My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  When I was in the service, two or three other guys on our ship bought these small Japanese guitars with fret posts that wore down so quickly we joked they must have been made out of beer cans for how soft the metal was.

  What I love about playing the guitar is that there is no end in sight to what can be done on the instrument. I always loved to play, even in the Navy. I played on the ship, started a little radio show and formed a trio. After the service, I came to Memphis in search of a day job and played on my own for a bit, which I did not like. I prefer playing in a group, so I formed one named the Starlite Wranglers. Later on I bought a Fender Esquire and an amp, which I had for a little while when I played gigs. Standing up with this guitar was not comfortable for me. I happened to be downtown one day when I spotted a large, gold-covered ES-295 Gibson, which looked almost like a Les Paul, and I said to myself, “I’ve gotta have it.” I traded in the Fender and used this Gibson throughout the early Sun Studios days.

  I came to work with Elvis through Sam Phillips, the man who ran Sun Records. Sam had agreed to put out a record on the Starlite Wranglers and we had also become fast friends. Every day I would drop by Sun to go have coffee with him. I haven’t thought about this for years, but I guess, in the back of my mind, I’d probably been hopeful for some studio work. One day when we were out for coffee, I overheard his secretary, Marion Keisker, say, “Did you ever do anything more about that boy?”

  Sam said, “No.”

  Later on, I asked him, “What about this boy Marion mentioned?”

  He turned to her and said, “Yeah, give him a call.” Sam handed me a piece of paper with a name and number on it and asked me to go ahead and audition him.

  I stared at the name and said, “ELVIS? What kind of name is that?” I called Elvis when I got home because Sam was looking for new material. Elvis came over to my house on a Sunday, July 4, and spent a couple of hours singing just about every song in the world. I called Sam after he left and told him Elvis had a good voice. I felt he could sing anything you asked him. Sam told me, “I’ll ask him to come to the studio then, and I’d like you to sit in and play a little music.”

  Tape was still a new means of recording back then, and it was very expensive to use. The original way was to record by wire. Now Sam had heard Elvis sing before because he had come by Sun to cut a song for his mother as a birthday present. This time, we were going to record him on tape, which would sound just like it was coming through a radio.

  Elvis and I went into Sun Studios on July 5th for an audition. Sam said, “Sing me a pop song.” And he’d do it. “Now sing me an R&B song.” He did it. Elvis could sing anything. Now the funny thing is, Sam would put two and three of these songs on tape at the beginning of the tape when he’d cut that first record. However, because tape was expensive and could be reused, he erased many of those early recordings. It’s not like nowadays, when they have absolutely every little bit of everything saved up on first recordings.

  For the last Sun session, I purchased the Echosonic amplifier for $500 from the builder Ray Butts. Back then, $500 was quite a sum, but I managed to get financing from the O.K. Houck Piano Co. in Memphis, where I had purchased other equipment, including my second Gibson guitar, an L-5 natural finish archtop. The Echosonic had been used to record Elvis’ “Mystery Train,” and I used this amplifier on every subsequent recording and performance throughout my career with Elvis, up to the 1968 NBC-TV special.

  Aaron Shearer

  No American classical guitarist can escape the volumes of guitar technique known as the Aaron Shearer Method, with its practice studies and neat diagrams of finger placement upon the strings. Dr. Shearer died in 2008 at the age of eighty-nine and it can be said that his work was the first real American contribution to pedagogy for the guitar.

  I traded three white geese that I had raised for a beautiful old Martin gut string guitar with ivory inlay with mother-of-pearl and ivory tuning pegs, though the neck had been a bit bowed. The guitar was hardly playable but I wouldn’t have known this at the time. I did not raise the geese initially for this purpose of buying a guitar. I just wanted to sell them and make a few dollars, which would have meant so much, as we were Idaho farm people. No one knows how poor you can be as a farmer when you cannot grow your own food. We would trade some eggs for some flour.

  My father learned to play a type of Spanish fandango but he hadn’t touched a guitar in a good thirty years, probably. The Spanish fandango sounded a bit like the classical guitar piece Romanza. I only heard him play three or four times and I do not think he was necessarily interested in the guitar. He did not intend to be of any help because he was a very religious man who thought music was a sin to pursue as a career. Mother was different. She played piano a little and was an expert at playing a melody and filling it in improvisationally. Her talent was remarkable, now that I think about it.

  I’d recognized by that point that the guitar I owned was unplayable. I had been playing it with a steel bar, which I slid across the strings. In 1929, when I was ten years old, the neighboring Ankney family invited me to come hear Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall radio program. Crosby announced there would be a Spanish guitarist by the name of Segovia performing that evening. Before I left their house, I told these neighbors, “This is what I want to do!” after hearing Segovia play.

  There was no thought of receiving lessons from anyone at this time, as it was the Great Depression. I can remember every so often someone would ask me what it was I wanted to do and I might have said I wanted to play the Spanish guitar. They would think I was nuts — just a kid. Segovia had been a very primary influence after I heard him on the radio because we did not have a record player, nor had one been available nearby. I did not hear him play again for many, many years. I’m eighty-five years old now and my memories of this live on quite vividly. I just had this big notion that I would somehow pursue the guitar as my lifetime work and it’s still there — it’s crazy! What I loved about the guitar was when I was able to play a cowboy song or a folk song and be able to accompany myself.

  I used to hitchhike into town almost every week to visit the one music store in Lewiston, Idaho, which was seventeen miles from home, to see if they had any copies of guitar magazines — though I’d had no money to buy anything. George C. Krick of St. Louis wrote a column that came to figure largely in my life because he spoke about playing guitar with the fingers. He did not really give out any real information but this is probably where I’d first read of Segovia. I was not certain if one played with the fingers or if one included the nails as well. I did not even know how to file my nails!

  Though I was interested in classical guitar, I was making money playing jazz guitar. My first performance was when they had the county music meeting of high school musicians in this city of 13,000. I was invited to come play my guitar and sing. I sang a cowboy song with my harmonica, and man, I do remember I simply brought the house down. They just screamed! That was the first time I ever played in public and I was maybe fourteen years old.

  Fate has been very kind to me and I am so grateful that life has turned out the way it has. I was hoping to do something for people to help them play the guitar. I wanted to create something beneficial because I’d never had a book that showed me how to play the guitar.

  Dick Dale

  Dick Dale is the King of Surf Guitar, whose breakneck speed and fiery fusion of Middle Eastern and Eastern European melodies and defined tones have set the style for this genre. His song “Miserlou” is featured famously in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. Dale is also renowned for experimenting with Fender amplifiers and collaborating with Leo Fender in the construction of the 100-watt Showman guitar amplifier.

  I typically don’t like doing interviews on account of an issue known as perceivability. Whenever you speak, you create a problem. If I say I like chocolate and you say you like chocolate, we’re fine and should leave it at that. But if each of us starts to explain how it tastes and smells, that is where we could
get into a disagreement. There is a saying, “He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak.” I believe in living by my talent with love, warmth and a good smile. My music is for helping the elderly and the children who are dying of diseases that they have no business having. My music opens doors to kids of all ages and I play to the grassroots, not to other musicians. I do not put drugs, alcohol, smokes or red meat into my body. Your body is your temple — treat it that way.

  I’ve talked with some of these journalists who say, “Yeah right, Dick.” They take my words, twist them around and say “he claims” or they use words like “supposedly.” Then they go and write about stuff like “the wet, splashy surf sound” that started in the 1960s. I’ve got news for you: they were not in the room with me, Leo Fender and Freddy Tavares. And Dick Dale created surf music in the ’50s, not the ’60s. I am the Last of the Mohicans now, as Leo and Freddy have passed away. Talk to the original and listen to the original.

  Leo was a very focused guy. He hardly smiled. The one time I saw him laugh was when he saw me play his guitar upside down and backwards because I’m a true lefty. He was developing the Fender Stratocaster and he took me in like a son. Leo had a saying, “When it can withstand the barrage of punishment given by Dick Dale, it is then fit for the human consumption.”

