Category: People

Kevin Hart suffers ‘major back injuries’ in car crash

Actor-comedian Kevin Hart has been injured in the crash of a vintage muscle car in the hills above Malibu.

A California Highway Patrol (CHP) collision report says the 40-year-old Hart was a passenger in a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda that went off Mulholland Highway and rolled down an embankment around 12:45 a.m. Sunday.

The report says Hart and the driver, 28-year-old Jared Black, both suffered “major back injuries” and were taken to hospitals.

Another passenger, 31-year-old Rebecca Broxterman, only complained of pain.

The CHP report says the car immediately went out of control as it turned from a canyon road onto the highway.

The report says the driver was not under the influence of alcohol.

A Hart representative did not immediately reply to messages.

The crash was first reported by TMZ.

Eddie Murphy, Netflix close to $70M deal for standup comeback: report

Eddie Murphy is gearing up to get raw again.

The reclusive comedy legend, 58, hasn’t been on the standup stage in years, but he’s reportedly in talks with Netflix for a series of comedy specials, sources close to Murphy tell TMZ.

The streaming giant’s big lure: a whopping $70 million paycheck.

TMZ admits they’ve been “unable to firmly confirm the exact figure” at this point, but that dollar amount is certainly in line with what headliners of the “Beverly Hills Cop” legend’s caliber can demand from the streaming giant.

Dave Chappelle raked in $20 million for each of his three award-winning specials, Chris Rock banked $40 million for his two-show package and Amy Schumer reportedly asked for — and received — more than $11 million for her last Netflix showcase.

Let us not forget that the former “Saturday Night Live” star — and Oscar nominee for “Dreamgirls” — actually helped pioneer this game. His popular — albeit ultra-raunchy and possibly homophobic — live specials “Eddie Murphy: Delirious” and “Eddie Murphy: Raw” paved the way for this format back when Chappelle and Rock were doing bit parts in B movies.

The prolific baby-maker has been teasing a return to the live stage for some time, and even stoked the flames of fandom during his recent surprise appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

“You know that you not doing stand-up drives people crazy — you know that, right?” Seinfeld, 65, asked “The Nutty Professor” star.

Murphy admitted that the “last time he saw” Don Rickles shortly before his death in 2017, the legendary insult comic pushed him to step up to the mic again.

“I’m gonna do it again. It’s just, you know, everything has to be right,” Murphy told Seinfeld. “The only way I can get, like, an act is I gotta go to the clubs and work out.”

Max Wright, veteran TV actor and Willie Tanner on ALF, dies at 75

Max Wright, known for playing father Willie Tanner on the hit ’80s sitcom ALF, has died. He was 75.

Wright’s family confirmed his death to TMZ. The actor reportedly died at his home in Hermosa Beach, Calif., after a battle with cancer. Wright was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1995, but had been in remission for many years.

Wright was a veteran actor of the small screen, popping up on a great many shows over a three-decade career, including Cheers, Taxi, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Mad About You. He also appeared in such films as Reds and Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz, and the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Stand.

Wright had a substantial stage career in addition to his onscreen work. He received a Tony Award nomination in 1998 for his performance in Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov.

He is best known, however, for his role on ALF, playing a social worker and patriarch whose family plays host to a cat-eating extraterrestrial. The sitcom ran for four seasons, from 1986 to 1990, on NBC and has become a cultural touchstone.

Wright’s wife, Linda Ybarrondo, died in 2017. The couple married in 1965 and had two children together.

Kelly Jay Fordham, founding member of Crowbar, dead at 77

A legendary Canadian rocker and member of Crowbar has passed away.

Kelly Jay Fordham, 77, died Friday morning at 2 a.m., his son wrote in a Facebook post.

“I just wanted to say I love you dad, and that I look forward now to getting to see you on the other side some day,” his son, Hank Fordham, wrote.

The singer, songwriter, and pianist who helped to co-write the famous 1971 hit Oh, What A Feeling had been in hospital in Calgary since early June after suffering a stroke, which his family had been told he wouldn’t recover from.

Crowbar was formed in 1970 in Hamilton, Ont. The group of musicians, including Fordham, was formerly the backup band for Ronnie Hawkins before being fired. The band’s name was taken from a colourful remark from Hawkins, who noted after firing them they “could (mess) up a crowbar in 15 second.”

