As my interview with Deke Dickerson in the spring (and 35th anniversary) issue of England’s venerable Pipeline Instrumental Review is only readable by buying the magazine (which, for fans of surf and instrumental music, is recommended)—I’m reprinting it here.
The guitarist-singer, historian, and author is of course known for telling great stories. Topics broached in our talk included his formative years, Duane Eddy, The Ventures, Santo & Johnny; a priceless recollection of working with Los Straitjackets—and, naturally, guitars.
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Travelin’ Man: An Interview with Deke Dickerson
by Steve Stav
Deke Dickerson is not the sort to let moss grow under his feet. While still in his teens, Dickerson fronted surf/garage band The Untamed Youth in the 1980s. In 1991, the guitar whiz formed The Dave & Deke Combo with rhythm guitarist Dave Stuckey. Branching out in the late 1990s, Dickerson made his bones as a solo artist for HighTone, recording several well-received albums with backing band the Ecco-Fonics in the olde-time country and early rockabilly veins. A seemingly endless stream of recording and performing alliances followed; the towering, genial showman has enlisted more sidemen than a retired bank robber has had getaway drivers. Additionally, Dickerson has served as sideman and collaborator for countless peers, and for some of the most legendary acts in roots and surf music, including Duane Eddy, The Fendermen, and The Trashmen. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about his eyebrow-raising schedule is that relatively few of these bands, duos, or pick-up combos are one-offs. The versatile guitarist can be fronting his hotshot backup trio The Whippersnappers one night, and the next evening perform with the ongoing Ventures tribute group, Venturesmania.
Ever-popular on the world’s roots-music festival circuit, Dickerson also has his own annual party, the long-running Guitar Geek Fest at Viva Las Vegas and/or coinciding with the NAMM convention.
In his spare time, Dickerson is a well-respected music journalist, historian, and lecturer. A self-described “guitarchaeologist,” this axe-wielding Indiana Jones has a knack of unearthing incredible instruments. His 1958 Danelectro Longhorn, originally owned by Link Wray, was loaned to Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in September. Dickerson doesn’t stop there, however. Amplifiers, parts, memorabilia, records (100,000-plus), and much more continually find their way into his private museum of functional, useful items.
Most importantly, Dickerson collects memories. Naturally, he makes many interesting acquaintances via his work; however, the musical bloodhound often takes a step or two further. The obscure, the famous, the once-famous—this guitarist has tracked down more people than a career US Marshal. The purpose, the results range from acquiring technical information from a retired recording engineer to securing a recording date with a forgotten star or sideman. Besides writing for numerous music magazines over the years, Dickerson has authored several books. Last year’s Sixteen Tons: The Merle Travis Story (BMG) is a definitive examination of the guitar wizard’s life. A history of Mosrite guitars and innovator Semie Moseley is in the works.
If all of this sounds like fodder for a hit reality TV series, that’s because it should be. Instead, Dickerson chronicles his life and career on his website (www.dekedickerson.com), and even more vividly, on Facebook. From the decade-long “Scully lathe saga” (Dickerson now cuts custom recordings at home) and acquiring the late, great Speedy West’s Bigsby pedal steel (now at the Country Music Hall of Fame) to airport-delay woes and the Phoenix-like resurrection of a defiant fig tree in the alley behind his home in California’s San Fernando Valley, Facebook friends follow Dickerson’s triumphs and debacles daily. With compelling text and photographs, the guitarist turns interesting into fascinating, and the mundane becomes sublime. Dickerson is a nice guy, and genuinely humble. However, the traits that lure people into his corner—and keep them there—is a contagious enthusiasm and boyish sense of wonder that have hardly diminished since his formative years in Missouri.
This past summer was an even busier season than usual for Dickerson; for example, he performed in both Paris and Alaska in July. In August, I cornered the frequent flier during a week’s break between performing at the Greazefest Kustom Kulture Festival in Australia and journeying to Aarburg, Switzerland, for the Route 66 Festival.
SS: You started off playing the sax as a kid. At what point in your youth did you have the epiphany that you might have real talent as a guitarist?
DD: Wellll… I’m still waiting for that epiphany, actually. But what I did see is—and this is going back to the 1980s—that I really did not want to work a day job. And I saw that there were these musicians—a lot of ’em were, like, drunks, or people who just could not function well in normal society—who played music and were able to eke out a living doing it. All of these different people that I met—I took notes as I went along. At some point I realized that if you hustle and have some sort of original thing going on, you don’t really have to be that good! You just have to be entertaining, and people will enjoy watching you play. It’s funny, because I’ve always been focused on that. I knew that I was never be Top 40 or teen idol material because the music that i liked was already thirty years old at the time—now it’s more like 60 years old—but I knew that I could hustle out a living doing it, and that’s what I’ve done.