  I play the guitar upside down and backwards the way Jimi Hendrix did instead of restringing it as a true lefty would. I discovered Hendrix in a small bar in Pasadena, California, playing bass for Little Richard, but he wasn’t called Jimi Hendrix then. Buddy Miles said to an audience, “Jimi used to say he got some of his best shit from Dick Dale.”

  I’ve never missed playing a show in my life. Back then, if you did that, it was called a no show. The only time I had to miss a gig was one time at Harmony Park Ballroom in Anaheim, California, because I had to have surgery for rectal cancer. I asked Dave Myers and the Surf Tones to fill in for me. At the time, Jimi was recording, and he said to his guys, “I heard Dale did a no show.” Jimi’s guitar player quickly said, “He’s dying.” Jimi then dedicated the song “Third Stone from the Sun” (his only fully instrumental song recorded) to me, because he had heard that I was dying, which prompted him to say, “You’ll never hear surf music again.”

  I have a dedication to Jimi on my Spacial Disorientation album where I say, “Jimi, I’m still here, wish you were.” People have read into that whatever they felt like, but the real reason for it is because of Jimi’s earlier dedication to me, thinking that I was going to leave this earth. I dedicated “Third Stone” back to him.

  My big musical influences were Hank Williams, Harry James, Ray Anthony, Louis Armstrong and Gene Krupa. I wanted the guitar to sound big and thick like Gene Krupa’s drums. Leo gave me the Stratocaster and said, “Beat it to death and tell me what you think.” What I am is, a manipulator of an instrument. I climb inside an instrument, find its soul then make it scream with pain and pleasure. A critic once said, “Les Paul invented the electric guitar and Dick Dale put the electricity in the guitar.”

  Dick Dale in the 1963 film A Swingin’ Affair. (Courtesy Dick Dale)

  I was born in South Boston but I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, during the Depression. My father is of Lebanese heritage and my mother’s parents came to the U.S. from Poland when they were twenty years of age — White Russian gypsies. I used to stay with my mom’s parents at their farm in Whitman, Massachusetts, during the summer, and I would pet the cows and chase the chickens and eat the food grown from Mother Earth. Back then, a gallon of gasoline cost twelve cents and you could buy a house for $6,000. I got paid twenty-five cents a week to clean a three-story house, doing the cooking, ironing and sweeping. I also worked for five cents an hour in a bakery making bread along with setting up bowling pins in the pit at the bowling alley in Quincy.

  I saw an ad in the back of a Superman comic book that said if I sold all these jars of Noxzema skin cream, I could get a ukulele with a cowboy rearing his horse and swinging a lariat painted on it. Now, I always wanted to be a cowboy singer like Hank Williams because I used to listen to the cowboy songs on the radio. If you listen, Western music is songs about places and Hillbilly music is songs about people, like, oooh, she broke my heart. I ventured out in the middle of a Massachusetts snowstorm — you had to climb out through the windows in the house because you couldn’t get out the front door on account of the snow being so deep — and bothered my neighbors at night, banging on their doors to sell them this Noxzema skin cream so I could get this ukulele. They used to yell at me, “Dickie, why aren’t you in bed? You have to go to school in the morning.”

  After sending in all that money I made, I had to wait three months before it came in the mail. When it finally arrived, the uke turned out to be nothing but green cardboard. The tuning pegs were wooden pegs pushed into the holes and they fell out every time you turned them to tune it. I was so disgruntled that I threw it into the trashcan.

  I got out my Red Rider wagon and collected enough Coke bottles to earn $6. It’s probably what I should have done in the first place. Then I walked to a music store seven miles away to get a plastic ukulele that had real pegs with screws that kept the pegs where they belong. It had nylon strings, and it had a brown bottom and a cream top. I first bought a chord maker that you strap on the neck to make a chord, but it was kind of crappy, as the strings would rattle when you strummed them. I then bought a chord book and tried to put my fingers where the book told me. It was nearly impossible. The book didn’t say, “Turn it the other way, stupid — you’re left-handed.” Ha!

