This Dick Dale interview was written by Deuce of Clubs and was published in a 1995 issue of Planet Magazine.

What does the word "Misirlou" mean, anyhow?

I like how you snuck in a traditional Arabic version of Misirlou as a hidden track at the end of your new 

Yeah, we were fooling around in the studio with an old flat-top guitar that a friend pulled out of in water in Mexico. The pegs were falling out and everything, but we put some strings on it anyway. Then we also had this little Arabic drum, like the Egyptians play for the belly dancers. I took that guitar—I couldn't see what I was doing because it's a right-hand guitar, and you can't see no dots on the neck or anything—and was trying to how "Misirlou" was played originally. We recorded it and decided to put it on the end of the album.

You received a Grammy nomination for the 

 soundtrack—do you keep in touch with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello?

Not really, no. I did those old beach movies with Annie and Frankie, way back in the early '60s. Annie and I were very close for many years. In fact, our parents were trying to get us married! She's just a sweetheart of a girl, a real special person who never let the fame go to her head. Unfortunately, she has a real bad illness. [Note: Funicello died in 2013 from complications due to multiple sclerosis.] Frankie was always a nice guy, too. He was a straight shooter.

 came out, I was disappointed not to see Eric von Zipper onscreen. He was my favorite.

It's a shame. I've seen a lot of people go.


Do you still keep a lot of animals? [Note: since the 1960s, Dale has kept and trained a variety of animal, including lions and tigers.]

I have a beautiful Castillian Mustang, some Arabian horses, my surfing dogs, and then all the creatures up in the desert here. My cats—my big cats—are with my buddy, he's got a big compound. And they're breeding and having fun and living out their beautiful years and preserving the breed.

Yeah, but not here with my child. They'd eat him! I lived with 'em and slept with 'em for thirty years. But you have to step away from it or, you know, the child will get eaten. I never my aminals in cages, I had big open compounds. They'd be in my home with me, sleep with me. You can't have that when you have a child.

I heard you were the first person in California with a license to play rock and roll. What does that mean?

In the '50s, you couldn't play guitar in the high schools and junior highs—they'd only book horn bands. They thought anybody who played guitar was evil. We said, "You want your kids out in the street or would you rather have them in one big place?" They said, "They gotta wear ties!" Who the hell ever heard of surfers wearing ties? They finally gave us a permit to play the Rendezvous Ballroom, which took up a whole city block. Opening night we had 17 surfers in bare feet—wearing ties. We had a box of ties and handed 'em out to keep the city happy. And the surfers would say, "Man, you're the king!" So that's how the name "King of the Surf Guitar" came about. I never gave myself that name. But that's what they called me then. And now, boom!—it's happened again, all because of 

—that just took it right over the top. That movie has done over $100 million in ticket sales. I just got a platinum album for it.

There's lots of misinformation about the invention of surf music.

Yeah! It was in the '50s, not the '60s, like all the magazines say. They don't know the whole story—they weren't even born when it happened! I crack up. I've always been kind of silent about it all, but now that everybody's starting to try to make money off it, I don't want kids to spend their money on the wrong thing. You got information out there with all these different kinds of guitars that have 

 to do with the sound that Dick Dale created. The sound is a Stratocaster guitar. It's the solidity of the wood—the thicker the wood, the bigger and purer the sound. It was a Strat. Not the Jaguar, not the Jazzmaster, all these things we created later, for different reasons.

 to do with the surfing sound, and now you got everybody saying "That's the wet, splashy sound of reverb." No! There's no reverb on my first album. We created it because Dick Dale does have a natural vibrato on his voice. I wanted to sustain my notes while singing. So we copied the Hammond organ, which had a tank in it. We took the tank out, rewired it, and had an outboard reverb! It was for the vocal. That first album, 

! That's like more than 4 million today. Dick Dale was already established as King of the Surf Guitar, and that album 

I really like that you hang around after a show and talk to people and sign autographs.

If I spent money to see somebody, I would love to be able to go up to that person and just say Hi. Sure, after a show, after I've been blasting for an hour or so, I'd like to go downstairs and die. But the thing is, for the fans, how often do they get to come out and see you? You gotta hang around, say Hi, see if they enjoyed the show.

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