by Julia Crowe
Parker had an inner sanctum of three offices. We stepped into the first office and a voice on speakerphone said, “Let ’em into the next office.” We stepped into the second office and the voice on the speakerphone said, “Let ’em into the next office.”
I saw the Colonel sitting there in his full Confederate uniform behind this huge desk and when I looked down at the two stools we were to sit on, I noticed the chair was made of a real stuffed elephant’s foot. My dad asked the Colonel if he would like to manage Dick Dale. The Colonel replied, “I would love to, but I’ve just spent $80,000 on a boy called Elvis, and I wanted to take a look at this Dick Dale who is packing in four thousand people a night. I like what he stands for.” The Colonel then proceeded to show me all his Elvis promotional materials that he had set up. He had a gold bust of Elvis on his desk. It was wild, like a Barnum and Bailey Circus promotion, very colorful and in your face.
Elvis invited me to his home in Trousdale Estates, Hollywood. He was so excited about his new Stutz Bearcat he had to take me out that night for a drive in it. El ran over to the Stutz and discovered that he had locked the keys inside. In a fit, he punched out the passenger side window, splattering glass all over the passenger seat where I was to sit. I brushed away the glass as much as I could as El wanted to start driving, and we took off with the Memphis Mafia following close behind us in the Rolls-Royce. El roared down Hollywood Boulevard and the cops pulled up next to us, looked over at El and said jokingly, “Oh, it’s you. Do you need a manager?”
El replied, “Thank yuh very much” and sped off. We drove back to his estate, where he proceeded to show me around his home and view his collections. Priscilla, or Prissy, as El called her, showed me the famous white Eagle Belt that she had made for El for his upcoming Las Vegas show. Then she showed me the home she was designing for them both. Elvis was so proud but yet so scared because he was producing his very first show for Las Vegas. I knew better, telling him that he would kill them. And he did.
Elvis and I studied with the same karate master, Ed Parker, and I can tell you that El loved the martial arts and practiced every moment that he could steal. It was a shame that he had to live his life in a goldfish bowl. Let me tell you the kind of guy he was: he’d found me sitting on the floor inside his closet reading a book I found on his shelf called This Is Karate by Masutatsu Oyama and, knowing this book was hard to find and not knowing the fact that I had been searching for years for it, he bought a copy of it for me the next day as a gift. He told Ed Parker there is the book that Dick wants, bought it and signed a very personal note to me when he presented it to me. Elvis, Ed Parker, Chuck Norris and other close practitioners of the martial arts always stuck close together. Many times they would come to visit my menagerie of tigers and lions, eagles and hawks. (I would tell people, if the animals liked you, they would lick you. If they didn’t like you, they would eat you.) Priscilla and Elvis loved the cats. When Elvis trained, he used to bring home the soft foam bats that we used in karate and he and Priscilla would bang each other every time they got into an argument. Prissy couldn’t stand the pressure of living with the Memphis Mafia living in the same house. She wanted her own privacy, so she had Elvis build another house next door so the Memphis Mafia could move out and live there.
After Elvis died, I had a friend contact the Colonel and we found out that he had moved his office into the RCA Building in Hollywood, where my dad used to have the old Dick Dale Enterprises office. Parker was a carny man from the word go. Thanks to him, Elvis never had to pay any taxes. The Colonel knew how to market and how to sell, to the point of even making the press pay at Elvis’ concerts. He told me he’d say to them, “Listen, I know all you guys are going to write shit about him anyway so you might as well pay.”
Back then, the guitar was considered the creator of evil devil music and the school bands were horn bands. Art Laboe produced concerts under tents on the grass, and Art had me play at his tent concerts. One night Ritchie Valens sang “La Bamba.” The crowd went wild and Ritchie got scared. He ran off the stage and didn’t know what to do with the crowd yelling, “Ritchie! Ritchie!” I grabbed Ritchie, calmed him down and told him to get back out there and do the song again. He sang it three more times, ha! I loved it. I have been close with his family ever since.