  I used to tape my fingers into a chord on the neck of the uke before I went to sleep, hoping that a fairy godmother would come along and tap my fingers and I would wake up with my fingers staying there.

  I wanted to play this uke and make it sound full to make my country singing sound good, so I applied a style of strumming that had a rhythm like Gene Krupa playing his drums. What I did was develop a picking style to emulate the rhythm playing the snare, the ride cymbal and the bass drum. I’ve taught my son Jimmy the same method which gives him the metronome effect in his head to articulate the beat that keeps him right on the note. The first song that I ever sang and played on the uke was “Tennessee Waltz.” Jimmy started out playing the uke and drums also. He started playing drums when he was twelve and a half months old, and when he was five, he was playing with me onstage during the Vans Warped Tour and the drummer from Green Day asked little Jimmy for his autograph.

  When I was in grade school, my friend Lester and I went out picking swamp berries in the marshes in Whitman, Massachusetts. There is some real swampland out there, and while we were walking through the woods, we heard this spooky sound of strumming coming through the trees. It was like a scene out of Deliverance for how this strange sound appeared to come from a ramshackle house with a broken-down front porch with no steps to step up. We found seven guys in there who looked very scary, with cigarette packs rolled up inside their t-shirt sleeves and one tooth inside their heads. They were strumming out the blues on these flat top guitars.

  I’d said, “Wow, look. You’ve got a flat top guitar! All I’ve got is a uke.” One of the guys told me he had a guitar for sale, for $8. I asked if he’d take twenty-five cent payments with twenty-five cents down. He wanted fifty cents down, so we went back and forth haggling like this until he accepted an installment of fifty cents per week. Well, now that I had this thing, it occurred to me the guitar had six strings on it and I was used to only playing four. “What am I going to do?”

  He said to me, “Well, kid, just pretend you’re still playing the uke. Play the four strings and muffle the others. No one’s gonna know.”

  Basically, I saw the guitar as an exploded version of the uke. My buddy later asked me to play rhythm with him in a talent contest while he played the lead to a guitar boogie shuffle. He played it real plain, and I said, “Why don’t you play it like this?” and I put a double-picking rhythm to it. At this point, he stopped playing and said, “
Dick, you take it from here.” I played the guitar this way until I got to California.

  After graduating the eleventh grade from Quincy High School, my father got an offer to take the family to California and work for Hughes Aircraft in 1954. So my dad bought a 1954 Oldsmobile 98 and we drove to California. We settled in southwest Los Angeles and I went to George Washington High School, graduating after my twelfth year. I went to a pawnshop and picked up a solid-body electric that I redesigned to look like a country guitar. Dad took me to some of the local bars, entering me into their contests. I was underage but he snuck me in. I later wound up winning a talent contest on a TV show called Town Hall Party, which had also featured Johnny Cash (before he wore black), Gene Autry, Lefty Frizell and Lorrie and Larry Collins.

  My dad and I re-opened the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California, establishing a place for everyone to come and dance their hearts out to the music of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, (a name my sister Shirley came up with). My dad and I met with the fire department, police department and the parent-teachers association. We told them, “Look, would you rather have your kids running around in the streets not knowing where they are, or would you rather have them in one building under one roof, knowing where they are?” Their kids would be dancing to Dick Dale music. They finally gave in, saying, “Well okay. But they must to wear neckties.” They gave me the permits and my dad went out and bought a huge box of neckties. We didn’t have any money to promote so I helped get an audience by word-of-mouth through the seventeen kids I was surfing with. They all arrived opening night and my dad handed them each a necktie. They danced barefoot and they had the ties on. This is why, at the Los Angeles Palladium’s first Surfer Ball, everyone came wearing black tuxedos and sporting bare feet. It was great — barefoot surfers in tuxedos. Afterward, Colonel Parker called up my dad and asked him to bring me to his office at Paramount Studios because he wanted to see who had the entire California scene “sewed up,” as he put it.