Enough Rope: Part Two On Dennis Wilson

[Fair warning this gets into a lot of seriously unpleasant stuff]

For as much of an achievement that Pacific Ocean Blue was for Dennis, its recording process was also emblematic of some of the biggest faults Dennis had. Impulsivity ruled the man.

The most likely explanation for his scruples is the same for almost every Wilson, their father. Quick to fight and quick to forgive, Dennis, under the hawkish, cruel, surveillance of Murray Wilson learned to be constantly vigilant and ready to fight, keyed up to wait for a blow from his father. Given this high anxiety and approval starved environment some of the turns his persona took are hardly surprising and could be sighted by the most reclined armchair psychologist (me).

The recording sessions for POB had this fight or flight response embedded into their construction. Dennis did not sit down to patiently and methodically ply away at his tunes; Dennis never learned the meaning of the word patience. Starved for any positive attention in youth, granted a fortune, made a sex symbol, and thrown to the screaming wolves of fandom all while he was still just a teen, Dennis was born to crave gratification and was plunked in a scenario where he could have it instantly. Often when Dennis had an idea for a song he wouldn’t even be in the studio, much less near a musical instrument, he’d be off sailing his yacht Harmony in the wee hours of the morning (eventually Dennis brought a piano on the boat for such occasions). The moment Dennis had an idea for a recording everything had to be dropped, at 2 A.M. phone calls would ring out to the Cali talent pool like 911’s, engineers were scrambled, studio musicians roused, and it went on like this until the idea was hammered out, Dennis lasered in for this brief period.

When he grew bored of something, he discarded it or moved onto the next thrill: whether it was the laundry list of athletic hobbies he took up to lessen the pressure on his uncoilable energy, drunk driving in the desert with no headlights, or illegally free climbing an under-construction World Trade Center in his jeans—Dennis had an IV adrenaline drip, and withdrawals intense enough to make a seasoned junkie recoil. Thus, when the thrill of making his own music ran out, he abandoned it. Gregg Jakobson, his longtime recording partner and friend, implored him to do final mixes of POB—extra adjustments, various bits of tweaking and nitpicking—but Dennis sealed the deal and moved on.

For all the promise that the album showed, it failed to hit the sales expectations that Caribou had set for it. To Dennis this was crippling, while it was a minor critical success, it was ultimately a failure for its inability to match the heights his ego assumed it would take. Furthermore, it was a wedge that drove him further from the band. While rumors abound about what threats were made and what was said, what is clear is that it ignited jealousy and resentment in the band, who were furious at Dennis’s relative success compared to the poor sales of their own album.

Dennis would never make another album. Brother Records recording studio was sold off shortly after the release of Pacific Ocean Blue to clear some of the bands ever mounting debts. The loss of the one place that could accommodate his sporadic recording habits was the nail in the coffin, his expected follow up album Bambu never materialized. A victim somewhat of circumstance, but also of Dennis’s unwillingness to sit still for more time than it took to finish a snippet of an idea. This petulance—his definition and his muse—was his ultimate shortcoming, it extended and magnified into his role within the band: when group members wouldn’t tow to his demands, he withheld songs he had written for their album Surf’s Up.

His absenteeism within the bands own recording sessions is well noted. Although Dennis does have a significant amount of drumming credits on Beach Boys albums, around 1964 Hal Blaine and other session drummers end up having to sit in for him on recording sessions, because of his inability to sit still during Brian’s long and tedious album cycles. The most he would be in the room for are vocal recordings, and sometimes not even that. There are multiple instances in their early career where Dennis was slated for a solo vocal, and either some slight he had done against Brian, or his own time concerns lost him the spot. In one rather amusing instance, Dennis was excluded from his own planned vocal solo on Pet Sounds, because while he was on a drive with Brian, Dennis decided to go too fast and broke Brian’s new video camera, incensing Brian enough that he replaced all of Dennis’s planned vocals with other members.