There were no loud guitar power players back then because there were no power amplifiers. Country guitar players stood still and played with their fingers very eloquently like Chet Atkins and Merle Travis. There was an expression for that type of playing, “I got a sit-down job,” because the only thing that moved were their fingers. Chuck Berry also played on these little amps with little six-inch and ten-inch speakers. Freddie Tavares used to play the Hawaiian steel guitar with Harry Owens’ Royal Hawaiians, and Leo hired him to take out any of the bugs in the Telecaster guitar. Leo and Freddie were the two main forces for Fender and the Telecaster country-plucking guitar.
Freddie once told me if you could take a telephone pole and put strings and pickups on it, you would get the purest, fattest, thickest sound. But obviously, you can’t play a telephone pole. So he made the Stratocaster out of a solid chunk of wood and made a cutaway so it would fit against the stomach. I first met Leo Fender when he was developing amps and guitars and my dad took me to meet him. I introduced myself, saying “Hello, Mr. Fender, my name is Dick Dale and I have no money for a neat guitar, but I am playing at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa with lots of people coming to see me.” Leo said, “Here, take this guitar, play it and tell me what you think.”
Leo handed me a Stratocaster, and I turned it upside down and started playing it. The look on Leo’s face was first one of shock. Then he burst into a fit of laughter. Leo never was one to laugh, as he was always so serious about his creations, but he couldn’t help himself and asked, “What are you doing, young man? Turn it around, Stupid. You’re left-handed.”
That, I believe was the glue that made the three of us forever friends: Leo, Freddy and me. Forrest White, Leo’s manager, joined the newly formed friendship as we started experimenting with Leo’s creations.
As I started blowing up Leo’s amps and speakers, Leo would say, “Dick, why do you have to play so loudly?” I would play so hard, it would heat up the electronic wires to the speaker and the speaker would catch on fire. When I was playing in concert at the London Forum, smoke was coming up out of one of the speakers and my bass player, Ron Eglit, motioned to me, saying, “Look, the speaker is burning,” as the smoke rose up in front of me. I’d motioned back to him to shush and keep playing because I knew I had burned it up. Ha!
One time Keith Moon of The Who came up to me onstage, grabbed the microphone in the middle of my song and said, “You’re the master. I’ve been listening to your bloody records for seventeen years and I want you to play on my album. I’ve got John Lennon and Ringo on it, and if you don’t play on it I am going to junk the bloody thing.” He said he was Keith Moon from The Who and I said, “Who?”
“Yes, The Who,” he repeated. It was a bit like Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” Keith was the first person I knew who spent $80,000 on making an album, so I recorded on his last album.
Because Leo Fender was always asking why I had to play so loudly, Freddie Tavares urged him to attend a concert of mine at the Rendezvous Ballroom, where four thousand people watched me tear up his guitar and amp. Leo then said, “Freddy, now I understand what Dick is trying to tell me. Back to the drawing board with reconfiguring the guitar.” Using a 10-inch speaker in Leo’s Fender amp, we used to sit in his living room listening to Marty Robbins records. I think Leo loved the fact that I loved Marty Robbins and country music. Leo hated stereo sound. He would only listen to his country music monaural, not in stereo, while we were testing out these amps and speakers.
I later wanted to improve the sound of my singing voice, so I got the idea to steal the reverb spring can out of the back of a Hammond organ that I had. I thought it had a nice sustaining sound that made my dry voice so
und better. Reverb was really meant for the voice, not the guitar, like everyone thinks.
I still have my original “Fender Champ Amp” put together with nails, and I have the only 600-watt Fender Mixer PA System that Leo build just for me as an experiment. Freddy had the other one as a backup at the factory, so there are only two in existence.
Leo went back to the drawing board every time I blew up an amp. The power, color and sound had to do with the output transformer, and I wanted that sound to come out of my amp and speakers. Leo created the first eight-ohm eighty-five-watt output transformer peaking at 100 watts. This transformer favored highs, mids and lows of the sound spectrum, as this had been my request. Transformers of today only favor highs, mids or lows by themselves. I wanted it all together to get my big, fat sound.
