It's often said that Dennis Wilson made the best solo record of any Beach Boy, 1977's Pacific Ocean Blue. This account appeared in The Word of July 2008.

"They dropped the body of Dennis Wilson into the blue Pacific Ocean, of which he’d once sung so beautifully."

What most people know is that Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who really was a beach boy. Where his elder brother Brian was a musical genius, but also a chubby geek who never went near a surfboard, Dennis was the real deal, a bronzed Californian Adonis who wowed the beach babes with his dazzling smile. Seemingly a simple, hedonistic soul, he inspired Brian’s early visions of a sun-kissed teenage heaven on America’s Pacific shore. You may also know the darker tales that followed – of his friendship with Charles Manson, for example. Or of how he became the Beach Boy who actually died by drowning.

Then there is the happier fact of Dennis Wilson’s short life, namely that he made the best solo record of any Beach Boy. This was never in the form-book. He was a decent drummer (though they often used a stand-in on the records) and a good singer, though not so pure and clean as Mike Love and the other Beach Boys. Yet his 1977 album, Pacific Ocean Blue, is widely and rightly considered a classic. It’s rather as if Ringo Starr had slipped away one day in 1966 and quietly made Revolver.

How did that happen? Pacific Ocean Blue is a great, lumbering, soft-rock Frankenstein of an album. It’s scruffy and passionate. Most of its songs lurch abruptly from lonely-boy-at-piano into vast conflagrations of a thousand overdubs, possibly with a New Orleans marching band thrown in. Like Wilson himself, it’s brazenly undisciplined but undeniably large of heart. The achievement is all the greater because Brian Wilson did not take part, though younger brother Carl contributes here and there. Beach Boy harmonies are used sparingly, and Wilson’s own singing is raw and vulnerable. On several tracks he sounds just about heart-broken.

It is in no sense “a drummer’s album”. He builds each number from a plangent piano base, slow and stately, usually to a crescendo. Farewell My Friend, an elegy for someone’s father, is sad and lovely (and was played at Wilson’s own funeral). River Song and Pacific Ocean Blues are stirring hymns in praise of nature. At a point when The Beach Boys themselves had lost their creative force and settled for being an oldies heritage turn, Wilson seized the chance to channel his creative frustrations. Here he holds nothing back.

The mystique of Pacific Ocean Blue has been helped by its rarity: it was only briefly available on CD. But this reissue is made doubly special by its second disc, containing the unfinished sequel Bambu. Previously unheard outside the community of swivel-eyed bootleg collectors that every great act attracts, Bambu is tremendous. These later tracks ebb and flow, swell and falter, with the same romantically wrecked grandeur as the first album. It’s good to have them around. Bambu should have sealed Wilson’s reputation, but he cancelled plans for a solo tour and never completed the album.

What went wrong?

Well, by 1977, Dennis was already looking weather-beaten. In less than a decade the former teen dream had gone from Ricky Nelson to Willie Nelson. He looked like an alcoholic Old Testament prophet. He had, as they say, “his demons”. He opened his home to the future mass-murderer Charles Manson and his harem of zombified hippy chicks. It was a terrible error, but as a female friend explained, “Dennis was all about sex. He called his penis The Wood and it had its own identity. It really ran him.” He clocked up five marriages and a major drug addiction. He fell apart. A colleague in the Beach Boys called him “a drugged-out no-talent parasite.” (Others were less charitable.) In his last conversation with Brian, he rang to cadge some cocaine money. Brian, battling through rehab, held firm. Dennis invited the family genius to “take a flying fuck”.

Drunk, he jumped off a boat in a California harbour in 1983 and was hauled up dead. Burials at sea are not normally legal in the USA but special dispensation was obtained from President Reagan, who was apparently a Beach Boys fan. So they dropped the body of Dennis Wilson into the blue Pacific Ocean, of which he’d once sung so beautifully.

Buy the CD at Amazon.co.uk

Buy the CD at Amazon.com