Introducing: The Mighty Power Arrangers

There’s instrumental prowess aplenty on display in recent releases by Dick Dale and Dan Crary, who may be the best guitar players ever associated with the Orange County pop scene. Also reviewed is the rough but ready country-rock debut by the band Diamondback. Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

** 1/2 , Dick Dale, “Unknown Territory”, HighTone The past year was a glorious one for Dick Dale. The surf-guitar patriarch finally went nationwide with the rambunctious “Tribal Thunder,” his first album of new material in almost 30 years.

At last he hit the road for extensive touring--something he had neglected to pursue when surf-rock was at its early-’60s peak. Far-flung audiences were treated to the Stratocaster barrages that had been knocking Dale’s Southern California fans silly for years.

With upbeat reviews and eager fan response, he became rock ‘n’ roll’s comeback player of the year for 1993.

For an encore, Dale returns with the same studio crew that backed him on “Tribal Thunder.” Producer Scott Mathews and Tubes alumnus Prairie Prince renew that album’s well-coordinated double-drum barrage, and Dale’s longtime sideman, Ron Eglit, is on bass.

As for Dale, another turn of the calendar hasn’t slowed the pick-melting frenzy of his attack or chipped away at an enthusiasm for rocking that few musicians of any age can match.

Now that he has re-established himself, Dale’s challenge is to find inventive, fresh-sounding backdrops for a style that is founded on very simple elements. He plays primarily instrumental rock built on basic riffs and chord progressions, coloring them with blazing-fast picking and a distinctive array of signature skids, screeches and splashing reverb effects.

Parts of “Unknown Territory” succeed in deploying those familiar elements in new, surprising surroundings. At times, though, for all the hot playing Dale and his band muster, it sounds as if they are tracing territory already well-charted.

“Scalped,” “Terra Dicktyl” and “The Beast” are all racing, pummeling variations on Dale’s beefed-up modern take on old-line surf-rock. The visceral impact and over-the-top energy of these aural car chases make Dale, at 57, as effective a purveyor of adrenalin-rock as any of the young headbanger bands on the circuit. Still, there’s not much to differentiate one of these sizzling tracks from the next.

Dale and company know that sameness is a pitfall of instrumental rock, and they take pains to mix things up. Three songs offer South-of-the-border hues, but they don’t lead to anything memorable--except for the drip-drop textures of the percussion track on the sentimental ballad “Maria Elena.” The liquid drum sounds wryly echo the puddle-splattering sonics of Dale’s reverb guitar.

On the song “Unknown Territory,” Dale strives for epic scale and high-plains drama but winds up with the album’s weakest cut. Like Coronado’s search for El Dorado, the lost city of gold, this nearly eight-minute excursion is a long, meandering trek through arid regions, without any payoff at the end.

The album’s prime stuff is defined less by speed than by its sexy swagger. “F Groove” offers slow, heavy rock that is truly low-down and mean. The beat pounds hard, yet is slippery and sly. Guest harmonica player Huey Lewis challenges Dale with raunchy, distorted blues licks, and the guitarist comes through with zooming runs that strain to escape the confines of the song’s deliberate tempo.

“Take It or Leave It,” with its Booker T & the MG’s-style R&B; groove, double-tracked guitar dueling, and (slightly overlong) percussion break, is another song that places Dale against a more scenic musical backdrop.

Dale’s take on “Hava Nagila” is the album’s best surprise. The hokey old bar mitzvah tune is reinvigorated and transformed into an erotic, high-speed belly dance. Acoustic guitar flashes, clicking castanets and rattling tambourines contribute to the most ambitious rhythmic construct on the record. Dale takes full advantage, mixing his strokes between dervish-like treble runs and hurtling low-note passages.

Instrumental rock is Dale’s forte, but he sings effectively on two sallies into vocal music. He goes for humor on “California Sun” with manic yowling, then bows to Johnny Cash’s example and handles “Ring of Fire” with understated authority. This nugget provides a fine basis for a kinetic mating of surf-rock with hillbilly twanging and leaves one eager for Dale’s take on “Mystery Train.”

Raw power may be the essence of Dale’s style, but the mixed results on “Unknown Territory” point to how important it is to channel that power imaginatively.

*** Dan Crary, “Jammed If I Do”, Sugar Hill For a quarterback, it’s fourth and goal and no time left on the clock. For a stage actor, it’s playing King Lear. For a folk guitarist, the ultimate challenge may be going one-on-one in a duet with Doc Watson.

Dan Crary accepts that challenge on the seventh solo album of his career, with results that are musically rewarding, but also instructive about the approach that has won the Fullerton-based Crary plaudits as a leading player in the world of traditional folk and bluegrass music.

He teams with Watson, the definitive acoustic player from North Carolina, on “Whistlin’ Rufus,” a jaunty, fast-flowing song on an all-instrumental album weighted toward light moods and lightning musicianship.

Watson’s playing is fleet but unhurried, each note given space, definition and a firm voicing, no matter how fast it registers. Set against such technique, almost anything will be open to criticism.

