This Guitar Is Available As A Fabulous Fake
Dick Dale invented surf music in
the 1950's. Not the '60's as is commonly believed.
He was given the title "King of the Surf Guitar" by
his fellow surfers with whom he surfed with from
sun-up to sun-down. He met Leo Fender the guitar and
amplifier Guru and Leo asked Dale to play his newly
creation, the Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar.
The minute Dale picked up the guitar, Leo Fender
broke into uncontrolled laughter and disbelief, he
was watching Dale play a right handed guitar upside
down and backwards, Dale was playing a right handed
guitar left handed and changing the chords in his
head then transposing the chords to his hands to
create a sound never heard before.
Leo Fender gave the Fender Stratocaster along with a
Fender Amp to Dale and told him to beat it to death
and tell him what he thought of it. Dale took the
guitar and started to beat it to death, and he blew
up Leo Fender's amp and blew out the speaker. Dale
proceeded to blow up forty nine amps and speakers;
they would actually catch on fire. Leo would say,
'Dick, why do you have to play so loud?' Dale would
explain that he wanted to create the sound of Gene
Krupa the famous jazz drummer that created the
sounds of the native dancers in the jungles along
with the roar of mother nature's creature's and the
roar of the ocean.
Leo Fender kept giving Dale amps and Dale kept
blowing them up! Till one night Leo and his right
hand man Freddy T. went down to the Rendezvous
Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula in Balboa,
California and stood in the middle of Four Thousand
screaming dancing Dick Dale fans and said to Freddy,
I now know what Dick Dale is trying to tell me. Back
to the drawing board. A special 85 watt output
transformer was made that peaked 100 watts when Dale
would pump up the volume of his amp, this
transformer would create the sounds along with
Dale's style of playing, the kind of sounds that
Dale dreamed of. Leo, Freddy and Dale went to the
James B. Lansing speaker company, and they explained
that they wanted a fifteen inch speaker built to
their specifications. That speaker would soon be
known as the 15'' JBL -D130 speaker. It made the
complete package for Dale to play through and was
named the Single Showman Amp.