Chords for Dick Dale talks about Leo Fender and guitars Part 1 1996

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
The first left-handed hunter_ _ _ _
_ Well, it's not left-handed.
It was Leo.
When I first met Leo,
_ _ I went to him and I said, my name's Dick Dale.
I got no money, I got no instruments.
Could you help me?
My dad was the one who kind of pushed me
into these things, and God bless my father doing that.
And Leo _ looked at me in his famous way,
like, _ _ I can't always do that. _
What a guy.
And he would_
He says, here, you going?
_ Bye-bye.
_ He would say, excuse me.
He would go, _ _
_ take this guitar and play it. _
And it was a Stratton that had been out for a year, and he had already done the Telecaster.
And he brought a Hawaiian man in called Freddy Tavares from Hawaii, who was a Hawaiian
steel guitar player, who was one of the most geniuses of playing.
And he could play a song _ and it played,
look at me, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
He would just chord bar structure
through every note.
And of course, I knew nothing about music,
except I wanted to be a singer-like player like Hank Williams or something like that.
_ So Leo gave me this Stratocaster, and Freddy
_ perfected the Telecaster [F] for sit-down players.
_ In that era, everybody was _ governed by the electronics
of that era in the 50s, that if you went on a scale of
zero to ten, if you wanted to see how loud someone could play,
they could never go past five on your scale or
volume.
_ _ So [A] everybody played beautifully and wonderfully
and people like _ Les Paul in _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ 1937. _
_ And at that time, I got a hold of
ukulele, _ selling Noxzema jars in the back of a Superman magazine
because it had a cowboy rearing on a horse.
And I went door to door selling these things, and then I
sent the money away and waited six months and got this _ cardboard
[N] pressed ukulele with the pegs falling out.
And I got so
frustrated that I just smashed it in a garbage can and then sold a bunch of Pepsi-Cola bottles
and Coca-Cola bottles and got $6.95 and bought my first plastic
ukulele.
And I picked it up left-handed because drums was my first instrument.
And I would play on knives on my mom and dad's
sugar cans and flour cans when they would leave.
My father would come home and kick me in the rear because I would dent them because of the knives, [E] listening to
Harry James records, listening to Gene Krupa, who was my big hero.
So I started developing a rhythm.
_ And then
when I got this ukulele, I picked it up that way
to use the same rhythm.
And I got a book and it says, put your finger here, here,
while I kept stretching my fingers, my fingers wouldn't go there.
I couldn't understand
why.
_ The book didn't say, turn it the other way, stupid, you're left-handed.
So I just stretched my fingers and learned these three chords
and started singing the Tennessee Waltz.
And I would play it in
all these different rhythms.
I'd go, I'd do the country style, I'd go,
I _ was actually strumming the beats that I was
learning listening to Gene Krupa, who was the first man to make drums a solo
instrument.
Then what happened was, _ that was in
Quincy, Massachusetts.
I was born in Boston.
_ Then I'd go out to the farm
where my grandma and grandpa lived, taught me how to plow with a single blade and a horse.
And I'd go out into the woods, it was like in deliverance.
And there was about 15 guys all in this one big house, with their
sleeves rolled up, keep missing, [Ab] _ cigarette out of one
mouth, saying, I got the blues, oh lord, since my babe said goodbye,
and stuff like that.
Strumming, all going ding, ding, ding, ding,
ding on these guitars, about 16 of them all around in a circle.
And I'm going.
_ _ And the guy goes, I got this one for sale,
the old flat top with this hole in it.
And I said, how much?
He goes, $8.
$8 is all the money in the world to me. _
So I gave him 50 cents down,
and I paid him 50 cents a week for this flat top guitar.
_ _ [N] I goes, wow, _ _ the six strings.
What am I going to do with the other two?
The guy goes, just muffle them,
nobody will know the difference.
So I played ukulele chords on this big guitar,
and that was a big deal, man.
Going from a little plastic uke to this great
big body.
Man, that's cool, I'm a guitar player.
And I just started playing like that.
And then, finally,
I learned one thing on that deal, on picking on a string,
and it was a boogie woogie thing, and my body used to go, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,
dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
That's all we knew.
So I goes, why don't you just jazz it.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
And I started doing that rhythm.
So when I came to California, _ _ I learned a friend of mine,
who is an attorney now, he taught me, Nick O'Malley, [F] he played _ acoustic guitar, _ _ _ _
and he showed me how to make a chord, and it was up to me to make my fingers do it.
And I learned to finally learn to bar chord.
and then I used that for everything.
When I met Leo _ and Freddie, _ Leo gave me this
right-handed Stratocaster, the one that I have today. _
[Ab] It's the only one I've ever had.
_ And he said, play this guitar.
_ _ Well I didn't know what to play because I
wasn't a guitarist.
In reality I was singing Hank Williams songs.
So I grabbed
the guitar and I held it up, I just took it upside down, held it and I upside down
backwards.
I had to transpose my head to my hand, play it, get my arm over the
knobs and start strumming it.
Leo died laughing and I guess it was so funny he
took me in like a son.
He says take that guitar and beat it to death.
He goes why
do you play like that?
It was so funny.
He says take that guitar and beat it to death. _ _