For the uninitiated, guitarist Dick Dale initially rose to fame during the high tide of the '60s surfing craze. While some peg "surf music" as synonymous with the sunny pop of the Beach Boys, for many it's Dale's turbulent, violently fast guitar sounds - coupled with the reverb effects developed by Fender Instruments and trial-tested by Dale - that truly define the genre. On early recordings like 1961's "Shake-N-Stomp," Dale debuted what would come to be known as his signature style: insistent, relentless 16th-note picking meant to evoke, as he once put it, "the sound of waves chopping."

In our interview, Dale is incredibly forthcoming; his conversational style as fun and fast-paced as his music. With Dale, all things are appropriately tidal, illimitable and overpowering.

But if he jaws like he plays, it's not without reason.

"I play the guitar like I play the drums, which was my original instrument," the musician and trained martial artist reveals. "In a Shaolin temple, they never allow you to touch the skin of a drum for five years, until you can tongue what you're going to play. When you learn through tonguing, it actually tattoos muscle memory on your brain with your mouth, through your hands ... I do everything on the one beat, and that's how the Shaolins do it."

Dale elaborates on this point with a verbal, "tongued" example of his double-time picking style. It's just one of many fascinating detours our conversation takes as it carves and maneuvers its way toward an epiphany about the revised sense of purpose with which Dale tirelessly performs (he's currently in the midst of his second West Coast tour since a resurgence of rectal cancer in 2008).

Dale's high-energy recordings and performances - not to mention his cultish mid-1960s following, which peaked again in the mid-1990s after a triple-whammy of tubular LPs and MTV airplay - earned him the title "King of the Surf Guitar," despite some quibbles over the evocative qualities of his ocean-inspired tunes. Quentin Tarantino - whose use of the 1962 classic "Miserlou" in Pulp Fiction's opening titles garnered Dale new legions of young fans - once commented that Dale's music reminded him more of spaghetti Westerns than wedges, tubes or wipe-outs.

These days, however, the long-reigning King has a new title and a new mission in life. 

"They no longer call me the King of the Surf Guitar. Now, they call me the Cancer Warrior, because we're out there helping the people who have gone through the same thing I'm going through," says Dale.

Dale's concerts are defiant gestures in the face of illness, and a chance for the living legend to meet and interact with fans of all ages who may also be struggling with life-threatening ailments. Dale, an advocate of homeopathic medicine, now lives with perpetual pain and discomfort, having never taken drugs in his life and declining to take pain medication now, despite the circumstances.

Complications from Dale's chemotherapy treatments (radiation shrunk his colon, and devastated his bladder and both kidneys) haven't slowed him down, and for this tour the restless innovator worked with Fender technicians to develop the "Dick Dale Signature Malibu," a specially designed acoustic guitar with a smaller body that makes it more comfortable to play.

"This tour that we're doing, is (my son Jimmy Dale) and I playing these custom guitars, which are going to split the atom again in the world of music."

As with anything Dale dishes out, his explanation is wordy and a little wacky. He's as much a raconteur as a rock ‘n' roller. The man has led a colorful life, full of professional highs, physical lows and all kinds of offbeat touches (a pet mountain lion, a private high-desert airfield). It's the latest chapter that sees the guitar guru transformed into sympathetic survivor.

The King still shakes and stomps, only he does it now as a messenger of hope and good health.

Dick Dale

w/Jimmy Dale, The Fucking Eagles, Rat City Brass
Thursday, Dec. 9, 9 p.m., 21+
Hell's Kitchen, 928 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
253.759.6003