Post by erik on Nov 25, 2023 22:27:02 GMT -5
The biggest hit for Dick Dale, the "King Of The Surf Guitar", is in this week's Pop Music Hits Spotlight.
LET’S GO TRIPPIN’ (Dick Dale and the Del-Tones; Deltone; 1961)—Incredible as it might seem, given how influential his guitar playing would be on many rock guitarists from the early 1960’s onwards, particularly in West Coast rock in general and “surf-rock” in particular, Dick Dale and his group The Del-Tones have only ever had two hits of theirs even reach the Hot 100; and neither of them broke the Top 40. The biggest one they ever had, however, was marked by Dale’s unique tremelo picking style on his Telecaster electric guitar, on what became known as a surf-rock classic, “Let’s Go Trippin’”. Dale, who was born in the snowy confines of Boston, came out to California in 1955, initially working at country-and-western and rockabilly bars and nightclubs; but his innovative electric guitar playing owed a lot to his Lebanese descent, and the music of the Arab-speaking countries that his father came from. “Let’s Go Trippin’” was the first true example of this, a completely original and, for its time, unusually loud, surf-rock instrumental that he and his Del-Tones premiered in 1960 at the Rendezvous Ballroom on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, one of the hotspots for the surf craze that would give him his biggest popularity. Recorded in the summer of 1961 and released that fall, “Let’s Go Trippin’” made it all the way up to #4 on the playlists of KFWB AM 980, one of the big radio stations in the Los Angeles metropolitan area during that time; but perhaps due to the limited distribution capacity of his own label, it got no higher than #60 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December. Nevertheless, Dale and his group remained Southern California surf music favorites, along with the Beach Boys, though, unlike the Beach Boys, the Del-Tones did suffer being seen as formulaix once The Beatles and their British Invasion brethren came along in 1964. The group’s best-lnown “hit”, as it were, was a stinging surf version of the Eastern Mediterranean folk song “Misirlou”, which became a Southern California radio staple from its 1963 release onward. But that song’s popularity really exploded when director Quentin Tarantino used it on the soundtrack of his ultra-violent 1994 crime drama epic Pulp Fiction. Dale passed away on March 16, 2019 at Loma Linda Hospital in Loma Linda, California from complications of kidney failure and heart failure at the age of 81.
LET’S GO TRIPPIN’ (Dick Dale and the Del-Tones; Deltone; 1961)—Incredible as it might seem, given how influential his guitar playing would be on many rock guitarists from the early 1960’s onwards, particularly in West Coast rock in general and “surf-rock” in particular, Dick Dale and his group The Del-Tones have only ever had two hits of theirs even reach the Hot 100; and neither of them broke the Top 40. The biggest one they ever had, however, was marked by Dale’s unique tremelo picking style on his Telecaster electric guitar, on what became known as a surf-rock classic, “Let’s Go Trippin’”. Dale, who was born in the snowy confines of Boston, came out to California in 1955, initially working at country-and-western and rockabilly bars and nightclubs; but his innovative electric guitar playing owed a lot to his Lebanese descent, and the music of the Arab-speaking countries that his father came from. “Let’s Go Trippin’” was the first true example of this, a completely original and, for its time, unusually loud, surf-rock instrumental that he and his Del-Tones premiered in 1960 at the Rendezvous Ballroom on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, one of the hotspots for the surf craze that would give him his biggest popularity. Recorded in the summer of 1961 and released that fall, “Let’s Go Trippin’” made it all the way up to #4 on the playlists of KFWB AM 980, one of the big radio stations in the Los Angeles metropolitan area during that time; but perhaps due to the limited distribution capacity of his own label, it got no higher than #60 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December. Nevertheless, Dale and his group remained Southern California surf music favorites, along with the Beach Boys, though, unlike the Beach Boys, the Del-Tones did suffer being seen as formulaix once The Beatles and their British Invasion brethren came along in 1964. The group’s best-lnown “hit”, as it were, was a stinging surf version of the Eastern Mediterranean folk song “Misirlou”, which became a Southern California radio staple from its 1963 release onward. But that song’s popularity really exploded when director Quentin Tarantino used it on the soundtrack of his ultra-violent 1994 crime drama epic Pulp Fiction. Dale passed away on March 16, 2019 at Loma Linda Hospital in Loma Linda, California from complications of kidney failure and heart failure at the age of 81.