SS: I’ve always been fascinated by stories of musicians who loved music so much when they were young, they became very accomplished at playing it. Whether it’s by tapping a previously unknown talent, or by sheer will and love.
DD: I think that’s true for a lot of us who don’t play current, popular music. You have to love it if you you’re going to do it. When I was coming up, there were all of these musicians that I knew who played Top 40 music—and they hated it. They hated the music that they were playing, but they did it because they had some bar-band gig five nights a week. But if you’re going to play ancient, forgotten old music, you have to love it.
SS: You once did a very clever thing that was bound to be considered “taboo” in certain circles—adding and singing lyrics to classic instrumentals. Tell me about your experiences with Los Straitjackets.
DD: I’ve known those guys since they were recording their first album with Ben Vaughn producing at Mark Linnet Studio back in—the mid-1990s? Pete Curry, who lives in LA, became their bass player, so they started recording a lot of their stuff in Los Angeles. Every now and then I’d sit in with ‘em, and we’d do “Woolly Bully,” “Surfin’ Bird,” that sort of thing. At some point, I was talking to Pete and Eddie Angel about songs with lyrics that became famous instrumentals—or the other way around, famous instrumentals that people wrote words to—and a vocal version was then recorded. We all had our favorites. Eddie and Pete were like, “Do you know this one, do you know that one?” We kinda laughed about it, but then I pitched them this idea: “Let’s do an album—Deke Dickerson Sings the Great Instrumental Hits. We all thought it was a great idea, that it would be hilarious and fun and actually, musically really good. So that’s what we did. We put this thing together, and I thought it was a great package; they liked it too. And then the really funny thing was, when the record came out and we started touring behind it, we realized, “No….”
Los Straitjackets fans are instrumental purists. They do not want to hear anybody singing, for any reason whatsoever. The minute that I starting singing, “Hey, here’s the vocal version of ‘Walk, Don’t Run!’ ‘Telstar!’” there was nothing but pure, unadulterated hatred from the audiences. We kept trying to make it interesting, and fun, and funny. There’s this song, “Kawanga,” that I sang kinda like with the voice of The Crusher, the famous professional wrestler from the 1960s and I’d go out in the audience and wrestle with fans. I tried my best to win ’em over, but at the end of the day—and I never really understood this, as much as I love instrumental music—there’s just a certain segment of people who only like instrumental music, and who will not accept a vocal version of an instrumental song, no matter what.
SS: That’s hilarious.
DD: Well, someone like yourself might appreciate this, but at the time, the fans legitimately hated the new record. And me. [chuckles]
SS: What was the first instrumental record that you ever owned?
DD: I had a lot of hand-me-down records as a kid. And then when I got my driver’s license, I was going to a lot of yard sales buying records. Probably the first instrumental record was Walk, Don’t Run by the Ventures. I remember practicing along to that album back in the old-school days, when you’d actually play guitar along to a record. I was thirteen, fourteen years old when I did that. But when I started driving, I’d find cool old records at garage sales. Obscure surf records like the Surf Teens’ Surf Mania. The Untamed Youth stole the song “Pabst Blue Ribbon” from that one. Things like Lively Ones’ albums on Del-Fi. I found Freddy King’s Hideaway album, that was pretty cool. That was the sort of thing that would turn up at garage sales back in the day.
SS: I’m imagining that a young guitarist in Missouri would start California dreaming, after finding great surf records. Is that what propelled you to LA?
DD: Well, there’s a lot of space in between. I formed my first band when I was about fifteen, a rockabilly band that was very influenced by the Stray Cats, because that was big at the time. Then I had the Untamed Youth, which started out as sort of a 1960s garage band that morphed into more of a surf band, basically at the behest of Billy Miller at Norton Records. We made some records and toured around for several years, and then we were faced with the proposition of staying in Missouri and not doing anything, or going somewhere and trying to “make it big.” And so I moved to California in January 1991 with the Untamed Youth’s bassist, Mace, who is now my step-brother. The plan was to move the Untamed Youth to Los Angeles, and we sort of cobbled together a version of the band there, but we really never got it together. It was sorta short-lived, that band in LA. That’s when I turned to doing rockabilly again, because rockabilly was really happening in Los Angeles at the time.
