Which guitarist is known as the ‘Father of Heavy Metal’?
A decade before metal music established itself as the loudest thing rock had to offer and branched out into various extremes from thrash to death metal, a few brave pioneers reigned supreme. Led Zeppelin arguably let the cat out of the bag in early 1969, and Black Sabbath threw down the gauntlet a year later, with Deep Purple trailing in their wake.
But even before these acts, those commonly thought of as the founding fathers of heavy metal, the sounds that would come to encapsulate the genre could be heard across the 1960s. Detroit bands MC5 and the Stooges arguably did as much to kickstart metal as Zeppelin, with their tracks ‘Kick Out the Jams’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ carrying a punk sensibility but a far bigger and heavier guitar sound.
Around the same time, mainstream rock bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who were putting the pedal to the metal on songs like ‘I Can See for Miles’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Helter Skelter’. Then there were blues rockers like Eric Clapton’s Cream and Jeff Beck, who, in hindsight, appear to be the most direct progenitors of Sabbath.
Going back even further, there’s no question that Jimi Hendrix’s release of ‘Hey Joe’ in 1966 was a seminal moment, showing that rock was made of heavier stuff than anyone could have imagined up to that point. Hendrix’s subsequent releases like ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Highway Chile’ and ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ only proved his point, taking music to the brink of pure metal.
Yet none of these legendary artists, whose enormous influence on the metal acts they indisputably spawned, earned the hallowed moniker “Father of Heavy Metal”. That’s because one maverick guitarist beat them to the punch by several years in the early ‘60s.
Who was he, then?
That guitarist was Massachusetts-born Orange County surf rocker Dick Dale. Dale is best known today for his single-string assault on the ears ‘Misirlou’, the record that opens Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. And surf rock disciples from The Beach Boys to Pixies see him as the main proponent of the genre in its early days.
But Dale is responsible for far more than a few landmark surf tunes. In fact, on the latter three of his five landmark studio albums released at the height of California’s surf craze, we can hear many of the building blocks of metal being put into place. The LP Mr Eliminator, in particular, offers up pounding drums and puts some meat on the bones of Dale’s initial surf guitar sound via a full-on blitz of power chords and distortion.
His innovations in the area of guitar amplification and effects can’t be underestimated. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Dale’s performances at raucous beachside hops around Orange County necessitated some thinking outside the box. The box in question was Dale’s Fender amp, which repeatedly blew up as he pushed it beyond its limits while playing over the noise of screaming surf rockers. In total, the guitarist totalled 48 amps during his ear-splitting performances.
He was an early proponent of the Fender Stratocaster, and Leo Fender himself went to one of his gigs during a residency at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa to see what the fuss was about. When he saw Dale’s amp blow up, he realised that a new version needed to be developed that could withstand the sound the guitarist was trying to make. Fender’s Showman, the first 100-watt amp in history, was born, which Dale described as “like going from a little VW Bug to a Testarossa.”
Fender and Dale didn’t stop there, though, doubling down on this invention by adding an extra speaker to create the 185-watt Dual Showman. The musician also began plugging his guitar into a reverb tank he originally used to alter his singing voice, becoming the first rock guitarist to make use of the effect.
As he told the Miami New Times in 2011, “Everything that came out of Leo Fender’s head, I was his test pilot.” Indeed, the test pilot for a new generation of hard-rock guitarists who’d forge the path forward to metal. Dale rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as these later guitar heroes. But he was the first, the true founder of high-powered amps and heavy reverb, and the real father of metal.
