While handsomely chiseled as he mugs for the camera in Two Lane Blacktop, barely six years on, Wilson is weathered, bearded and brined in alcohol on the cover of his album. The first solo release by a Beach Boy was a modest success, selling some 300,000 copies at the time, somewhat overshadowing the band’s own Love You, itself a vehicle for the purported return of his brother, Brian.

Over thirty years on, POB has aged rather well. Though at times it could sound like a Glenn Fry solo album (and might make us re-appraise such a beast) with its mix of machismo and gruff-earnestness, its AOR (album/adult-oriented rock) is just skewed enough so as to sound like a Wilco album, too. Drummer Wilson dabbles in almost everything: Steinway grand, Rhodes, Hohner clavinet, Moog, Hammond. Again, contradictory notions course through it. There’s the deluge of gospel in the opening of “River Song,” with its startling chord progressions that elevate it far above its own dreck rhymes of “city/ pretty.” Elsewhere, Wilson––already a huge star––sings about wanting to be a movie star on “Dreamer” and a rock star on “Under the Moonlight.” (The former recalls a story his friend Chris Clark told Steven Gaines in his book, Heroes & Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. Near the end of Wilson’s life, Clark snapped at him one day: “You know, your problem is that you’re just mad you never made it as an actor. That’s why you have to act everything out.” At this accusation, Wilson perks up: “How did you know that?”)

Two particular tracks showcase both extremes of Wilson’s art and persona. On the unfinished sketch “I Love You,” we get the lizard mind at its most plainspoken, with Wilson basically singing about busting a nut (“I’ve waited so long to let my love flow and now it’s alright”) before a choral approximation of a post-coital male afterglow washes over us, all ahhhhs and aural bliss. From the plaintive piano emoting on “Thoughts of You,” Wilson hints at a minor key melody not dissimilar from “Theme from M.A.S.H.” before swiftly descending into a middle section that is honestly one of the most devastating things I’ve ever come across in an AOR song. There’s a vocal arrangement quite unlike anything the Beach Boys ever attempted, with Wilson’s multi-tracked voices intoning the observation that “all things that live one day must die, you know/ even love and the things we hold close.” “Even love” repeats again and again, Wilson anguished at the realization, voicing the unplumbed depths of a heart being carved out. Soon, we get thrown back to shore, to the slight twinkling piano of the beginning, but we remain shaken.

Surface shimmer and/or oceanic depth, it remains impossible to parse Dennis Wilson as either a drummer, a B-movie actor, or anything loftier. Holy man, wholly present, a man unconscious of the film he acted in, voicing his most primal urges and his most enlightened observations on life, staring deep into TLB or listening close to POB, no answers shake out. Contradictory or no, Wilson himself plowed straight ahead. Or as he sings on the unreleased Beach Boys’ song “San Miguel”: “I go where I’m going/ Goin’ straight ahead.” Which meant both the lateral and eastern nihilism of Two-Lane Blacktop (which never reaches the East coast) and the silty bottom of Marina Del Ray that ultimately leads us out into the Pacific Ocean’s blue.