.

“The staccato is so fast it heat-treats the strings,” he said. “They turn purple and black and they snap. And when I play, you’ll see a flurry of plastic — it just falls down like snow. I used to think it was dandruff. But I grind so hard that the guitar picks just melt down."