Pacific Ocean Blues
by David Leaf
It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been thirty years since Dennis Wilson became the first of the Beach Boys to release a solo album...thirty years since I walked through the door of Brother Studio to interview Dennis about that album for my fanzine, Pet Sounds...thirty years since he invited me to sing background vocals with a group of music journalists on “He’s A Bum”...thirty years since I spent the night talking music and life with him at his Venice home.
The man I got to experience a little bit that summer day (and night) was a tremendous life force. It was Dennis’ enthusiasm for surfing, cars and girls—for life itself—that first inspired the songs about the Southern California dreamscape, that helped turn the Wilson family music room into the birthplace of the group. Dennis was also vital to the music, an absolute key voice in the harmony blend and a powerful (if unschooled) stage drummer who was the focal point of the girls’ screams. In the 1960s, the Beach Boys were a successful recording group. Dennis Wilson was a rock star. And he remained one ’til his premature end.
This CD is designed to re-introduce Dennis Wilson, the artist: a remarkable, self-taught and expressive pianist, a balladeer who could break hearts, a rock singer with a sexy growl of a voice, a vocal arranger with an intuitive grasp of how to take Brian’s “Four Freshmenesque” stack and twist it to make it funkier, a composer who came out of nowhere to be far and away the second best in the group. Regardless of tempo, a Dennis Wilson vocal exposed his beating heart, and while it
sometimes sounded like a jagged nerve, he could also
sing so sweetly that you would have no choice but to be
seduced.
From the very first time Dennis sat down at the piano and became a creator, everything changed for him. Born in a world where feelings could be taken as a sign of weakness, he found in music a safe harbor, a place where he could express his soul. Brian couldn’t teach Dennis how he did it, but what Brian had accomplished so moved him that Dennis set out to create his own melodies of feelings…whether they were of love, passion, triumph, loneliness, fear or loss. Listening to his work, you could chart the ups and downs of his loves and marriages, a musical roller coaster of romance gone right and wrong.
Feeling no obligation to write songs that catered to the good-time surface of the Beach Boys image, Dennis wrote of a much darker, more complicated “real” world. Nothing was off limits to him—the Vietnam War, Jesus or just the everyday confusion of the world of fame and fortune that hadn’t brought him a moment of peace of mind—those were all subjects for his songs. But most of all, he wrote about love, and that put him in perfect sync with his older brother. Dennis was so physically strong that he was not afraid to show his emotions or follow his passions. If you didn’t like it, what were you gonna do? Challenge him to a fight? Not a great idea…Dennis was, at heart, a Southern California surfer punk, and if you challenged him, the response was immediate. And all of that…the strength, the fear, the anger and heart…found its way into his music.
If you’ve been listening to the Beach Boys reissues during the past two decades, Dennis’ vital place in Beach Boys musical history is clear—listen to late Sixties/early Seventies gems like “Little Bird,” “San Miguel” and “Forever” and get a sense of his growing songwriting skill…listen to Sunflower and imagine what it would be like without his songs (including “Slip On Through” and “It’s About Time”)…revisit Carl And The Passions (e.g. “Cuddle Up”) and Holland (e.g. “Only With You”) and hear how he could take center stage musically.
I first saw Dennis Wilson onstage at the Westchester
County Center in suburban New York. It was a Beach Boys concert, Thanksgiving eve, 1967. The opening acts were the Soul Survivors and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and my only memory of the Beach Boys portion of the show is that they sang very well and the concert was very short. Maybe 30 minutes. Over in a blink. The next time I saw the group, it was four years later, the Surf’s Up album was causing a stir and their concert at Georgetown University lasted nearly three hours. If memory serves, even though one of Dennis’ hands was bandaged (he spent much of the night up-front, at a microphone), he played a song or two solo (perhaps
“Barbara”) at the piano, and at one point in the concert,
he got so stirred up by the audience’s response that he ripped off the bandages and jumped behind the drums.
It was a perfect example of the spontaneity with which
he lived his entire life, onstage or off.
Of course, I knew nothing of that. I was just a fan.
And prior to moving to Southern California, I went to
see the Beach Boys a lot—at Carnegie Hall, Madison
Square Garden, Jersey City, Nassau Coliseum, Roosevelt
Raceway—if they played within driving distance of New York, I wanted to be there. Some of the shows were great, others routine, and on occasion, inspiring. I remember at one show in Maryland, Dennis played two new songs at the piano, long-lost pieces like “I’ve Got A Friend.” For forward-looking audience members, these were choice moments in the evening, proof there was still creative life in the band.
When I moved to California in 1975, Dennis was the first
of the group I met. It was a Monday in early November,
and I had just exited the unemployment office at 5th and Broadway in Santa Monica. I crossed the street heading north, not realizing that I was perhaps no more than fifty feet from the entrance to Brother Studio. Heading towards me was Dennis. As a friend described him, “he walked like a big cat, gracefully embracing the animal within himself, a fire at his core that made him as beautiful as a tiger.” I, of course, didn’t see any of that. I just saw DENNIS WILSON. I couldn’t believe it.
I went up to him and introduced myself, told him I had moved to L.A. to write a book about his brother, Brian.
Dennis laughed, a full-throated roar and said, “Good luck.”
Living in Los Angeles in the late ’70s, I saw the Beach Boys in concert frequently, but the last time I saw the Wilson brothers onstage together, Dennis was clearly in decline. Then, when I first saw the group after his death in April, 1984—at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey—thirty seconds into the show, one could feel his absence. I never went to a Beach Boys concert again. For me, without Dennis onstage, it just wasn’t the Beach Boys.
While Dennis’ impact and importance in Beach Boys recorded history hasn’t been overlooked, the simple fact that it’s been a quarter century since he appeared onstage with the group means that an entire generation of fans have come of age never having seen him, never having experienced the charismatic presence of the irresistible boy/man whose sheer enthusiasm for the idea of the Beach Boys embraced the audience with the spiritual love that Dennis understood was embedded in the music. When he came out solo for the encore and sang “You Are So Beautiful” to the audience, you knew he felt it and meant it.
Without that in-concert moment, with the absence of his physical presence and the sheer passage of years, the power of Dennis’ commitment to the Beach Boys and his individual artistry has seemed to slip away, taken out by the undertow, the waves he made in the studio a distant memory.
“Celebrate The News,” Dennis wrote in 1969, a song that was the b-side for the appropriately and ironically named “Breakaway.” Both are sentiments very appropriate to this release. Finally, fortunately, here in one package for the very first time is the absolute best of Dennis’ mid-1970s solo work...his justly-acclaimed solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, available on CD for the first time this century...as well as a second CD full of the best of the unreleased material that Dennis recorded for Bambu, his never-completed, never-
released second album…tracks and songs that indicate that like his older brother Brian, Dennis had a lot to say. Sometimes, life just got in his way.
— David Leaf
(Award-winning writer David Leaf has directed or co-directed such acclaimed films as “Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson & The Story of SMiLE” and “The U.S. Vs. John Lennon.”)