Fordham settled in Calgary sometime after Crowbar broke up in 1975.

Oh What a Feeling hit number 10 on the Canadian charts and was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2011.

Fordham told Postmedia in 2009 he believed the misconception that the song was about drugs was why it never received airplay in the United States.

“It was written in 1969. Man walked on the moon. Woodstock. The summer of love. It was written about the times, about everything that was happening,” Fordham said after the song became the official theme of the 2009 Grey Cup in Calgary. “The song was meant to be celebratory.”

Grammy-winning New Orleans musician Dr. John dead at 77

Dr. John, a six-time Grammy winner who in his incarnation as the “Night Tripper” brought the New Orleans voodoo vibe to America’s music scene and became one of the most venerated pianists in the city’s rich musical history, died on Thursday at age 77.

The New Orleans native, born Malcolm John Rebennack into a family amateur musicians, including an aunt who taught him to play piano, died “towards the break of day” from a heart attack, his family announced on his official Twitter account.

Immersed in music from a young age, he was an avid radio listener, and his father, who sold records in his appliance store, sometimes took his son along to nightclubs when he worked on their sound systems.

In grade school he began hanging around clubs, and by the time he was a teenager, Rebennack was playing in rough bars and strip clubs. Along the way, he absorbed a blend of rhythm and blues, cowboy songs, gospel and jazz, as well as New Orleans’ Mardi Gras music, boogie, barrelhouse piano and funk – or “fonk,” as he pronounced it.

Early on he was principally a guitarist, but errant gunplay in 1961 led him to change course. One of his fingers was nearly blown off when he intervened to help the singer in his band, who was being pistol-whipped by another man.

The finger did not heal sufficiently for proper guitar playing right away, but was less troublesome on a piano, and eventually Dr. John would become an heir to the New Orleans keyboard tradition of Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith and Fats Domino.

He also was a successful record producer, session player and songwriter in New Orleans before a lifestyle of hanging around addicts, hustlers and thieves while working as a pimp caught up with him.

He had started smoking marijuana at age 12, and was a regular heroin user before being kicked out of high school and landing in prison on drug charges in 1965, he wrote in his autobiography, “Under a Hoodoo Moon.”

By the time he had finished his prison sentence in Texas, the local prosecutor in New Orleans was trying to clean up the city, and he was advised not to return.

That was how he ended up in Los Angeles, nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from his hometown, creating the persona of Dr. John the Night Tripper, a shaman-like figure draped in furs and feathers, beads and Mardi Gras Indian-style headdresses who would make his entrance in a cloud of smoke.

He had concocted the stage character, based on a 19th-century New Orleans medicine man, for another singer but took it on himself when that performer declined to go along.

After working as a studio musician for everyone from Sonny and Cher to the Monkees, Dr. John recorded his first album, “Gris-Gris,” in 1968 with the help of several New Orleans natives.

The record, named for a protective amulet worn in voodoo culture, was inspired by the city’s music with his own twists, making it moody and mysterious with a tinge of psychedelia. It was not a big seller but found a cult audience among rock fans.

In 1972 his “Dr. John’s Gumbo” album featured more traditional New Orleans songs, such as “Iko Iko,” “Junko Partner,” “Blow Wind Blow,” “Big Chief” and “Let the Good Times Roll.”

That was followed in 1973 by “In the Right Place,” which featured two standbys of the New Orleans music scene – producer Allen Touissant and the band The Meters.

With a unique vocal style reminiscent of a bullfrog with a hangover, the album would become Dr. John’s biggest commercial success, thanks to the hits “Right Place, Wrong Time” and “Such a Night.”

“Music is the one thing that keeps me alive and happy. If it don’t be for music, I think I would have threw in the towel,” he told the Times-Picayune newspaper in a 2011 interview.

A conversation with Dr. John almost required a translator to understand his malapropisms, Creole patois, hipster lingo and fabricated words, all spiced with profanities.

“What goes around slides around, and what slides around slips around,” he once told the Times-Picayune in typical Dr. John-speak. “As long as it’s slippin’ and slidin’ around, we ain’t got to trip through the shortcuts of life. We can take the long way around. It’s the shortcuts that kill you.”

After Los Angeles, Dr. John moved to New York in the late 1970s, and in 1989 he finally overcame his heroin problem. He returned to live in the New Orleans area in 2009.

