Dick Dale

Musician

1937-05-04

Quotes by Dick Dale

• I don't play pyrotechnic scales. I play about frustration, patience, anger. Music is an extension of my soul.

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• I smashed my tailbone and couldn't sit for five years, and I broke my clavicle because I thought I was a great surfer, and of course, I could be a great snowboarder, too. Man, was I wiped out!

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• Every song is like a painting.

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• Springsteen - he's the Lord God.

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

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• The kids called me King of the Surf Guitar. I surfed sunup to sundown.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.'

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• Surf music is actually just the sound of the waves played on a guitar: that wet, splashy sound.

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