Dick Dale isn’t just surf music’s greatest artist; he midwifed the damn genre. He invigorated the practice of instrumental rock ‘n’ roll, adding strenuous alternate picking and the frequent employment of the double harmonic scale, a gift from his Lebanese heritage. Dale single-mindedly pursued a music that would evoke his beloved surfing: the feel of shooting the curl, the pounding of huge swells. He worked with the Fender company to design the kinds of amps and speakers that could withstand — and enhance — the powerful sounds in his head. One day, he got the idea to run his guitar through a reverb unit — he’d been using it to reinforce his singing — and that classic wet tone was born. It rarely broke onto the charts, though: Dick Dale and the Del-Tones cracked the Hot 100 just twice, peaking at #60. In 1966, Dale was diagnosed with cancer, forcing him to quit music. The next year, Jimi Hendrix could be heard intoning “you’ll never hear surf music again” on “Third Stone From the Sun,” reportedly as a tribute to Dale. But Dick beat cancer, and spent the next couple of decades putting on an Elvis Presley fantasy camp: studying martial arts, learning to fly, caring for a number of endangered animals, and becoming a horseman. And, of course, there was the occasional gig. He issued a live album in the ’80s — you’ll notice he’s holding a pet tiger cub on the cover — and was nominated for a Grammy in 1988 for his duet with Stevie Ray Vaughan on a cover of the Chantays’ “Pipeline.” A series of gigs around San Francisco led to a record contract, and he released Tribal Thunder in 1993. The man hadn’t lost a step, and the CD era allowed him to stretch out on a few moody compositions. But his comeback hit the next level the following year, when “Misirlou,” his stunning 1962 cover of a 1920s Greek folk tune, scored the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. His live career took off: the Warped Tour added him to their 1996 lineup; he played two songs atop Space Mountain at the 1998 reopening of Disneyland. His cancer recurred in 2008, accompanied by diabetes and renal failure. But he’s still a man of inexhaustible energy, and he’s declared that he plans to play ’til he dies. (And for the record, he covered “Third Stone From the Sun” in 1996, as a tribute to the long-gone Hendrix.)