Dr. John recorded some 35 albums, and three of them won Grammys – “Goin’ Back to New Orleans” for best tradition album in 1992; “City That Care Forgot” about the destruction and heartbreak of Hurricane Katrina; and 2013’s “Locked Down,” which touched on his prison time, drugs and efforts to repair his relationship with his children.

He also picked up Grammys for a 1989 duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee” and his contributions on the songs “SRV Shuffle” in 1996 and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (My Baby)” in 2000.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

Dr. John was married twice and told the New York Times he had “a lot” of children.

Tim Conway, comedian and star of ’The Carol Burnett Show’, dies at 85

NEW YORK — Tim Conway, the impish second banana to Carol Burnett who won four Emmy Awards on her TV variety show, starred aboard “McHale’s Navy” and later voiced the role of Barnacle Boy for “Spongebob Squarepants,” has died. He was 85.

Conway died Tuesday morning in a Los Angeles care facility, according to Howard Bragman, who heads LaBrea Media. Conway’s wife, Charlene Fusco, and a daughter, Jackie, were at his side. The cause was a disorder in which there is an excess of fluid on the brain, Bragman said.

Tributes came from across the comedy world, including from Conan O’Brien, who said as a kid “no one made me laugh harder than Tim Conway.” Larry Wilmore called Conway “always always always funny” and Kathy Griffin called him “a wildly talented, comedy giant.” Al Roker tweeted out a link to Conway playing a hysterically incompetent dentist.

A native of Ohio, Conway credited his Midwestern roots for putting him on the right path to laughs, with his deadpan expression and innocent, simple-minded demeanour.

“I think the Midwest is the heart of comedy in this country, and a little bit of the South, too,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal in 2005. “For some reason, we’re just more laid-back, more understanding. … And Midwesterners have a kinder sense of humour.”

Those qualities probably contributed to his wide popularity on “The Carol Burnett Show,” which he joined in 1975 after years as a frequent guest. The show aired on CBS from 1967 to 1978 and had a short summer stint on ABC in 1979.

“We really didn’t attack people or politics or religion or whatever. We just made fun of, basically, ourselves,” he said.

The show operated with just five writers, one producer, one director and without network interference. The ensemble cast surrounding the redheaded star included Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner.

“I don’t think the network would allow a show like ’The Carol Burnett Show’ now because we had such freedom,” Conway said in his interview with the State Journal.

While America was laughing at Conway, so were his co-stars: Burnett and Harvey Korman were often caught by the camera trying not to crack up during his performances.

The short, nondescript Conway and the tall, imposing Korman were a physical mismatch made in comedy heaven. They toured the country for years with a sketch show called “Together Again,” which drew on characters from Burnett’s show.

Besides the four Emmys he won with Burnett (three as a performer, one as a writer), he won Emmys for guest appearances in 1996 for “Coach” and in 2008 for “30 Rock.”

Conway also had a modest but steady movie career, appearing in such films as “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975), “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976), “Cannonball Run II” (1984), “Dear God” (1996) and “Air Bud 2” (1998).

“The Apple Dumpling Gang” and “Cannonball Run II” allowed him to work with his comedic hero, Don Knotts, who died in 2006.

“If there’s any reason at all I’m in the business, I think it’s Don,” Conway once said. “He’s an icon in this business. He’s an icon that’s never going to be duplicated.”

He also found success in the 1980s in a series of comedy videos based on an oddly short character named Dorf. (Carefully costumed, Conway performed the bits on his knees.) Among them were “Dorf on Golf” and “Dorf Goes Fishing.”

More recently Conway voiced the role of Barnacle Boy for the hugely popular children’s series “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

He was born Thomas Conway in 1933 in the Cleveland suburb of Willoughby. He attended Bowling Green State University and served in the U.S. Army. He got his career start on local TV in Cleveland in the 1950s, where his duties included comedy spots on a late-night movie show.

He was spotted by Rose Marie of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” who got him an audition for “The Steve Allen Show.” He became a regular on the show in the early 1960s. It was Allen who had advised him to change his name from Tom to Tim to avoid being confused with a British actor.

Following the Allen show, Conway gained attention as the incompetent Ensign Charles Parker on the Ernest Borgnine sitcom “McHale’s Navy” from 1962-66. That led to series of his own, including “Rango” and “The Tim Conway Show,” but they were short-lived.