But the undaunted Crary lets fly with what he has--and we do mean fly. His light, coursing style calls to mind the flickering of hummingbird wings or the glistening flow of a fast-moving stream (the blurred double-image of a pick-wielding Crary on the CD cover is an apt visual metaphor for his musical style).

Next to Watson’s unerring balance, Crary does sound a bit hurried for an instant or two during “Whistlin’ Rufus.” But there isn’t much else to quibble with over the course of an album that includes three other duets with A-list players (Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Beppe Gambetta), many joyful picking fests featuring members of Crary’s band, California, and an amazing solo suite of traditional Irish tunes.

Traditional bluegrass is often defined by speed and headlong drive, but Crary, for all his mastery of speed, is more interested in dancing nimbly than plowing forward in linear fashion.

The band pieces are all larks, as the players get caught up in the gaiety of festive dance music. Fiddler Byron Berline, mandolin player John Moore and John Hickman or Dennis Caplinger on banjo come off as the merriest band this side of Sherwood Forest.

The middle section of “Twin Reel” is particularly delightful, as Crary, Moore and Caplinger tumble through intricate variations climaxing in a powerful, cresting swell. It’s all a far cry from Crary’s last solo album, “Thunderation!” which went for darker hues and progressive-New Agey stylings.

Crary’s duet with Rice on “Cattle in the Cane” provides one restless, unsettled interlude (Rice’s woody tone contrasts with Crary’s almost metallic, ringing sound).

Joined by Gambetta, the Italian player whose touch is also quite light, Crary adjusts on “Foggy Mountain Special” by putting some extra sting and bluesy swing into his own playing.

“Irish Tune Suite” probes ghostly mysteries and heights of Celtic lyricism, then hurtles down the home stretch. Everything else is merriment in which the uncommon care and craft exerted by expert players yields springy, carefree music.

Consequently, “Jammed If I Do” should bring good cheer to almost anyone who hears it, except perhaps for those few serious guitar players who forget to set aside their competitive instincts and find themselves wondering how they’d fare going one on one with Dan Crary.

*** Diamondback, “Ragin’ Wind” Deadeye Records

It’s usually a good sign when country musicians make albums that mainstream country radio will have absolutely no use for. That honorable fate is likely to befall Diamondback’s debut album.

Rather than polish its sound for the programming chiefs, the Lake Forest band, formerly known as the Honky Tonk Hellcats, has left all the rude, sweaty and gritty substance in. At the same time, the band has enough taste to know when to pull back the reins to avoid mindless country-boogie.

Raunchy, barking guitars in the Lynyrd Skynyrd tradition abound, but they often coexist with sweetly sawing fiddles that keep the band well-balanced between country and rock.

At a time when most country bands are doing their best to get that polished early-Eagles formula, Diamondback’s four members favor the more exciting, if less commercially successful, country-rock sound established before the Eagles by the high-kicking early Poco.

At a time when too many country-rock albums feature vocals run through a studio blender that makes everything come out sounding unruffled, exact and lifeless, Diamondback’s primary singer and songwriter, Frankie Lee Jenkins, has all the rough-edged personality of a likable character actor.

This transplanted Arkansan’s scratchy, stringy, high-pitched voice is hardly a thing of beauty, but it’s believable. The other lead singer, George Brown, has a fuller, smoother tone.

As a songwriter, Jenkins isn’t a threat to Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle or Dwight Yoakam. But even when they aren’t fully realized, Diamondback’s songs sound like the statements of actual people relating stories drawn from life.

It helps that they stick to what they know: Five of the eight original songs have musicians as the protagonists. “King Cotton,” a sprightly traditional country song, and the hard-charging “Honky Tonk Trail” are celebrations of music-making and its psychic rewards.

Elsewhere, Diamondback weighs the consequences of the free-booting life, especially the narrowed chances of a stable, satisfying romantic connection. Even when Diamondback goes for a big statement on “Ragin’ Wind,” a pro forma anthem-lament for the loss of the good old days of simple, small-town living, it carries a spirited kick that makes you think they just might churn up an Oz-like tornado to carry them back to the mythical past they pine for.

Diamondback’s raw-and-juicy approach (augmented at times by guest players, including Danny Federici, the keyboardist of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) is just right for its swaggering bar-life celebrations and reprobates’ confessions.

Especially fine is their insouciant, rocked-up take on the Roger Miller chestnut, “Dang Me.” Finally, though, Jenkins gives love its due on the wistful ballad “Loretta,” in which a regretful, worn-out guitar-player begs for one last chance at the settled life.

With its echoes of Levon Helm fronting The Band, it’s the album’s most affecting song. It’s nice to know that even a bunch of rough-riders like these can show a winning tender streak.

(Available at Tower Records and Virgin Megastore, or from Deadeye Records, P.O. Box 5022-347, Lake Forest, CA 92630; (714) 768-0644.)

* Diamondback plays Monday at 11 p.m. at the House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. (213) 650-0247).