 Beyond this, his inability to take anything seriously, or devote all of himself to as task extended to finance in the band. The Beach Boys operated on a democratic system for a large part of their existence; each founding member of the band would have a vote on all band matters. Carl, who was more pragmatic than either of his brothers, would usually side with the more business minded Mike on album decisions, touring, and merchandising related issues. Brian, after he turned power of attorney over to his then wife, Marilyn, took over Brian’s vote and often sided with Mike and Carl as well. Dennis, while he often voted against the careerist and traveling-circus endeavors of Mike, was not often around and did not care, which leaves one to wonder at how much of the bands decline fell upon someone who refused participate in it, or often ignored it.

Unsurprisingly, this indifference at finance extended into his personal life, and showed up early on. Dennis reportedly blew over 94,000 dollars by December of 1964, 25k on a house and the rest spent here and there on extravagances and friends, seemingly not out of any lack of concern or specific disdain for money, as he broke down when he found out the actual amount he had spent. Ruined houses, destroyed sports cars, extravagant gifts, ill-advised luxury purchases, drug and drinking dollars down the drain. By 1984 Dennis was almost completely broke, his finances either having been cut off, spent, or taken by creditors[1], despite owning and renting out several properties in California, which presumably were also taken by creditors when it finally came time to pay debts.

Further damning on the actual playing side of things was Dennis’s behavior on stage in the ‘70s. While a sex symbol, the crowd pleaser, and heart-wrenching troubadour at the end of every set, Dennis also did his best to throw chaos into the mix. Take for example this rendition of Surfer Girl. The whole entire time Dennis physically mocks the lyrics and gets in Mike’s face as much as possible, trying his best to trip him up, make him miss a note. While extremely funny to watch five minutes of Mike Love’s ever-growing discomfort and simmering mald—Dennis impishly smirking and preening all the while—it demonstrates his inability to put differences aside for the benefit of the band. Look at this rendition of You Are So Beautiful to Me, while a very good one, if you wait until the end you can watch Dennis attempt to hog-tie Mike in an effort to prevent him from making his next drole announcement. This was the norm: Dennis’s famed You Are So Beautiful to Me, even started off as an effort to piss off Mike by stealing the spotlight from him. Not captured are the multiple reports of Dennis getting Abosluted before going on stage, to the point where band members would have to wrangle him just to get him up.

This interplay with Mike, who by this point had become the bands de facto leader, leads us into another reason why he could never become the next auteur for the band: he hated Mike, and Mike hated him. While there are points of collaboration, and even some reported comradery such as the two living together for a stint, they were at throats more than in arms. Their relationship started to take a turn for the worse when Brian’s decline compelled Mike to try and push the band in a more financially stable direction. Dennis—who had always looked to his brother and his music with a loving astonishment and adoration—angered by what he saw correctly as a thoroughly exorcised future for the band, took it upon himself to go toe-to-toe with Mike on the issue. With a penchant for pranks, Dennis went to work on making sure that Mike’s tour life was a living hell. The above videos are only a few light examples.

Dennis pushed the envelope on his relationships the same way he pushed it in every other aspect of his life. In the case of his relationship with Mike he pushed it to fist fights and beyond. In another case Dennis got drunk before a concert and took a little stroll through Mike’s dressing room, where Mike would often meditate to prepare himself spiritually for the neurotic adoration of his 40+ year old fans. Dennis vomited all over that room. Filling a squirt gun full of urine and going after Mike, an affair with Mike’s former wife Suzanne that contributed significantly to the end of the marriage, culminating in Dennis marrying Mike’s illegitimate underage daughter and a restraining order issued by both parties. This is just to name what I have been able to find documentation on. For as much as one could fault Mike Love for any of his numerous shortcomings, here there is solid reasoning in his decision to exclude Dennis from the band. And for as ubiquitous as his portrayal is as the evil overlord of the Beach Boys, Mike made the right move for both the band and Dennis excluding him, and in urging other members of the band to get behind him to try and get Dennis to attend rehab. Contra to popular narratives, the ultimatum didn’t come unseen from above, like the hand of some cruel god come to pick on poor Dennis. Dennis had been in and out of rehab at the pleading of the band for the better part of the last years of his life.  

