There's a saying. If you want someone to love you forever, buy a dog, feed it and keep it around.
Dick Dale
You know, music is sex. It's a sensual driving mode that affects people if it's played a certain way.
Surf music is actually just the sound of the waves played on a guitar: that wet, splashy sound.
Every song is like a painting.
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.
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.
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.'
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.'
I don't live with the 'right' people. I don't want to. I don't want to live with the rich in Beverly Hills or walk the streets of Hollywood. I want to go to K-mart and get good deals.
I'd rather be a Jack-of-all-trades than master of one. If I became an icon, where my whole life was music, I would probably have become a vegetable. I wouldn't be able to have all these talents I have today and be an interesting 'character.'
I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.
You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.
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.
Surfers were the ones who named all my songs. They'd yell out the names, and we just kept 'em.
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.
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.
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.
Earthlings are confused, insecure. And some Earthlings have no heritage: that's what leads them to kill each other and rob 7-11 stores.
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.
Music is nothing but a door opener to meet families and their children and the elderly.
My aunt played the piano and I used to sit and listen to it.
My music is more native than intricate or technical.
I always felt people should live with animals.
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!'
When my guitar was growling, playing surf beat, you could hear it; you could feel it.
Drums were my first instrument.
I've been called 'the father of loud.'
I enjoy living like a hermit, but I cannot live like a hermit.
My philosophy is that on a scale of 1 to 10, I will go to 15. No matter what!
I'm a perfectionist. I'm not going to cheat the people.
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 make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure or sensuality. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That's what music does.
I make jokes because humor is the greatest healing factor that there is.
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'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.
They're putting cement dust into cattle feed to make the cows heavier; the FDA knows all about it.
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'm not one of these guys who is dedicated to playing or performing - that's just one facet of my life.
I used to surf up in Ventura County at Silver Strand; plus, I've played up there many times.
I have all the rhythm in my left hand, and I use the rhythms that Gene Krupa did on his drums.
I'm constantly being influenced by the soul that's directly in front of me.
When I play, I don't cheat. I played for 490,000 in Berlin, and I'll play just as hard for 100.
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.
I almost had to have my leg amputated because of an infection.
Some guys record an album with songs that are filler. I recorded this album like it was my last.
I know what it's like to wash my clothes in a Chevron station.
As I'd go out learning to surf, I'd feel the power of waves coming over my body. It's like you're with God.
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.
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.
