B.B. King has “Lucille.” Dick Dale has “the beast.” Dale’s beast is a gold-sparkled Fender Stratocaster with some of the heaviest gauge strings this side of bass guitars. As Dale said at one point during the show, “the faces I make aren’t show business—it’s pain. That was a 56-gauge string I just bent.” The distinctive surf guitar twang Dale wrestles from the beast is vital, but his ideology behind the choice of strings goes beyond sound. Dale’s style, in his own words, “penetrates,” and takes nothing less than his own physical pain to produce. Hearing it, however, is pure pleasure.

The Howlin’ Wolf show saw Dale in a more relaxed mood than previous engagements, taking time to recall the names of tracks on the forthcoming Calling Up Spirits, or to remember lyrics to the requested “Ring of Fire” from Dale’s 1994 Unknown Territory. The songs themselves were blazing, especially “Ghostriders in the Sky,” which prompted a huge response. Perhaps bolstered by the crowd’s enthusiasm, Dale attempted something he hadn’t tried before: after explaining how much Quentin Tarantino, who “makes films around music,” likes the “angelic” trumpet in Dale’s classic “Miserlou” (featured on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack), Dale brought his wife on stage to hold a trumpet, which he played between guitar phrases on one new song.

The best indication that Dale’s current fans have not all discovered him from Pulp Fiction was not the warm response to “Miserlou,” but the much bigger response to the new (and very hot) “Catamount” and the surf classic “Let’s Go Tripping,” the first encore. After the blazing fast “Scalped,” the second encore, Dale set down the beast for the night, and relegated himself to signing autographs for the crowd of enamored Dickheads. If cover charges were based on the number of notes a musician played, Dick Dale would be the best deal going.