I’ll tell you, the funny thing about LA is that some people really like the city, and some people really hate it. It’s weird. The first time I visited Los Angeles, I said, “This is where I want to live! How soon can I move here?” It took me a couple of years, but as soon as I saw the city and experienced it, I knew I wanted to live here. Surf music didn’t have anything to do with it. I’ll tell you, this is how my mind worked back in those days: all the people I knew in New York lived in apartments the size of closets, and had to work three jobs, and everybody I met in Southern California didn’t seem to have jobs! They all seemed to be like weird gadflies, and I thought, “This seems better to me.”
SS: What was your first guitar?
DD: Well, again this is a multi-tiered thing. I took lessons when I was about eight years old on classical guitar. I was loaned a classical guitar by a family friend. My teacher would tell me that I was doing everything wrong, and I told her that I wanted to learn to how play like Chuck Berry. She said that that wasn’t allowed. That whole thing didn’t last very long. And then when I was thirteen, I was obsessed with 1950s music and really wanted to be like Chuck Berry. I kept seeing clips of him on TV—this would’ve been in the early 1980s—playing this cherry-red Gibson ES-355. I didn’t know anything about guitars at the time, but I went into a local music store and they had this Framus—a German-made Gibson copy from the 1960s—and I said, “Oh! That looks like a Chuck Berry guitar!” I think it was $150, and I asked for money for my birthday so I could get it. I still have it. It’s a horrible guitar, but that was my first.
SS: Little did you know that two decades later, you’d have your own signature guitars.
DD: I could’ve never have predicted that. [chuckles]
SS: Hallmark has produced a couple of Deke Dickerson guitars. Are you ever going to make another one?
DD: I’ve got a couple of other models in mind that I’d like to make and market, but it’s a lot of money. Just to design and produce twenty-five guitars, it’s thousands and thousands of dollars.
SS: Thinking about your guitars, I read your history of Hallmark last night. I had no idea that Ventures bassist Bob Bogle basically created the famous “swept wing.”
DD: Yeah, and he was one of the original investors in the company. I’m pretty sure he was a secret, silent partner, because they also had the Ventures/Mosrite deal going at the time. Most people don’t know that there was an original Hallmark guitar company in Bakersfield in the 1960s.
SS: Speaking of the Ventures, amazingly enough, Nokie Edwards guested with your Venturesmania tribute band on stage, and in the studio (Bound & Sidejacked Again, Major Label Records). What was it like to be in his presence?
DD: For me, the most amazing thing about Nokie was that he was one of these guys who didn’t move on stage. He didn’t speak on stage, either. He let the guitar do all the talking. When we played those Ventures songs, especially the ones that the average person wouldn’t know, some of the Ventures originals, I’d think, “Holy crap! Here’s the guy on that record!” It was an absolute joy to play with him. The one thing that always struck me about Nokie was that most people knew him as this surf/instrumental rock guitar legend, but really, he was a country picker. He was always looking for country pickers to jam with, that was where his heart was at. It goes back to the story where Nokie stumbled across a Mosrite guitar in Bakersfield. He was there looking for a place to jam, and went into a country bar where Gene Moles was playing a Mosrite guitar. Nokie asked, “What kind of guitar is that?” And that’s how the whole Ventures model Mosrite came about.
SS: You last were on stage with Duane Eddy last spring, during your Guitar Geek Festival. I can’t imagine playing something like “Cannonball” alongside the legend. Do you have a favorite Eddy anecdote?
DD: Here’s the best Duane Eddy story I have: When I played with him, often Duane would send me out on stage with his guitar to tune up before the show, check the amplifier settings, et etera. When I played Duane’s guitar through Duane’s amp, it just sounded like—me! But when Duane took the guitar and played it with the exact same settings, all of a sudden all the notes sounded an octave lower and just more twangy, for lack of a better word. That always used to amaze me. It’s just in his hands! He has the most amazing attack with a pick in his right hand. Whenever people get really hung up on gear, especially pedals and effects, I just always remember that it’s IN THE HANDS.
SS: You have acquired so many guitars during your career. What was the guitar that got away?
DD: I don’t really look at it as guitar “collecting.” Honestly, my ultimate goal is guitar preservation. Man, it used to kill me, as a kid, seeing these vintage guitars and guys would drill holes in ’em, install extra pickups, put jumbo frets on ’em, refinish the bodies. I saw so many nice old guitars that were completely ruined. So for me, pretty much every instrument that I own is something that I seek to preserve. And also something that I could play, use in my profession. That’s my motivation.
