BY JUD COST

A shingle-rattling power chord that rearranged some of the bottles  behind the bar at Moe's Alley, erupted from the dressing room at the side of the stage, startling the 200 patrons jammed into the place to see the return of "the king of surf guitar." Dick Dale strolled out to greet his adoring public, already well into one of his reverb-drenched, middle eastern-basted surf instrumentals that changed the face of rock 'n' roll in the early '60s. And where better to pull off this night of living history than Santa Cruz, Calif., one of the coastal towns glorified in surf music's foam-flecked lore!

Dressed in black with his hair combed straight back and held in place by a thin black headband, Dale somehow looked younger than he did the last time I saw him in 1992. He appears to be having more fun now too since he broadened his set list to include plenty of what some tight-assed aficianados might consider "non-surf material." But it all flows like grog at a pirates' picnic, giving a well-rounded snapshot of the early years of rock.

The 72-year-old Dale, who glides around the boards with the economy of motion of a revered family cat, is a member of the famed triumvirate of American guitarists that includes Link Wray and Duane Eddy, fretboard pioneers who made it cool for young boys to play an instrument during the Kennedy years. The Beatles then finished the job by making singing look ultra-masculine. Vocals, of course, were never Dale's forte, but he's fine-tuned his singing over the years to the point where he can pull off something close to Johnny Cash doing a medley of "Folsom Prison"/"I Walk The Line" or Sam Cooke (or Eric Burdon) doing "Bring It On Home To Me" with stylish aplomb. 

Capitol released a handful of seminal albums by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones during the years when the California pastime of surfing (and surf music) had reached epidemic proportions among the nation's teenagers. You have only to eyeball your pack of hometown skateboarders to see how far this revolution reached. Dale's historic southern California gigs at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach ignited the surf music scene almost single-handedly. Accompanied by bass and drums, Dale is still around to thrill his fans with scalding versions of surf staples "Let's Go Tripping" "California Sun" and "Hava Nagila" as well as second cousins to surf music like Link Wray's "Rumble" and Richard Berry's "Louie Louie," the latter dressed up with the chicken-scratch vocal extras the Coasters used in "Little Egypt." To further show his versatility, Dale will toss off the intro to the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun" (accompanied by the Chuck Berry duck walk) scotch-taped onto the Animals' big hit, "House of the Rising Sun," then roar off into "Hey, Bo Diddley" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

Dale excels at playing directly to his audience, an especially effective proposition in a joint as cozy as Moe's Alley. He'll serenade a swooning, middle-aged lady in the front row, face to face, then bark at her husband, "Hey, you can look at her all year. I only have tonight!" Then he'll teach the crowd the response to one of his rare LP vocals, "Mr. Peppermint Man," before careening off in another direction to play Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water." He warned the crowd eager to participate in signature tune "Hava Nagila" to punctuate the tune with "hey" not "oy" in all the appropriate spots.

Dale's firecracker of a show must have been particularly thrilling to Stretch Riedle, the drummer for fine opening act, the Concaves from Santa Cruz. "Can you believe I've been playing surf music for 25 years?" muttered the starry-eyed Riedle from the back of the club as Dick Dale soldiered on up-front with a high-decibel career retrospective worthy of a Pablo Picasso or a Jackson Pollack.