Why Does Surf Rock Sound Vaguely…Middle Eastern?
Dick Dale, originator of vaguely Middle-Eastern surf rock.
12 min
Most musicians have a mild hatred of scales because we were all forced to practice and memorize them without anyone ever telling us what the hell they are.
I mentioned before that a scale is the palette of pitches with which a specific piece of music is painted. If you’re a composer in the West, you generally go into a paint store of 12 available pitches (the chromatic scale) and choose a subset of pitches for the emotional quality you want, essentially a palette of colors for the piece. Most of the time we choose one of two palettes: major or minor. It’s amazing how much great music has come out of those two palettes.
Once in a while we alter a single pitch to make something like the Dorian mode (Michael Jackson’s favorite, which takes a minor scale and bumps the sixth pitch up a click). If you change more than that, the scale begins to sound exotic, and that’s especially true if you create a step that’s not present in major or minor. The second step of the scale, for example, is a whole step above the tonic pitch in both major and minor, like the do-re in do-re-mi. So if your tonic is C and instead of going to D, you go to D-flat…well, even if you know nothing about music theory, your ear is instantly intweeged. If you want to paint Spanish Flamenco Dancer or Indian Snake-Charmer, or Some Kind of Vague Middle-Easternness, flat the 6 as well and you get this:
It’s called a Byzantine scale, one of several that appears in folk music throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Saint-Saëns sets up the climactic Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah by putting the Byzantine scale in a sinewy oboe. That scale is all you need to say “ooh, kinda biblical”:
0:24
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/TEhor3HeulE” parameters=”start=9 end=33″ /]
The Byzantine scale also appears in a place that is crazily incongruous and somehow brilliant — Dick Dale’s surf rock anthem “Misirlou.” The rapid-fire guitar, backbeat drums, and exotic scale made it the perfect heart-racing opening for Pulp Fiction. I’ve included the terribly upsetting profanity that precedes it because — well Tarantino, first of all, but also it’s part of the emotional crescendo that makes the song selection so spot-on:
1:40
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/oOoBomvuYnw” parameters=”start=20 end=56″ /]
God I love the cool, sinister energy of that song. (Dick Dale’s complete “Misirlou” is at the end of the post.)
As it turns out, Dick Dale wasn’t just borrowing the scale for his surf anthem. “Misirlou” is a remake of a vaguely Middle-Eastern traditional song, possible Egyptian or Turkish, first recorded in Greece in 1927. The whole melody finds its way into the Dick Dale version:
1:17
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/LW6qGy3RtwY” parameters=”start=19 end=86″ /]
As it further turns out, Dick Dale’s connection to the scale isn’t crazily random. Dale was of Lebanese descent on his father’s side and grew up playing the tarabaki drum and hearing music based on these scales, which he then incorporated into his surf music.
Here’s the tarabaki (aka doumbek) in the hands of a master:
0:29
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/FYlWrI9C-pI” parameters=”start=12 end=72″ /]
Grow up in Southern California with Byzantine scales in your ears and a tarabaki rhythm under your hands and you’ll create something like this:
2:15
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/-y3h9p_c5-M” /]
Dick Dale photo by Paul Townsend CC BY-SA 2.0
Follow Dale on Facebook:
