RIP Dick Dale— “I was at one time the president of the Sultans of Southwest LA, a biker motorcycle club and I rode on my 1941 flathead Harley Davidson that I completely chopped it all down. At the time, I was trained as a machinist. I was doing induction brazing, that’s working the electrical impulse, and I made these 3” what I called “risers” and I combed them all up and they clamp onto the front headstock of your motorcycle so it will hold handlebars and the handlebars, I had them up to shoulder height because I felt that if you hit something or had to stop hard you want the fulcrum to go from your shoulder directly in a horizontal line to the handlebars, not an ape hanger, you know that’s way above your head, you know that’s deadly, that’s crazy, you just can’t control a machine like that, it’s just for looks. But I’m the guy that they got those risers and they would put their ape hangers on it and handlebars on it... And that’s why Harley put me in their 100 year anniversary museum book showing my flathead with my risers. Anyway, Ray and I would ride our machines and we wanted to go down to Balboa ‘cause we were living in Southwest LA and there was only one road down there and it was on the coast and that’s how we fell in love with Balboa and I fell in love with surfing. So you know, I went up to Leo [Fender] and I had this old guitar that wasn’t a Fender, in fact it’s sitting in here in a box, looking out a piece of glass. I said, “my name’s Dick Dale, I’m a surfer, I got no money, can you help me?” And he said, “Here, I just made this guitar. It’s a Stratocaster” and he says, “go ahead and play it, tell me what you think.” And he plugged it into one of his amps and when I picked it up, he saw me pick it up backwards and start playing, picked it up as a left-hander... Upside down... And then he saw me doing my fingers to play it and he turns around and he just almost fell off a chair laughing...he never laughed, he was like Einstein. When you looked at him, you know, he would only say two or three words and mean a paragraph. But he took a liking to me for some reason and we used to sit together in his living room on his floor and listen to Marty Robbins..."