“McHale’s Navy” fans loved watching Ensign Parker infuriate the ever-flammable Captain Binghamton (played by Joe Flynn), but it was Conway’s work on Burnett’s show that would bring him lasting fame.

Conway and his wife, Mary Anne Dalton, married in 1961 and had six children. The marriage ended in divorce. He later married Charlene Fusco.

In addition to his wife and daughter Jackie, Conway is survived by children Tim Jr., Patrick, Jamie, Kelly, Corey and Seann, as well as two grandchildren, Courtney and Sophia.

Twin Peaks actress Peggy Lipton dies

Actress Peggy Lipton has passed away at the age of 72.

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Lipton’s daughters from her marriage to music producer Quincy Jones – Parks and Recreation star Rashida and actress/designer Kidada Jones – confirmed their mother had sadly passed away after a battle with cancer on Saturday.

“She made her journey peacefully with her daughters and nieces by her side,” they said. “We feel so lucky for every moment we spent with her. We can’t put all of our feelings into words right now, but we will say: Peggy was and will always be our beacon of light, both in this world and beyond … She will always be a part of us.”

Lipton was best known for her roles on TV shows The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks, playing the role of Double R Diner owner Norma Jennings.

She began her career working as a model before moving into TV at the age of 19. She went on to appear on Bewitched and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour before landing the role of undercover hippie cop Julia Barnes on U.S. TV show The Mod Squad, which aired from 1968 to 1973.

Lipton won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama for the show in 1971, and went on to enjoy a singing career, with three of her singles hitting the Billboard charts.

The actress was married to Grammy-winning producer Jones from 1974 to 1990, and they share daughters Rashida, 43, and Kidada, 45.

Following their divorce in 1990, Lipton returned to acting by joining cult classic series Twin Peaks, and later reprised the character of Norma for the show’s successful revival in 2017.

‘We’re like the Stones’: Steve Martin and Martin Short talk about life on the road

Over the years, every time Steve Martin and Martin Short have got together it has been nothing but fun times.

So when the comedy greats were asked to interview one another onstage at the 2011 Just for Laughs fest in Chicago, it was an automatic yes.

And as it turns out, it was the beginning of a stage show that has morphed over the years into a touring act — dubbed An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life — that finds the duo riffing on showbiz, singing songs, performing stand-up and roasting one another. Their routine, which stops at Toronto’s Sony Centre this Friday and Saturday, was turned into a Netflix special in 2018.

“It went really well,” Short, 63, recalls during a joint interview with Martin. “But more importantly, we had great fun doing it. We went out for dinner the night before and then we had a great dinner afterwards. Then we were asked to do it again and we agreed.”

The SCTV veteran and Saturday Night Live alum liked structure, but wanted to do something more. “So the show has evolved,” the Hamilton-born comic adds.

The friendship goes back nearly 33 years to when they first starred together alongside Chevy Chase in the 1986 comedy ¡Three Amigos! Their cinematic partnership continued in two Father of the Bride films and the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt.

“I find whenever I become friends with someone it’s because they’re really funny or really smart. Marty was… funny,” Martin, 73, jokes.

Calling from New York and Los Angeles respectively, Martin and Short bantered about stardom and life on the road.

The tour, Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t — it’s music, it’s stand-up, it’s you two onstage having conversations — what can people expect when you bring it to Toronto next week?

Martin: Exactly what you said. Marty and I love doing our show and after the Netflix special, which was last March, we really started working on new material in earnest. There’s a lot of growing pains when you’re working out new material, but now we’re just in the swing of things and we love it.

What is life like for you guys on the road?

Martin: It’s pretty easy. We travel first class and stay at nice hotels. We have a little room service before the show, then we laugh for the rest of night. Sometimes we spend the night and sometimes we fly out right afterwards. It’s really, really nice.

Short: And there’s always a nice dinner.

Do you have any guilty pleasures on the road?

Martin: Poached eggs on toast.

Short: You can’t really call them guilty pleasures, but when we get on the plane, sometimes I have a big bag of M&M’s.

Martin: We’re like the [Rolling] Stones except if you take away all the drugs and the women and the youth. Take out the drugs and the women and add Advil.

Short: And a game of cribbage… we play cribbage after the show.

