- Nitrus

- The Wedge Paradiso

- The Pit

- Fever

- Doom Box

- Catamount

- Window

- Calling Up Spirits

- Temple of Gizen

- Bandito

- Third Stone From the Sun

- Peppermint Man

- Gypsy Fire

Say the name Dick Dale to any modern music fan and you're bound to get the response, "King Of The Surf Guitar". He thinks it's always been something of a misnomer because his playing isn't confined to the heavy, staccato, machine-gun style picking of surf music - and because he hasn't gone surfing in years because of the polluted water. But if the crown fits, wear it proudly and that's just what Dale is doing on his latest guitar assault, Calling Up Spirits, his Beggars Banquet debut album.

Recorded in six action-packed days with Prairie Prince and Scott Matthews on dual drums, Vince Welnick from the Grateful Dead on keyboards, and Dale's longtime bassist, Ron Eglit, Calling Up Spirits opens with the classic Dale explosion of "Nitrus", and hammers through 12 more songs pulled from birth, death, sex, strength, pain and fear, all the experiences that have driven Dale in recent years from the mountaintop where he now lives to the studio and the world's concert stages.

Produced by Dale with Ron Eglit, the sound is classic Dale (who sings on four of the tracks): a compelling blend of hard rock, explosive guitar, reverb, a hint of latin, and what Dale readily identifies as the sound of our indigenous tribal roots. Snakes or moshers will feel at home in "The Pit", while the future for his four-year old son, Jimmy, inspires the chantlike, "Window", the uncertainty highlighted by an eerie spaghetti western treatment. A brassy addition to "Wedge Paradiso" gives it a South-of-the-border feel, while his take of Hendrix's "Third Stone From The Sun" draws to a close with some of the most delicate guitar sounds Dale has ever made.

"They gotta go in there like they're fighting in the arena, 'cause I beat the shit out of them," Dale says of the musicians brave enough to record with him. "We're non-stop. When we're in a groove, we're in a groove. I recorded it live and I wanted to keep it loose. I said, 'hey guys, just follow me." And we didn't leave 'till it was done. We lived there on the property where the studio is. So if my string goes out of tune, it goes out of tune because I hit it so hard. These are the things that let people know that it's real."

Calling Up Spirits is the third album that Dale has made since his recording career was rekindled in 1992. It's also his most power-packed, and his most earthy. The other two LPs, Tribal Thunder and Unknown Territory, were released on High Tone Records. The two albums, he proudly states, made him the oldest artist in history to make the Top 20 on the charts at the college radio trade journal, CMJ. Rolling Stone gave him four stars for Tribal Thunder, and after MTV's "Beavis And Butt-head" aired a video for "Nitro", a song he wrote for snowboarders, every kid in the country knew who Dick Dale was.

Calling Up Spirits is his first release for Beggars Banquet Records and his first record since director Quentin Tarantino used Dale's 1962 recording, "Misirlou" to open the hit film "Pulp Fiction". Dale earned his first platinum album for the soundtrack, and the song quickly became the signature theme for the film's worldwide success. Dale clearly feels at home with his new label - he says, "The attitude of the people at Beggars Banquet is so unpretentious - it made me feel like I was talking to grass-roots people. They didn't look down their noses at me like they're doing me a favour."Dale has always been a true independent. In 1960, Dale released his first album Surfers Choice on his own Del-tone Records and managed to sell 88,000 copies. When Capitol Records signed him in 1963, he received a $50,000 advance, eclipsing the previous industry record set by Elvis Presley in 1956. Although he made the obligatory "Ed Sullivan Show" appearance (plus roles in various beach movies and in Marilyn Monroe's last film, "Let's Make Love"), he didn't tour because he is a self-proclaimed "hermit" who doesn't particularly like other musicians. That, and the change in music after the British invasion, meant that for a while his star shone a little less brightly.