And then there is the very broken band dynamic. While the shit-stirring was delivered equally by each group member, it’s perhaps Dennis who caused some of the biggest debacles in the family and band dynamic. Articles about this have a penchant for deferring responsibility or only delivering a partial truth. Take for instance the Cocaine Sessions, often framed as a well-intentioned effort by Dennis to try and get his brother to write music again—in reality, it was a complete micro-dive back into what put Brian in the bed in the first place. The arrangement was so, Dennis would entice Brian into recording a song by supplying McDonalds Cheeseburgers and cocaine for each song he agreed to complete. As far as his good intentions went, they didn’t make it out the door. In that vein the infamous encounter between Shawn Love and Dennis shines. Some accounts I’ve read state that Mike Love sent Shawn out to enact a mafia style hit on Dennis, in others Dennis is beaten up by Shawn for leaving rehab. The most likely scenario that I’ve dug up, is that Shawn—who was Brian’s minder at the time—beat up Dennis because Dennis tried to goad Brian into purchasing somewhere between 10 and 15k worth of cocaine. And to end the saga of Dennis encouraging or enabling Brian drug abuse, there are accounts that during Dennis’s heroin phase he also got Brian to partake, not to mention the infamous Australian tour where Dennis and Carl went out and purchased heroin, and completely boned the set to the point where the audience demanded their money back.

Past his failings in the band Dennis’s petulance extended to the very root of his life; his domestic abuse debacles are the sour cream of ‘70s Hollywood gossip. The most notorious was his relationship with Karen Lamm. Married and divorced twice, with a wedding trail of wreckage and inhumanity that Dennis left in his wake, he was known at the time to frequently engage in domestic abuse, and at one point Lamm—so scared after Dennis hit her—went for a .38 to threaten him out of the house, punctuating it with a shot fired into the side of their Mercedes. On another occasion, Dennis drove her Ferrari to Venice Beach and set it ablaze. His relationship with Christie McVie of Fleetwood Mac was just as bad, McVie herself recalled Dennis frequently charging through the house breaking everything in sight, and at one point he accidentally burned down her pool house. His last wife, Shawn Love, was not untouched by his fury either, an infamous account recounts Dennis dragging her by the hair down the street after she punched him for supposedly cheating. Their relationship was etched in the walls of their home in red crayon that read “no love,” and “no respect,” accompanied by a frame of smashed window panes and broken doors.

And that famous sexual appetite of his? The escapades of man quoted as calling himself ‘the wood’? Has anyone stopped to consider how many of those oft recounted encounters were with women who were still basically children? His infamous association with the Manson Family, something it’s stated he regretted until the end of his life, did he regret it for the right reasons? i.e. the fact that a large portion of the members of those orgies he participated in were fifteen or barely older? He certainly didn’t at the time, Dennis couldn’t have been more thrilled, boldly proclaiming to David Griffiths of Record Mirror “I live with 17 girls.” And I can forgive this lack of judgement from the articles I’ve read, I had to pick over birth dates and names of the Manson family to make sure I could say this with some degree of certainty, but to ignore that Shawn Love was just 16 when she had her first encounter with Dennis—who by this point was in his late thirties—is beyond glaringly obvious and is willfully ignorant.

For as many stories as there are of his generosity, his warmth, his surprising creativity, and his (phony rich hippie bullshit) humbleness, there are just as many floating around about his cruelty, his bullying, his abuse. The man was chaos and poison to many who entered his life; all those lauded qualities of his also had their darker, monstrous, and plain unreliable flipsides. And for as many counterpoints as I’ve tried to find, tried to personally tried to figure my way around this, find any excuse for him, been in denial because of my appreciation for his music, I can’t get around what I fundamentally see him as: sun kissed trauma, riding on a wave of rich shit head narcissism.

I don’t think Dennis Wilson was a good person. I don’t think that good should be associated in any way with his personhood, and I don’t care how much money he gave or what he bought for whom. Considering this, and looking back at what I have written, I am left with what I find the very troubling question of what to think about the legacy of Dennis Wilson.

Endnotes

[1] He also apparently had two years worth of unpaid back taxes. Overall this is a habit common to pop musicians broadly, overspending while cash and assets are still liquid and good, and then eventually running so deep into debt off the security of your predicted income you lose it all.