DICK DALE!!!
One of my guitar heroes.
His solo version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" still amazes me, and gets the adrenalin flowing no matter how many times I here it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIvfVyyqTDI
How can you not love a guy who had the first 100 watt guitar amp!
"Leo Fender kept giving Dale amps and Dale kept blowing them up! Till one night Leo and his right hand man Freddy T. (Freddie Tavares) went down to the Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula in Balboa, California and stood in the middle of four thousand screaming and dancing Dick Dale fans, and said to Freddy, I now know what Dick Dale is trying to tell me. They went to JBL (James B. Lansing loudspeaker company) and explained that they wanted a fifteen inch loudspeaker built to their specifications. The unit became famous as the 15" JBL D130F model. It made the complete package for Dale to play through and was named the Single Showman Amp. When Dale plugged his Fender Stratocaster guitar into the new Showman Amp and loudspeaker cabinet, Dale became the first person on earth to jump from the volume scale of a modest quiet guitar player (on a scale of 4) to blasting up through the volume scale to TEN! That is when Dale became the "Father of Heavy Metal" as quoted from Guitar Player magazine. Dale broke through the electronic barrier limitations of that era!"