Leo wound the copper wire in an unorthodox way until he finally created a transformer where the sound peaked at 100 watts as the four 5881 tubes built up internal gas. The tubes created the distortion and pumped up the sound until it became bigger and fatter and blossomed in color. We now needed something to plug the amplifier into so we got an eight-inch Jensen speaker, then a twelve-inch speaker. We fried them immediately. I made changes on the guitar as we were connecting this amp to the speakers. Leo, Freddy and I went to JBL speaker company and requested them to build a fifteen-inch speaker with a twelve-pound magnet mounted in an aluminum alloy casting, and I added an aluminum dust cover on the cone on the speaker so I could hear the treble click of the pick as I played. They laughed and replied, “What are you going to do with that thing — put it on a tug boat?” Leo replied, “If you want my business, make it.” This speaker was called the JBL fifteen-inch D130.
We plugged the new amp into a speaker cabinet that was three feet tall by two feet wide and twelve inches deep. It had no sound portholes and was packed with fiberglass for creating a tightness of sound. Inside the cabinet we mounted the JBL fifteen-inch D130 speaker. Leo named the amp “The Showman” because I used to leap off a four-foot-high stage down into the audience, sliding onto my knees across the floor whenever I ended a song. “Man, what a showman,” Leo would say to me, but my dad would go crazy with scolding, screaming that I would never walk again if I kept doing that. Ha!
Now it was time to fire up this creation that Leo made for me. Bam! When I hit those sixty-gauge strings on that chunk of wood Stratocaster guitar, I experienced a newfound power. I told Leo that I wanted to put two d130s inside the cabinet. Leo replied in shock, “Dick, I will have to design and make a new output transformer.” The next week I got a very excited call from Leo, urging me to come to the shop right away. Lo and behold, there on the desk was a four-ohm 100-watt output transformer that would peak at 180 watts. Powering the new Dual Showman Amp and blasting into two fifteen-inch JBL D130s, I plugged the “Beast” (as Guitar Player Magazine named it) into the Dual Showman amp and made people’s ears bleed.
There had been one more bump in the road, though. I was still freezing and twisting the JBLS. Freddy said, “Dick look at this, how are you doing this?” referring to the twisted speaker cone. I replied, “If the speaker is supposed to move in and out with each note that I strike on the guitar, I think that the heavy staccato picking that I am pushing into the speaker is confusing it, and the speaker is moving in and out crookedly. That might be the reason why it cocked itself and jammed its movement.” Leo, Freddy and I went back to the JBL speaker company, and Leo asked them to put a coating of a rubber glue–type material all around the ridge of the speaker. This worked. It kept the speaker pushing in and out in a straight direction. It did not cock and twist anymore. The speaker was now called the JBL fifteen-inch D130F, the letter “F meaning Fender specifications,” as Leo would say.
Fender Company manufactured my guitar strings, and the tech buzz in the factory was that my guitar strings were like coat hangers or telephone wires. Ha! In my thinking, the thicker the strings, the fatter and thicker the color of sound was going to be, and the amp would be working less hard to produce the sound. My strings were sixteen-gauge plain, eighteen-gauge plain, twenty-gauge plain, thirty-nine-gauge wound, forty-nine-gauge wound and sixty-gauge wound. That’s why they called me the Father of Heavy Metal. It was the first creation of what’s now known as heavy loud power playing.
One performance night I had blown another amp, and Leo was right there to put another one together for me. He had run out of covering material for the wood frame that housed the amp head. He found some cream-colored material in the back of the factory and quickly covered the amp head with that. Leo brought it to me saying, “Dick, do not let people see this. They will want it because you are playing through it. It will not be practical as people will get it stained with coffee and cigarette burns. I replied, “But Leo, I love it. It is so pretty and I love the color. Please can I keep it?” Well, the next week Leo called me into the factory and took me to the assembly line to view an entire line of cream-colored amps. I loved it. Every Showman amp that rolled off that assembly line came out with my cream covering.
