Top 50 Dick Dale Quotes

I blew amps like they were made of tissue paper. Once I blew out the sound system at Royal Albert Hall in London.

I used to surf up in Ventura County at Silver Strand; plus, I’ve played up there many times.

I’ve got holes in my guitar.

Surfers were the ones who named all my songs. They’d yell out the names, and we just kept ’em.

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!’

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.

I have all the rhythm in my left hand, and I use the rhythms that Gene Krupa did on his drums.

Guitar Player Magazine says Dick Dale is the father of Heavy Metal, blowing up 48 amplifiers, creating the first power amplifier.

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.

Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.

You know what the doctors call me? ‘The Cancer Warrior.’

When my guitar was growling, playing surf beat, you could hear it; you could feel it.

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.

Some guys record an album with songs that are filler. I recorded this album like it was my last.

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.

Jimi was a good guy ’til he got into drugs. That’s the way it is. I just tell it like it is.

I live like in the days of Daniel Boone, hauling water by hand. I used to have two Rolls-Royces. Now I got one. It’s got four flat tires; the trunk is open, and a rat lives inside it.

My philosophy is that on a scale of 1 to 10, I will go to 15. No matter what!

Dick Dale don’t surf no more.

I called it Rockabilly ’cause I was rocking the strums, which you’re not supposed to do.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They’re not your blood. They’re not your mind. You get in an argument.

I’ve been called ‘the father of loud.’

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.

My music is more native than intricate or technical.

I’ve never taken a lesson in my life, and I can play every instrument there is. I play by ear, but I can fool anybody into thinking I went to some conservatory of music.

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.

My son now is 22 months old, he’s been playing since he was 12 months old and he gets standing ovations on the drums. He’s been with us since he was 10 weeks old, he’s been on the drums. He’s got blisters on his fingers before he can even talk.

When I start playing I’m just a rollercoaster of sound. I don’t know what’s coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.

Whatever you do, don’t take shortcuts. It’s great advice to take and live by.

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.

I learned everything by ear and played all the different instruments. So then I was able to find a guitar. That was, like, in the seventh grade. And then I didn’t know how to put my fingers on all the different strings, so I had to figure out how to do it upside down and backwards, and I still play that way today.

I’ve never followed a list in my life, and that’s probably what has created so much nervous energy in my body.

When I played with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings in Vegas, the guys used to go, ‘Dick, cut it out, man! You’re moving around too much on this stage. You’re making us look bad!’

I always felt people should live with animals.

Every time I went into the studio some engineer tried to impress me with how they’re going to capture my sound with all kinds of tricks. But they limited the sound and never allowed me to play how I felt.

I’m a perfectionist. I’m not going to cheat the people.

I’m constantly being influenced by the soul that’s directly in front of me.

With every problem comes a gift in hand.

You know, music is sex. It’s a sensual driving mode that affects people if it’s played a certain way.

I try to read the audience, see what they’re in the mood for.

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.

When I was 18 at the Santa Ana River Jetty is where I put my first board in the water that I ever got from Joe Quigg. I was just riding the whitewater in, and I was just in heaven.

I know what it’s like to wash my clothes in a Chevron station.

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.

Springsteen – he’s the Lord God.

They’re putting cement dust into cattle feed to make the cows heavier; the FDA knows all about it.

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 actually first picked up an ukulele before I picked up a guitar.

I almost had to have my leg amputated because of an infection.

Music is nothing but a door opener to meet families and their children and the elderly.