What’s your favourite thing to do in Toronto?

Short: Well, as you know, that’s one of my hometowns and I have a son and daughter-in-law that live there so I hang out with them. Usually before I make my way to Muskoka.

Martin: I’ve always loved Toronto. I went there early on in my life at like age 22 and I always loved walking along Bloor St. or walking up and down Yonge St. By the way, when I went there a lot it was during the hippie days, so Toronto was really alive with a lot of energy and pop.

You first worked together over 30 years ago on ¡Three Amigos! What was your first impression of one another?

Short: I really liked Steve. We immediately hit it off and made each other laugh. I think the thing that you hone in on sooner than you even think is: does this person have a basic decency to them and are they kind? Those things were apparent right away. From there, we kept building as friends.

Martin: It was a fast friendship. I think banter in a marriage might not be a good thing. If you were always cracking jokes or playfully teasing or putting each other down, that might not work. But in friendship, that’s a good thing. We know how to kid and it just seems to work.

What did you think about each other’s comedic chops way back when, before you ever met?

Short: I didn’t meet Steve until 1985 and by that time he was a legend of the stage and stand-up and he was movie star. I was well aware of who he was. I had bought his (comedy) albums and I had read his books, so I knew who he was and it was thrilling to meet Steve.

Martin: I always viewed SCTV, where Marty got his start, as the home of some really incredibly talented people. These were comics who could do a million impressions and voices and they were really, really funny. I viewed myself as a kind of one-note Johnny. I was actually worried that he might not have respect for me and might not like me. Luckily, that was short-lived.

Steve, what’s your favourite thing from Marty, and Marty what’s your favourite thing Steve has done?

Martin: You know, there’s a couple of specials Marty did, one is from the ’90s on HBO and it’s called I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood. There were some fun, far-out sketches. But I really get a kick of watching him onstage at our show. When he’s onstage and I’m watching from the wings, I just sit and enjoy what he’s doing.

Short: With Steve, I could say The Jerk or Roxanne, but the reality is I kind of agree with what Steve just said. There are very few things that allow a performer to do everything under one umbrella. That’s a lot of what happens in our show. You can’t talk about Steve without the musicianship or the comedy or broadness of Steve. So I’m going to say, the Steve in this show is my favourite Steve.

Marty, do you break out any of your old SCTV characters for this show?

Short: There’s a new variation on a character I’ve done, but not Ed Grimley or Jackie Rogers Jr. or any of those guys.

What do you like best about one another?

Martin: We just have fun together. But our friendship onstage is kind of fake. Our friendship offstage is real, but onstage we kid around and say things we might not in real life.

Short: It’s like any friendship, except we’re more public. Anybody who has a close friend will understand.

Steve, you haven’t been in a movie since 2011’s The Big Year. Are we going to see you on the big screen anytime soon?

Martin: I’m retired from movies. …. I’m not actively pursuing movies and they don’t actively pursue me.

So you’re saying people aren’t coming to you with scripts anymore?

Martin: Well, I do have a life. Things are going on (laughs). I actually kind of shut down conversations about it pretty early on … I still get requests every once in awhile, but I’m not pursing it and I tell my agents not to pursue it.

So just to be clear, we’re not getting a Father of the Bride 3 then?

Martin: Alright fine, we’ll do it.

Short: Wow, that was a short retirement (laughs).

You’ve both been in show business for over four decades. Do you have a motto?

Short: My father always used to say, ‘At the end of the day, Martin, you do the decent thing.’ I think that’s a nice sentiment.

Martin: I’m curious Marty, with that motto, why you don’t?

Short: Because I never really trusted my father.

What’s the best advice you ever got?

Martin: You’ll think I’m joking, but I’m not. When I first started in show business and I was doing my act onstage, I didn’t know how to dress. I didn’t know what to wear. So I asked this guy, his name was Fats Johnson, and he did have a pretty funny folk music act. He always wore a puffy white shirt, a nice jacket and had diamond rings on his fingers. I said, ‘Fats, what’s your advice for how I should look onstage?’ And he told me: ‘Always look better than they do.’

Short: I guess, just from watching other people on television, the best advice I ever got was: More is more.

What is an ideal Sunday for both of you?

