FEATURES
Holy Man: Dennis Wilson Revived
/ Andy Beta
07.30.08
Ever since his burial out in the Pacific Ocean’s coordinates of 33-53.9° N/118-38.8° W in the first week of 1984, Dennis Carl Wilson has remained silent. Drowned after Christmas in 1983, in those same waters that he dedicated his lone solo album to, Wilson wasn’t around to partake in the Beach Boys infamous appearance on Full House (and is therefore absolved from the sins of “Kokomo”) and also missed the reemergence of SMiLE, his big brother’s lost Beach Boys album, recast now as a Brian Wilson solo album, in 2004.
Perpetually in the shadow of that big brother, only now does Dennis Wilson get his own renaissance: since late 2007, Wilson’s meager body of work has reappeared to greater appreciation. The esteemed Criterion Collection filled two DVDs and a book with 1971’s massively hyped road movie flop from director Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop (the only film appearance of both a Beach Boy and “Sweet Baby James” Taylor). And then this spring Sony lovingly made a two-CD set out of Wilson’s long out-of-print solo album, 1977’s Pacific Ocean Blue, and the demos he never sobered up enough to finish, Bambu (named after the rolling papers). In keeping with the theme of singing drummers, the set concludes with the Foo Fighters’s drummer Taylor Hawkins (who plays for a band whose own frontman was once the drummer for a world famous band before stepping to the mic) belting out a dead-on, barnacle-throated Wilson impersonation on Bambu’s “Holy Man.”
“Holy Man” doubles as the sub-theme for the Wilson set, as it grapples with understanding the man and his maddening contradictions that were laid to tape. He gets fondly remembered as big-hearted and lovable, a natural (and naïf) on piano––an impression that comes courtesy of ‘the Captain’ Daryl Dragon (of Tenille fame)—a man too sensitized to last long in this world. But if Wilson’s a holy man, then he’s of the Mr. Natural variant, with a prodigious sexual appetite that conquered such lays as President Regan’s daughter, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, fellow Beach Boy Mike Love’s illegitimate teenage love child, and the clap-bearing ‘daughters’ of the Manson Family. He also had an appetite—for dope, vodka and orange juice, and other illicit chemicals—that may’ve not been on the same level as his big brother’s––but which was nevertheless frightening to those around him.
Contradictions and conundrums abound, not just in Wilson the person, but in his art. Wilson was the only Beach Boy who could surf and the only actor on the Two Lane set to know his way around an engine (and yet in a movie starring two bona fide pop stars, it’s only tin-eared co-star Laurie Bird who actually sings). Wilson’s the guy who could turn his band-mates onto Transcendental Meditation and then nail groupies in the band’s meditation room. Who else but Wilson could make wholesome the act of the Beach Boys stealing a Charles Manson song (retitling “Cease to Exist” as “Never Learn Not to Love” off of 20/20)? For every astonishing chord progression he flashes on POB, there’s an insipid rhyme scheme to bury it. As he laments pollution of our rivers and oceans, he’s similarly hellbent on destroying his own body.
Perpetually in the shadow of that big brother, only now does Dennis Wilson get his own renaissance: since late 2007, Wilson’s meager body of work has reappeared to greater appreciation. The esteemed Criterion Collection filled two DVDs and a book with 1971’s massively hyped road movie flop from director Monte Hellman, Two-Lane Blacktop (the only film appearance of both a Beach Boy and “Sweet Baby James” Taylor). And then this spring Sony lovingly made a two-CD set out of Wilson’s long out-of-print solo album, 1977’s Pacific Ocean Blue, and the demos he never sobered up enough to finish, Bambu (named after the rolling papers). In keeping with the theme of singing drummers, the set concludes with the Foo Fighters’s drummer Taylor Hawkins (who plays for a band whose own frontman was once the drummer for a world famous band before stepping to the mic) belting out a dead-on, barnacle-throated Wilson impersonation on Bambu’s “Holy Man.”
“Holy Man” doubles as the sub-theme for the Wilson set, as it grapples with understanding the man and his maddening contradictions that were laid to tape. He gets fondly remembered as big-hearted and lovable, a natural (and naïf) on piano––an impression that comes courtesy of ‘the Captain’ Daryl Dragon (of Tenille fame)—a man too sensitized to last long in this world. But if Wilson’s a holy man, then he’s of the Mr. Natural variant, with a prodigious sexual appetite that conquered such lays as President Regan’s daughter, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, fellow Beach Boy Mike Love’s illegitimate teenage love child, and the clap-bearing ‘daughters’ of the Manson Family. He also had an appetite—for dope, vodka and orange juice, and other illicit chemicals—that may’ve not been on the same level as his big brother’s––but which was nevertheless frightening to those around him.
Contradictions and conundrums abound, not just in Wilson the person, but in his art. Wilson was the only Beach Boy who could surf and the only actor on the Two Lane set to know his way around an engine (and yet in a movie starring two bona fide pop stars, it’s only tin-eared co-star Laurie Bird who actually sings). Wilson’s the guy who could turn his band-mates onto Transcendental Meditation and then nail groupies in the band’s meditation room. Who else but Wilson could make wholesome the act of the Beach Boys stealing a Charles Manson song (retitling “Cease to Exist” as “Never Learn Not to Love” off of 20/20)? For every astonishing chord progression he flashes on POB, there’s an insipid rhyme scheme to bury it. As he laments pollution of our rivers and oceans, he’s similarly hellbent on destroying his own body.