The King of the Surf Guitar

    I lived in Twenty nine Palms in the mid to late 90's and had a job
as a 'Primestar' (one of the original sat tv systems) installer. I pulled a
work order for an install for a party named Dale Dick. I lived about eight
miles east of 29 and the address for this job was 2 or 3 miles from my house.
The place looked typical for the area, haphazard phases of construction all
gone kind of dilapidated. The man who answered the door, barefoot and
balding with a rattail down to his low back looked par for the Hi Dez too.
I could see around him into the house and lets just say you couldn't
tie your shoes in the place without hitting your head on something. I saw
the guitars and then the gold LPs hanging on one of the few bare areas
on the wall.
     'Are you the Dick Dale?' I asked him.
     'Yeah, man' he replied with a grin.
     He was a character. When I mentioned to him that I had just
seen the 'Surfaris' the week end before and they dropped his name
during the set he was quiet, it made me think 'if you don't have
anything good to say . . .' He wasn't wild about being called 'the king
of the surf guitar' at the time, either. He'd generated a minor buzz
on one or two 'Warped' Tours and had picked up the nickname
'Shredhead'. Or something like that. He'd cop to inventing 'that'
sound and would let you know he also had some credit coming
for conceiving the system that produced it. Actually, what I recall
him saying was something about the guitar wouldn't have happened
without him.

    Anyway I installed him, met his young wife and his son who was
four years old at the time and already banging away on a drum kit,
witnessed the incredible pool surfin' dog he had and by 'command
performance' of the Shredhead himself installed the Primestar system
in the new house he had built for his parents a few miles closer to
town. Old Dick helped me on that one and hey, whatever his roadies
and techies got paid couldn't have been enough.  He pulled wires off
all the old (late 80's) analog audio equipment in the AV room and it
took me hours to re-wire and connect the system audio. It was cool
in the house though and I hadn't pulled any other work for the day
so I wrote it off as 'artistic mania.'
     Dicks parents were old and frail and I just never could get Mr. Monsour
up to speed on multiple remotes. Dick was on tour in Texas for most of that
summer, and on an almost weekly basis I would get a call from him;

     'Hey, man, Dad's got nothin' but snow on every channel. Think you
could get by the house and check it out?'
     'You bet Dick, I'll swing by this afternoon'.

    The Primestar receiver sent signal on VHF channel 3 and all tuning
was done onboard the unit. Invariably, I would find the Monsours old
RCA set tuned off of ch.3. Bump it back and there those 120 some
odd channels were.
 
    'There you go, Mr. Monsour all 120 of 'em,' I'd tell the old man, 'Just
remember, the more channels ya got the more SHIT there is to watch on TV.'
 
    It was a joke but I had started to notice that the 2 minute 'station break'
had evolved into blocks of commercials and while there were 120 (or so) channels i
in my program tier, at any time after midnight better than 50% were airing paid
programming, often the same infomercial. This was not due to the Discovery
Channel or Science Fiction Channel concluding their programming day, it was due
to the Primestar Partnership pinching pennies by abridging the program day on
many stations to something like 18 or 19 hours and then selling that time to the
freaking 'Gazelle' guy and the like.
     The more SHIT there is to watch on TV . . . I mean, WOW. I'd like to say I saw
it coming but I had no idea how far it could go . . . How stupid the viewer could be . . .
How vapid our culture would turn; so obsessed with celebrities and the possibility of
personal celebrity that none of us, not one, can see the hand or the bread it offers
or know a circus when we see it.