Martin: Marty, do you go to the earliest mass or the later one? I wake up and I go to the gym. Then I have a nice lunch out and then my wife, my child and I go to a really nice restaurant and we have dinner. Just the three of us. I love Sundays.

Short: I wake up and I … you know, we’re in show business. We don’t really work. Every day is like Sunday to me.

ALL RIGHTY THEN! Jim Carrey says he won’t bring back old characters

Jim Carrey has abandoned plans to revive any more of his most famous comedy characters, insisting he has no interest in revisiting the past.

The funnyman reprised Ace Ventura and Lloyd Christmas for the sequels Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and Dumb & Dumber To, but he has assured fans there won’t be anymore film follow-ups.

“I’m bringing nothing back,” Carrey told Entertainment Tonight at Las Vegas’ CinemaCon, where he helped movie bosses promote the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog film on Thursday. “I’m moving forward.”

There has been talk of Carrey revisiting The Mask and pet detective Ace Ventura one more time, but he insists he’s not interested.

“You get a lot of pressure from people you know to bring things back and stuff, and then you do and they go, ‘OK, I just wanted you to do something’.”

Carrey has also stripped back his acting roles in recent years to focus on his work as an artist, but he’s slowly picking up new projects, like acclaimed TV series Kidding and the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog, based on the popular Sega video game franchise.

He’ll portray villain Dr. Ivo Robotnik in the movie, which is set for release in November.

“I’m always animated, OK?” Carrey jokes about his new role, “so there’s really very little difference between that and real life for me.”

Meanwhile, he might not be interested in revisiting any of his old movie characters, but Jim is keen to bring back 1990s sketch comedy series In Living Color, where he landed his big break alongside stars like Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier and Marlon and Shawn Wayans.

“That show really needs to happen! That show needs to exist,” Carrey told ET. “Especially now, man. There’s so much to eat up and spit out, so I’d love to see it reconstitute itself in another form.”

Dick Dale, pioneer of the surf guitar, dies at 81

Nearly 60 years ago, surfers flocked to the waves along Newport Beach to try mastering the new craze. When the sun set, they needed someplace to dance and Dick Dale delivered it at Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula. Nearly every week for two years, Dale and his band packed over 3,000 people into the ballroom.

“The energy between the Del-Tones and all those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale’s guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard,” recalled Del-Tones bandmate Paul Johnson.

Dale, whose death was confirmed Sunday, manifested a quintessentially Southern California story, forged in surf, sand and rock ’n’ roll. They called him the Pied Piper of Balboa Beach, but his musical instrument of choice was defiantly not a flute. Rather, the electric-guitar playing son of a Lebanese father melded elements of the music of his ancestral homeland with roaring instrumental rock sounds emerging in the late-1950s, and helped pioneer an iconic American genre known as surf music.

“When I got that feeling from surfing,’” he told the writer Barney Hoskyns, “‘the whitewater coming over my head was the high notes going dikidikidiki, and then the dungundungun on the bottom was the waves, and I started double-picking faster and faster, like a locomotive, to feel the power of the waves.”

Those rushing guitar lines energized generations across the Southland and reverberated around the world.

Dale, who was 81, died Saturday after a long bout with rectal cancer, longtime friend and former bassist Steve Soest said Sunday.

That guitar tone arrived via a blindingly fast picking technique, one of the centerpiece elements of his breakthrough hits “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961 and “Misirlou” the following year, that caused guitar picks to melt in his hand. A few decades later, director Quentin Tarantino tapped “Misirlou” to serve as the theme to “Pulp Fiction.”

The sound featured a liberal use of electronic reverb with his signature Fender Stratocaster guitar, cranked to wall-rattling volume through juiced up Fender amplifiers. Other rock instrumentalists charted wordless hits before Dale came to the fore in the early days of the electric guitar, among them Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser,” but Dale helped push surf music into the mainstream through those high-energy performances, supplying a sound that paired perfectly with that growing surf craze.

It began as a regional phenomenon in Southern California and soon spread around the world influencing the likes of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in England, and a high-school aged Canadian named Neil Young long before he found fame. According to Hoskyns’ “Waiting for the Sun,” a young Jimi Hendrix was said to have seen Dale and his band play. Echoes of Dale’s fiery guitar runs and showmanship can be heard in Hendrix’s style.

Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour May 4, 1937, in Boston to a father who had emigrated from Lebanon and a mother who was Polish Belarusian. Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood in Quincy, Mass., outside of Boston, exposed him to the sounds of Arabic music, which became a signature of his musical amalgam.

His musical training started with his childhood interest in piano. Early on, he studied trumpet and also acquired a ukulele before eventually picking up a guitar and trying his best to emulate one of his heroes, country music titan Hank Williams. A friend suggested he call himself “Dick Dale,” rather than Richard Monsour, because it sounded more fitting for a would-be country singer.

The Monsour family moved to Southern California in 1954, when his father landed a job at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, near the beach. Dale became a regular at the weekly live country music television show “Town Hall Party.”

“I wanted to be a cowboy singer, so I went on ‘Town Hall Party’ and entered their talent contest every week,” he told the Glendale News-Press in 2015. “And I did, every week.”

The confluence of Dale’s ethnic heritage and newfound geographic proximity to the beach and to the flourishing factory in Fullerton, Calif., where electric guitar innovator Leo Fender worked, all blended into the music Dale would soon bring to listeners.

“Misirlou” represented a cross-cultural blend, coupling minor key motifs and Middle Eastern musical scale with pounding drums and throbbing bass, all fueling Dale’s stinging “wet” electric guitar pyrotechnics. A section of the song featuring trumpet also brought in an element of the mariachi music that was prevalent around Southern California.

In interviews he would often overstate his role in the development of Fender products, but he was an important early adopter of instruments and amplifiers that would change the sound and content of popular music beginning in the 1950s. Dale liked to consider himself one of Fender’s favorite guinea pigs, and he did push guitars and amplifiers to the limits in his live performances.

“Playing guitar was only a window in my life,” he said in 2015. “I never practiced the guitar and when I’m done playing I just put it down. Music is like building a house. It’s like going out deep into the desert to see what nature is doing. It’s like painting, like Salvador Dali. I try to do that with my music, make it like a Salvador Dali painting.”

A freak accident, when hot oil exploded while he was cooking popcorn in 1983 left second-degree burns over much of his body, put him out of commission as a musician for months.

“With every problem comes a gift in hand,” he told The Times in 1985. “For instance, when I do shows to raise money for burn victims, now I can talk to them and know what they are going through. And I can tell their family and friends that when the doctor says the recovery has begun, that’s really the time they need your concern and love.”

As a celebrity, he capitalized on quirky passions. At one point he kept live tigers at his Balboa Peninsula mansion, which had previously belonged to Gillette shaving company magnate King Gillette, and titled an early-‘80s live album “The Tigers Loose.” That was his first album in 18 years after surf music fell out of favor in the mid-1960s with the rise of the Beatles, the British Invasion, psychedelic music and other genres.

A decade ago Dale battled back from cancer, even playing a show in south Orange County shortly after being released from a nine-day stay at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for treatment of an infection.

“I thought, ‘I cannot cause this [club owner] to lose thousands of dollars,’” he said at the time.

That’s when he started trying to promote a new moniker to substitute for the “King of the Surf Guitar” label often applied to him: he wanted to be referred to as “Dick Dale-Cancer Warrior.”

With characteristic bravado, he told The Times, he would soon return to the hospital because “everything is messed up, and if it continues that way, I will die. But I’m not ready to leave my son, not ready to leave [his wife] Lana, I’m not ready to leave all the Dick Dale music lovers. They’ve been my medicine.”

Although he has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville a decade ago. He experienced recurring brushes with widespread popularity, notably in 1994 when Tarantino used “Misirlou” in “Pulp Fiction.”

In 2010, a career retrospective album “Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale” also helped introduce his music to a new generation.

Through his life Dale practiced martial arts and explored eastern philosophy, which he often quoted in interviews.

“There are four sentences [taken from Eastern philosophy] in my life that I go by: ‘To experience is to know. To know is to understand. To understand is to tolerate. To tolerate is to have peace’,” he told The Times in 1985. “It took me 17 years and [training with] masters of the martial arts to make me understand what that means. But I understand it and that’s how I can put up with all the stuff that goes on.

“That’s one of the reasons I like working with tigers and lions. If you can understand animals like that, then you can really put up with the reasons why people are the way they are and love them.”

Dale’s survivors include his wife, Lana, and his musician son, Jimmy. Information on services was not immediately available.