Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale

iTunes Review

Did you know Dick Dale’s 1962 hit “Miserlou” was actually a reworking of an Arabic love song from 1927? Besides pioneering the surf guitar genre, helping develop the Fender Showman amp and making external reverb effects popular, the highly influential Dick Dale also had a knack for spinning the songs of others into his golden tones. Dale’s 1996 take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun” is not only an homage to another revolutionary guitar hero, but also a belated response to Hendrix’s dialogue at the end of the 1967 original where he says, “To you I shall put an end, then you'll never hear surf music again." The rest of this 2010 compilation bends, twangs, and reverberates some of Dale’s best, including his 1961 beach-party anthem “Let’s Go Trippin’” and a 1987 duet with Stevie Ray Vaughan on the Chantays’ ode to the gnarliest surf spot on O'ahu's North Shore, “Pipeline.” Though some of his early singles on Deltone are absent, Dale makes up for it by putting his Stratocaster’s snarl in a blistering rendition of “Hava Nagila.”