Quotable Quotes - Dick Dale quotes

Dick Dale quotes

“As a little child I used to listen to my father's big records, big 78's. I used to listen to guys like the big Harry James records and Gene Krupa. We didn't have a lot of money. My parents both worked, and I was born in Boston.” — Dick Dale

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“As a little kid I had a girlfriend, and her boyfriend used to beat me up, so then I used to sing these songs, and that's what it's all about. Country music is all about your heart and your people and things like that.” — Dick Dale

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“Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.” — Dick Dale

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“Dick Dale won all these contests using a simple, psychological approach of sensual, driving rhythm, and then one of the major contests was somebody playing like Elvis, and I won. I started drawing like 1,700 kids there.” — Dick Dale

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“Don't even bother telling me about dirty music unless you can tell me what dirty music is. From then on I was a rebel.” — Dick Dale

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“Every song is like a painting.” — Dick Dale

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“Every time I went into the studio some engineer tried to impress me with how they're going to capture my sound with all kinds of tricks. But they limited the sound and never allowed me to play how I felt.” — Dick Dale

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“Gene Krupa was smart enough to study the natives... went into the jungle to study their fertility dances, what caused them to be mesmerized. He was the father of it all.” — Dick Dale

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“Guitar Player Magazine says Dick Dale is the father of Heavy Metal, blowing up 48 amplifiers, creating the first power amplifier.” — Dick Dale

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“I almost had to have my leg amputated because of an infection.” — Dick Dale

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“I always felt people should live with animals.” — Dick Dale

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“I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs.” — Dick Dale

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“I became stereotyped.” — Dick Dale

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“I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.” — Dick Dale

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“I can get into Nat King Cole, as I can Ry Cooder, and Van Halen and Slash, anybody.” — Dick Dale

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“I can play every instrument there is, every horn, I've played all the saxes and trumpets and everything and keyboards.” — Dick Dale

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“I don't claim to be a musician, I didn't go to Julliard.” — Dick Dale

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“I don't play pyrotechnic scales. I play about frustration, patience, anger. Music is an extension of my soul.” — Dick Dale

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“I get high-a natural high-off of a 10, 15-foot wave, flying in a plane, face to face with a tiger.” — Dick Dale

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“I grew a love for helpless, defenseless things. People would give me lions and jaguars. I had cheetahs, monkeys.” — Dick Dale

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“I had no bravado in my voice, and I wanted sustaining sound, so we took it out of a Hammond organ, put it in an amp and I put in a microphone and sang and got sustaining sound.” — Dick Dale

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“I had rectal cancer. I was given three months to live and I went down to 98 pounds. I had never missed a show, but this time I was so sick that I did. Jimi found out about my surgery. Jimi thought I was dying, and that's why he said you'll never hear Surf music again.” — Dick Dale

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“I held a ukulele upside down, not realizing that and I couldn't understand why my fingers wouldn't stretch where they were supposed to go.” — Dick Dale

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“I met a lot of people, like Gene Autrey, Freddy Hart, Lefty Frizzell. They found out I could play a trumpet but I wanted to be a cowboy singer.” — Dick Dale

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“I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.” — Dick Dale

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“I mixed my music with my lions and tigers. When you've got two mother nature forces you can't control, then you've got to go with them. When a lion puts 18 stitches in your skull, man realizes he is nothing, when you paddle over 10-foot waves, study martial arts for 30 years, you understand silence.” — Dick Dale

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“I play different everytime I play. To get a four star review in Rolling Stone and have them say Dick Dale's a pioneer, he should be playing with... it's frustrating.” — Dick Dale

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“I studied martial arts 30 years.” — Dick Dale

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“I told them if were going to do it were going to do it right, I'm not leaving 'til it's done. My wife, child and I slept in the studio. We cut these raw.” — Dick Dale

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“I took my Pepsi Cola bottles in my little red wagon flyer and went about four miles down to the store and cashed in my little Pepsi bottles for a couple of cents a bottle and raised five dollars and ninety five cents. I bought this cream and brown plastic ukulele.” — Dick Dale

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“I used to be a mean maniac. Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked 'em on the side of the head.” — Dick Dale

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“I used to do things for the mentally retarded children. I wanted to fly my falcons, hawks at a public field, so I asked permission, and they said it's OK if you bring some to the Fairview Hospital to show the children, so I'd bring my lion, my great Dane.” — Dick Dale

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“I used to give the Beach boys $50 to open for me. Jan and Dean, The Ventures, used to come see me. I found The Righteous Brothers playing at Jon's Black Derby to six people, they were so ahead of their time.” — Dick Dale

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“I used to shoot a bow the wrong way, and then the found out what eyed I was. Everyone's either left-eyed or right-eyed and I found out I'm left-eyed. So they made me shoot left-handed.” — Dick Dale

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“I wanted to put a sheet in explaining what all the songs are about, but they didn't do it.” — Dick Dale

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“I went down to Balboa. This big ballroom was alive with people and sound. It was a giant horn band, they were playing Jazz, it was a big band sound. You'd never have a guitar group playing.” — Dick Dale

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“I went to work for Hughes Aircraft in metallurgy and in heat treatment for metal.” — Dick Dale

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“I'd grab my trumpet and I'd do a stripper sound, like the old Louis Armstrong, real raspy. And the people would go nuts! Then I knew that the sexual, sensual, guttural sound, that throbbing sound, is where it's at.” — Dick Dale