But that worked in his favour. Since his performing career never went beyond Southern California, Dale assumed a near-mythic status among other guitar players. Guitar Player observed, "Take away the title of the King Of Surf Guitar and you'd have the father of heavy metal". Paul Shaffer of "Late Night With David Letterman" insisted Dale join Joe Walsh and Joe Satriani on his 1989 album. In 1987, Dale's duets with Stevie Ray Vaughan on the movie soundtrack for "Back To The Beach" earned a "Best Rock Instrumental Performance" Grammy nomination for the song "Pipeline".

According to the self-taught Dale, "When I play guitar, I don't come to pose and play fancy pyrotechnic scales. I come to kick ass. I create sounds of frustration, sounds of mother nature, sounds of screaming and dying animals, and sounds of happiness. That's basically what I do. Meanwhile, I break 60 gauge strings."

Music on Calling Up Spirits could be called a matter of life and death. Four years ago, the 58 year old guitarist's wife Jill, gave birth to their son, Jimmy. Dale, who survived a battle with his cancer 30 years ago, never wanted children. He grew up wanting to be a veterinarian and used to have a collection of exotic animals including a young female lion, a couple of mountain lion clubs and an ocelot. He still has horses to this day. Dale knows how much it hurts to lose an animal from an incurable disease and he feared something similar happening with a child. But fathering a son has taught him, "You don't really start feeling things until you have a child of your own." Watching Jimmy's world evolve from their vantage point on an 80 acre spread in the high desert of Twenty-nine Palms, California (2,000 feet above Palm Springs) inspired the title cut, says Dale.

"This CD is called Calling Up Spirits because if the people in control of this earth have no conscience of what they are doing to the grass roots people, to our families, jobs and children, then maybe we should go back to the beginning of time and call up spirits." In the liner notes, Dale writes, "I will not watch our four year old Jimmy grow up in a world that is so infected with greed and power and not caring for the elderly, who brought us into the world." One of Dale's dreams was always to play with Jerry Garcia because, "he had the same feeling for people - his heart was in the right place." He never got the chance, but after Garcia died in August, 1995, Dale was able to help a member of the Grateful Dead cope with Garcia's sudden passing. Prairie Prince, who had worked with Vince Welnick in The Tubes, suggested to Dale that he ask Welnick to play on Calling Up Spirits..

"He said it would be a good gesture because Vince had been in a deep depression," recalls Dale, who had originally rejected the idea of using keyboards, telling Prince that he didn't like to put something on record that he couldn't duplicate with his three-piece live set up. "He hadn't touched his instrument again. I was told he was seeking help, so based on that, I asked him to come to the studio," says Dale. "At first he said he couldn't do it, but he, ended up playing on "Peppermint Man." That's exactly how I would have recorded it if I had played the riffs myself. When we did "Fever" he did some of the greatest augmented chords and jazz chords. At the end, he just looked at me with that smile in his eyes and said, "Thanks man, I really needed that."

The revitalized appreciation for Dale's music and encouragement from other artists helped him get over his contempt for touring. Now, he had little choice: Dick Dale had become a concert attraction all over the world. His legendary reputation and new music and video earned him a whole new generation of fans. Dale found himself playing to 450,000 at Holland's famous "Pink pop" festival and appearing on British TV shows with Eric Clapton and Dr John. Alternative music hero Frank Black called Dale's music "pure punk". The Australian press said Dale - the first guitarist to break the sound barrier with a 100 watt output transformer peaking at 180 watts and blasting into dual 15 inch speakers - was "louder that Motorhead". Japan went from calling him "The Phoenix", the bird that rises from the ashes, to Godzilla, "monster, monster Godzilla."

"I never wanted to tour because I never wanted to leave my family, my animals," Dale explains. "Now, I can't stop. I stand onstage for two hours and play for two hours until I'm ready to drop. I'm not going to retire to a rocking chair. When I do go, it'll be up there onstage, in an explosion of body parts. I've been in explosions, I've washed up on the beach unconscious, I've been in the jaws of lions and tigers. I've been burned and told I'd never play again. The reason I'm still here is to learn to feel everyone's pain. Music soothes the beast and takes no sides. I am a manipulator of musical instruments to create sounds of human emotion."