As far as “the one that got away,” when I was young, I had no money at all. I’d go to these music stores in St. Louis or Kansas City, and see things that… Thinking about it now would make you sick to your stomach, because the guitars were so cheap, but at the time, they seemed expensive. There was this guitar dealer in Kansas City. He actually sold instruments out of his home, he had tons of stuff. He knew I was a rockabilly kid. One day, I was at my home in Columbia, Missouri, and he knocked on my door. I said, “Oh, hi, Jim. What are you doing at my house?”
”Well, I was just in St. Louis and I picked up this 1958 Gretsch White Falcon,” he told me. “Now, if you want it right now, you can have it for $1,500, but if I get back to Kansas City with it, it’s going to be $2,000.” And I said, “Fifteen hundred bucks? Man, If I had that kind of money, I’d buy a better car than the piece of crap that I’m driving.” The thought of spending that much money on a guitar was so ludicrous, I couldn’t even wrap my head around it.
So he left, and that was my one shot at owning an original 1950s Gretsch White Falcon.
SS: Even people who know next to nothing are aware that the Gretsch White Falcon is one of the holy grails of the guitar world. Why that one, of all the great guitars to choose from?
DD: The funny thing is, they’re really nice instruments, but how many people can say that it’s their main gigging guitar? The White Falcon has always been the guitar that people hold up as the highlight of their collection, but few actually play them.
SS: I’ve read on Facebook so many of your adventures that turned truly epic. I was recalling one today, something a few years ago about a legend who didn’t want to be found. For the life of me, I can’t remember who it was right now.
DD: You might be thinking of Santo Farina.
SS: Yes! Yes! Please tell that story again.
DD: He was a real enigma. Santo & Johnny had broken up in the 1970s, and nobody had heard anything from Santo since. I think the last record he did was in the 1980s sometime. His brother Johnny, who played rhythm guitar on all the records, had been touring, playing the pedal steel. Meanwhile, I kept asking myself, “Where is Santo?” I mean, Santo was one of the true masters of the steel guitar. He had just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
I was in New York in 2018, I believe, and I had to go out to Long Island. I’d heard that Santo lived out on Long Island somewhere, and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to try to find him.” I have some friends who are pretty good detectives, and one of them rustled up this address. Pretty far out on Long Island. So I drove out there. A pretty nice suburban street, and I’m looking for the number. Finally, I get to the end of the street and there’s this gate, and a lot of overgrown grass, and a “Keep Out” sign. I thought, “Crap, this has to be his place, but it says, ‘Keep Out.’ I really shouldn’t trespass.”
But then I noticed somebody about fifty feet away, working on a truck.
I yelled out, “Santo!” And this head popped out from underneath the hood, and he looked at me. “Santo!” And he starts slowly walking toward me. A small, really tough-looking guy.
”What the hell do you want?” And I said, “My name is Deke Dickerson, and I came from California to try to track you down. I write for guitar magazines, and I’d like to interview you.”
He looks me up and down and says, “Show me your credentials.”
I reply, “I don’t have any credentials, but here’s my California driver’s license.” He looks it over, and says, “Alright, you’ve got thirty minutes. Let’s go to McDonald’s.” So we drove in my van about two miles to a McDonald’s, and he buys me a cheeseburger. I asked him, “Do I really only have thirty minutes?”
”Yep, thirty minutes.” So I just tried to ask him as many questions as I possibly could. I thought, I hoped he would warm up to us talking. After the interview, I said, “Look, can I contact you to interview you further on the phone?” And he said, “Sure.” He gave me his number, and someone took a photo of us with my cell phone.
As soon as I got back home, I started calling him and leaving messages. He never called me back. I sent Santo a package, with a letter telling him how nice it was to meet him and all that, and I got the package back: “Rejected.” I just gave up at this point. Santo just didn’t want to be found, and the fact that I got thirty minutes out of him was incredible. He was a really intense guy.
To me, it was one of these great mysteries of life. When I met Santo, I told him, “Your hands on the steel guitar have the ability to make me cry. I mean, you are able to convey such emotion with your playing, you can make me cry, and there’s not many musicians who can do that.” And I asked him if he had any interest in performing again, and he flatly said no. That was it. There’s all these crummy musicians who literally make me angry when they play, and they want to play every single night, with their amplifiers on 10, but try to talk one of the all-time masters into playing again, and “No.” Really, one of the great mysteries.
