Dick Dale

I do not play to musicians. I play to the people.

Drums were my first instrument.

I blew amps like they were made of tissue paper. Once I blew out the sound system at Royal Albert Hall in London.

You know what the doctors call me? 'The Cancer Warrior.'

Dick Dale don't surf no more.

Earthlings are confused, insecure. And some Earthlings have no heritage: that's what leads them to kill each other and rob 7-11 stores.

I live like in the days of Daniel Boone, hauling water by hand. I used to have two Rolls-Royces. Now I got one. It's got four flat tires; the trunk is open, and a rat lives inside it.

Nothing could capture the sound of Dick Dale - he was too loud.

Every time I do an album, I say, 'That's the last one.'

People ask about love. Real love. I was never in love; the people around me didn't love me. They were just along for the ride.

I've been performing since 1955. I'm going to have to keep performing till I die because I'm not going to die in some rocking chair with a big ol' beer belly.

When I play, I don't cheat. I played for 490,000 in Berlin, and I'll play just as hard for 100.

I smashed my tailbone and couldn't sit for five years, and I broke my clavicle because I thought I was a great surfer, and of course, I could be a great snowboarder, too. Man, was I wiped out!

I don't like to use the word 'fans;' I call them 'Dick Dale music lovers.'

With every problem comes a gift in hand.

I'm not one of these guys who is dedicated to playing or performing - that's just one facet of my life.

I answer number one to myself, because I know myself. I answer to my fans, because they know me. My mother knows me and God knows me, and that's where it's at.

When I come onstage, I'm exploding.

I've been called 'the father of loud.'

If you ask me what I'd rather be doing, well, I'd rather be home in California, watching TV, polishing my tools and working around the ranch.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

I like to say, 'I hit every type of music in a show, and I play the people, not the instruments.'

Whatever you do, don't take shortcuts. It's great advice to take and live by.

I enjoy living like a hermit, but I cannot live like a hermit.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

My father never put me on his lap and said he loved me.

I've never taken a lesson in my life, and I can play every instrument there is. I play by ear, but I can fool anybody into thinking I went to some conservatory of music.

People who have witnessed all the years of me playing, they bring their kids and say, 'I used to see this guy when I was fourteen!'

Little Richard, he'd say, 'Oh Dick Dale! You have luscious lips!'

The Musicians Hall of Fame is chosen by thousands of your peers. So it's the real thing.

When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'

For 20 years I've been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, 'It's abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.' Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse.

I used to surf up in Ventura County at Silver Strand; plus, I've played up there many times.

Hendrix was the bass player for Little Richard. We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. In fact he used to say, and this is documented, 'I patterned my style after Dick Dale.'

Surf music is played through a Showman amp with a Stratocaster guitar.

Surf music is actually just the sound of the waves played on a guitar: that wet, splashy sound.

I refuse to bring my son up in a world corrupt as it is now.

I'm dedicated to touring the rest of my life.

Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother's flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad's records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.

The ultimate guitar players can play every scale in the book.

In the Shao Lin temple, they never allow you to touch the skin of a drum until you can tongue what you're going to play.

I try to read the audience, see what they're in the mood for.

What I play now isn't surf music. It's too powerful. I used to go through paper bags; now I go through brick walls. I play hard.

I was reading a magazine when I was a little kid, probably about twelve years old, and an ad said that if you sell so many jars of Noxzema skin cream, we'll sell you a ukulele. So I went out and banged on doors in the snow in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I was raised, and I sold the skin cream.

When my guitar was growling, playing surf beat, you could hear it; you could feel it.

I'm going to make people happy. I'm going to make them forget about their cancer. I'm going to make them forget about their diabetes.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.

My philosophy is that on a scale of 1 to 10, I will go to 15. No matter what!

Kids don't see me as an oldies person when I go out on stage. They see me as an energy force.

Music is nothing but a door opener to meet families and their children and the elderly.