Credit: Far Out / Dick Dale / Album Cover
Tue 25 August 2026 0:00, UK
When the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction exploded into the Fender Strat tremolo riff of Dick Dale’s ‘Misirlou’, it helped ignite a ’60s surf rock revival and introduced a lot more people to the pioneering influence of Dick Dale and his Del-Tones.
As Dale was always the first to admit, however, his 1962 recording of ‘Misirlou’ was a revival in its own right, his own unique interpretation of a melody that had travelled around the world for decades, if not centuries.
“‘Misirlou’ goes back to the beginning of time,” Dale told the Associated Press in 2001. “It’s not a Greek folk song like people think; it’s an Egyptian song. I created my version of ‘Misirlou’ at the Rendezvous Ballroom, when a little kid asked if I could play something on a single string. So I went home and tried to figure out what to do. I was playing the song very slow and realised the sound was too thin, so I added a little bit of a Gene Krupa beat and speeded it up.”
Once Dale had worked out his high-octane cover, he debuted it right away at the Rendezvous Ballroom, the venue in Newport Beach, California, that had booked the Del-Tones as their band in residence.
Born in Boston, Mass, as Richard Monsour, Dale was a Lebanese-American, contributing to his knowledge and interest in Middle Eastern music. From very early in his guitar-playing career, he had a reputation for ignoring rock and roll and country-western norms, playing unusual scales and, in order to accommodate his dominant left hand, flipping the guitar upside down and stringing it backwards. Speed and volume were also his calling cards.
By 1960, a 23-year-old Dale and his band had talked their way into playing regular gigs in an ice cream parlour called the Rinky-Dink, located in the Balboa Peninsula area of Newport Beach, California. He and his family had moved to the area toward the end of his high school days, and he had taken to the west coast climate quite quickly, even learning how to surf.
The Del-Tones were a popular attraction for young folks at the Rinky-Dink, but they were perhaps a tad less beloved by the neighbouring businesses, as Dale didn’t seem to have a lot of softer acoustic ballads in his arsenal. Instead, his playing was already loud and ferocious enough that he routinely went through a small pile of replacement strings and guitar picks (or plectrums, as the Britons say) over a weekend, especially if the sun was really shining over the Pacific.
Credit: Far Out / Capitol Records
“The staccato is so fast it heat-treats the strings,” Dale explained to the New York Times in 1994, “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.”
According to surf rock lore, Dale and his bandmates eventually went to the management of the Rinky-Dink and asked for a five-dollar raise for their weekend performances, considering how much footfall they were enticing into the joint. When the ice cream makers denied their request, however, they took their talents down the road to the much more expansive Rendezvous Ballroom, a 3,000-capacity beachfront venue that used to be a playground for the Big Band jazz acts of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
The Rendezvous owners had their own concerns about having these noisy rockers rattling the old wood floorboards of their joint, so an agreement was reached with the establishment and the city permit office. In order for Dick Dale to frequent the Rendezvous, a dress code would need to be enforced, and alcohol sales were forbidden.
The whole situation got off to a clunky start, as the band’s first gig at the ballroom only drew a small flock of admirers from the ice cream parlour crew. Soon enough, though, word spread of the electrifying gigs, referred to as “stomps”, and the incredible new sound Dale was creating: a howling, screeching electric guitar tone that somehow echoed the roar of the ocean and the calls of the seagulls; the total sound of the surf.
Crowds began to pack the place every weekend during the band’s 1961 residency, and by the following spring, when thousands of young people descended on the Balboa Peninsula from all over southern California for the annual spring break pilgrimage known as ‘Bal Week’, Dale was the central attraction.
“It was the thing to do during Bal Week to come to the Rendezvous and see Dick Dale,” he said, speaking about himself in the third person in a 1990 interview with the LA Times, “Cars were lined up bumper to bumper all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway, and all the kids were playing ‘Let’s Go Trippin’ on their car radios.”
In 1962, the surf rock sound reached the rest of the country, as The Chantays’ ‘Pipeline’, the Bel-Airs’ ‘Mr Moto’, and The Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin’ Safari’ joined Dale’s ‘Let’s Go Trippin’ as anthems of the new genre, synonymous with the idealistic image of the youthful, sun-baked California dream.