While I was playing my Beast, I removed the plastic knobs because my wrist would accidentally turn down the volume. But after I pulled off the knobs, the metal shafts kept cutting my wrist as I picked up and down. I asked Leo if he could relocate them to the bottom of the guitar. He said it would cost him $12,000 to make a jig to put them where I wanted. He borrowed the guitar for a few days to check the neck. Then I received a message asking me to report to the factory. Bam! Leo handed me my guitar, saying, “Check it. I want to see how you play it.” He’d moved the controls on the bottom. My guitar neck is one quarter of an inch smaller in width, and the Dick Dale Signature Stratocaster comes with a choice of either a three-position switch or the Dick Dale five-position switch. If you want the original neck, you have to ask for it, and I still use the three-position switch.
My advice to people who want to play the guitar is simple: Perfect practice makes for perfect performance. Empty yourself and you will find the humility to ask, how does one learn? You do not play for the acknowledgment — you play from deep within. Picture in your mind that you are creating awareness as you play, for you can create with your talent or you can destroy with your talent.
Albert Lee
Grammy-winning British guitarist Albert Lee grew up in Blackheath, London, and performed on recordings with Deep Purple before he joined The Crickets and Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band. Lee has also worked with Eric Clapton and is known for his fast fingerstyle and country, rockabilly and western swing picking style.
I was at school when a good school friend’s brother just returned from the Navy with a guitar. We had recently become enamored of skiffle music. This is a kind of folk music that was started in England by a guy called Lonnie Donegan. In the mid-1950s, everyone was trying to learn the guitar as a result — simple songs, like three chords, strumming and so on. A school friend of mine, Max Middleton, and I started learning to play on his brother’s guitar. I borrowed the guitar and I might have borrowed a couple other guitars for the next year before I finally got one of my own. I was about thirteen years old at the time, and this guitar was a Höfner President archtop, a cheap one, and of course, the action on it was very high. Looking back, I’m sure it was just horrible and terrible to play, though we did not know it.
I had taken piano lessons for a couple years, so I was already interested in music. A little later on, I heard Jerry Lee Lewis, and I wanted to play piano like he did. But it was the guitar that really got me. I thought, well, I could do that. Once I learned to play a couple chords, it all fell into place. I was very fortunate, really, because it all came to me rather quickly, and I was on the road playing by the time I was sixteen. I didn’t have any grand plans. Wish I did, really. I just wanted to play the guitar. My family was very supportive all along the way. In fact, they turned the living room into a band rehearsal room and let me just take over the house. I would just listen to records because there really wasn’t anyone to see.
There were visiting
American guitarists who came over. I remember seeing Duane Eddy when he came to England in 1958. I’d seen a few people on TV. I was a big Buddy Holly fan, but I never actually got to go to one of his gigs. Bill Haley — I never saw a gig of his but the movies were out, like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock. All the artists in those films were very inspiring to me. I never had a teacher. I still don’t read music. I taught myself really, just by listening to solos and trying to copy them. I started to then improvise my own solos that I’d heard other people play.
I just love the sound of the guitar. It’s such a thrill to hear a solo and then realize, “I think I know how he’s doing that.” And then, to finally figure it out in the confines of your own bedroom where you’re sitting, playing away. It was a thrill for a real number of years till it got to the point where it came easily to me. My schoolwork went downhill pretty quickly after I discovered the guitar. I pretty much left school at the age of fifteen. That was the earliest age you could leave school in England. I started working a day job of paint-spraying for a few months, all the while doing little gigs. But at that age, one earns very little doing a day job anyway. I found that I could easily beat that day job pay by playing a couple places during the week, earning one pound sterling a night and, soon, I was earning more than I was with a day job. When I was sixteen, I played my first professional tour.
There was a dance hall near where we’d lived that had a dance band, and we’d roll up with our instruments and beg the manager to let us play. He said, “Okay, boys, how ’bout it? Seven and six a man.” This translates as seven shillings and sixpence a person, which I believe was about a dollar back then. So we’d play for twenty minutes while the dance band was having a break. We were about fifteen or sixteen years old.