Quotes from Dick Dale

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.

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

Every song is like a painting.

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

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

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.

The ultimate guitar players can play every scale in the book.

I don't claim to be a musician, I didn't go to Julliard.

I do not play to musicians. I play to the people.

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.

Springsteen - he's the Lord God.

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

Hendrix was the bass player for Little Richard. We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. In fact he used to say, and this is documented, 'I patterned my style after Dick Dale.'

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.

Earthlings are confused, insecure. And some Earthlings have no heritage: that's what leads them to kill each other and rob 7-11 stores.

Kids don't see me as an oldies person when I go out on stage. They see me as an energy force.

When I come onstage, I'm exploding.

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

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.

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'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.'

I told them if were going to do it were going to do it right, I'm not leaving 'til it's done. My wife, child and I slept in the studio. We cut these raw.

I always felt people should live with animals.

My father never put me on his lap and said he loved me.