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“I'll just tell you the way it is. You ask me what time it is and I'm gonna tell you how to build a clock.” — Dick Dale

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“I'm a perfectionist. I'm not going to cheat the people.” — Dick Dale

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“I'm constantly being influenced by the soul that's directly in front of me.” — Dick Dale

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“I'm going to start snowboarding.” — Dick Dale

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“I'm into just chopping, chopping at 60 gauge, 50 gauge strings. That's the sound, the sound of the waves chopping. The Surfing sound is not the reverb.” — Dick Dale

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“I'm left-handed. All my rhythm went into my left hand, so naturally I picked up the ukulele upside down and backwards.” — Dick Dale

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“I've got holes in my guitar.” — Dick Dale

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“If you go to a Dick Dale concert you'll see skinheads, tatoos, androgenous people, tribes of all the lands, college professors.” — Dick Dale

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“Jimi was a good guy 'til he got into drugs. That's the way it is. I just tell it like it is.” — Dick Dale

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“Music is an attitude. It's a sensation to the average person, to the human being. And keep it simple, stupid. That's always been my theory.” — Dick Dale

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“My aunt played the piano and I used to sit and listen to it.” — Dick Dale

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“My philosophy is the thicker the wood the thicker the sound, the bigger the string the bigger the sound. My smallest string is a 14 gauge.” — Dick Dale

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“My son now is 22 months old, he's been playing since he was 12 months old and he gets standing ovations on the drums. He's been with us since he was 10 weeks old, he's been on the drums. He's got blisters on his fingers before he can even talk.” — Dick Dale

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“My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut.” — Dick Dale

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“Nobody was allowed at that time to throw dances playing a guitar because guitars were considered evil. It was called devil music. It's a fact. The cities would not issue permits to people to throw these kinds of dances.” — Dick Dale

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“Once I had 30 animals. I kept them well mannered. At Newport Beach I had a cheetah in the front and an ocelot in the back, 22 fishtanks, a baby mountain lion. These animals were my pals. I just kept taking in more and more.” — Dick Dale

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“People just loved the sound because I kept it simple.” — Dick Dale

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“Some guys record an album with songs that are filler. I recorded this album like it was my last.” — Dick Dale

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“Surfer's Choice sold 80,000 copies, which is like selling a million today. So when historians say the reverb's the Surf sound... they don't know what they're talking about.” — Dick Dale

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“Tex Ritter bought me my first gunbelt because I loved quickdraws.” — Dick Dale

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“That's where typical musicians fail-they try to show off and play more technical to impress other musicians. But I'm playing for the people who are working for $3.50 an hour, the carpenters, the ditch diggers, the grass-roots people.” — Dick Dale

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“The average person doesn't know an augmented 9th or 13th, so neither do I, 'cause I never went to school for music.” — Dick Dale

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“The first 15 minutes we'd start out with Sugar Blues and Begin the Beguine, and the teachers loved it, and the kids would just be sitting there. Then the next 15 minutes we'd play our kind of music and the kids went wild.” — Dick Dale

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“The kids called me King of the Surf Guitar. I surfed sunup to sundown.” — Dick Dale

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“The night I'm gonna play they tell me someone really wants to play with me-Slash of Guns n' Roses. And I didn't know who he is, but my wife tells me. She knows all that stuff.” — Dick Dale

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“There is a saying; He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak. Music is just one facet of my life.” — Dick Dale

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“There's a saying. If you want someone to love you forever, buy a dog, feed it and keep it around.” — Dick Dale

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“There's things that I could never ever play on a guitar, but there are things righties couldn't play that I do. so the first three chords I learned were in the key of G, and I learned how to play The Tennessee Waltz.” — Dick Dale

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“These people who don't know anything talk and talk. That's why monks go off to the mountains. That's why old people don't talk much. They just smile and go through life as it is. The only honesty I've found is in rare people, like surfers with the spirituality of the waves. Also in animals.” — Dick Dale

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“They digged this bopping sound I was doing.” — Dick Dale

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“When I came onto the scene, out here in the West Coast there were only two styles. One was Country and the other was Jazz.” — Dick Dale

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“When I start playing I'm just a rollercoaster of sound. I don't know what's coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.” — Dick Dale

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“When I was asked to play in San Francisco, Joel Silvin, a heavy Rock critic, wrote a big story on The History of Dick Dale, and then the show was sold out. This was a place even million sellers don't sell out.” — Dick Dale

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“When my mom and dad would leave in the evening I would take their canister set, their sugar and their cookies and all these little metal cans and I'd take these knives and I'd bang on them with these regular kitchen knives and I'd play the drums and that's how I developed all this rhythm.” — Dick Dale

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“When someone's smoking pot in the front of one of my shows and it's bothering me, I'll make 'em put it out. Dick Dale has never had a drug in his life. I never drank. I wouldn't infect my body.” — Dick Dale

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“Where are you calling from? Omaha. Well, no wonder you don't know what's going on.” — Dick Dale

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“You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.” — Dick Dale

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“You know, music is sex. It's a sensual driving mode that affects people if it's played a certain way.” — Dick Dale

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“You shouldn't even be writing this story if you haven't heard me play live. You can't write with the passion you receive until you see a Dick Dale concert.” — Dick Dale

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