The relationship between Manson and the Beach Boys' drummer began that night, based on a mutual interest in sex and drugs. Wilson was not the only young Hollywood hedonist to fall under the malign spell of Manson's "family", and he had more or less managed to shake off their persistent presence by the time the gang slaughtered Sharon Tate and other occupants of a mansion on Cielo Drive in August 1969. But the shadow had fallen across him, dimming the bright southern California sun, and it would refuse to budge.
Manson cannot be blamed for the factors that ruined the middle Wilson brother's youthful promise. Dennis's history of addictions had begun much earlier and stayed with him all the way to his death in 1983, at the age of 39, when he drowned while diving off the dockside at Marina del Rey two days after Christmas, in search of objects he had thrown overboard from his yacht. A postmortem examination revealed twice the legal driving limit of alcohol in his blood, along with traces of cocaine and valium.
He went to his death leaving behind bankruptcy, five broken marriages (including two to the same woman), four children, a bunch of bereaved heroin and cocaine dealers, a dozen or so songs scattered across the later Beach Boys albums, and the memory of his sandpapered voice, which could bring crowds to tears when he advanced to the microphone and closed a concert with a single chorus of You Are So Beautiful, which he had co-written with Billy Preston. He had long abandoned hopes of completing his second solo album, the follow-up to Pacific Ocean Blue, an extraordinary piece of work that appeared in 1977 before languishing for three decades as an expensive item for very discerning collectors; it is now receiving its first full CD reissue, along with a careful assembly of the remains of its putative successsor.
For many years, it was believed that Dennis's sole meaningful contribution to the Beach Boys came on the day, back in 1961, when he persuaded his older brother Brian that it would be a good idea to write a song called Surfin'. He was the group's only surfer, and his love of girls and cars made him, along with his floppy-haired good looks, the incarnation of the sunlit life serenaded in the group's growing catalogue of hit songs.
They had already passed the peak of their popularity when, with the aid of a succession of lyricists, Dennis began to contribute his own songs to their albums, a task made easier by the breakdown that severely reduced the output of the formerly prolific Brian in the late 60s. At a time when the group's popularity was on the wane, Dennis gradually established himself as a songwriter of very individual qualities; ultimately, Pacific Ocean Blue confirmed the existence of gifts not far removed in scope from those of the family's resident genius.
Curiously, it was during the year of his first encounter with Manson that Dennis began to write songs. For the first few years of the Beach Boys' existence, he had been too busy chasing girls and racing cars. When he stepped out from behind the drums to sing lead on the group's cover of Do You Wanna Dance, or on a ballad called In the Back of My Mind (both from the 1965 album The Beach Boys Today!), it became clear that he possessed a vocal timbre strongly contrasting with that of his two brothers, whose choirboy purity - along with that of their cousin, Mike Love - was a dominant feature of their sound.
California Girls, Good Vibrations, Pet Sounds and the Smile debacle were already history by the time Dennis began to make a place for himself as a composer, with a couple of deceptively artless songs called Little Bird and Be Still on the almost-acoustic album Friends in 1968. A year later, on 20/20, he had three songs, two of which explored a mood of husky intimacy with a subdued intensity that would become his speciality, and which somehow evoked the dark shade of Manson and the hippie dream gone bad. Never Learn Not to Love, originally titled Cease to Exist, was even co-written with Manson, who had musicial ambitions of his own; turn up the fade of All I Want to Do, the third of Dennis's songs on the album, to hear him having sex on the studio floor with one of the Manson girls (possibly not Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, to judge by the noises).
In 1969 he became the first Beach Boy to go solo, testing the waters outside the US by releasing a two-sided single, Lady and Sound of Free, recorded with the help of his friend Daryl Dragon (later to become famous as half of Captain and Tennille). Either track would have passed muster as a Beach Boys single, and their next album, Sunflower, included four of his songs, one of them a glistening ballad called Forever, with a lyric by his friend Gregg Jakobson, which became one of the best-loved items of the latter-day Beach Boys repertoire.
Songs of seduction were Dennis's forte, and they worked because they were written from life and for a purpose. When the group released an album called Carl and the Passions - "So Tough" in 1972, it contained two songs, Make It Good and Cuddle Up, that provided further evidence of his penchant for love songs so trancelike they sometimes seemed to have been slowed to a halt by the sheer rapture of their author's erotic contemplation. In that vein, there was even a masterpiece: Only With You, written with Mike Love, sung by Carl Wilson, the youngest brother, and included in the 1973 album Holland, is perhaps the most affecting love song in all rock (a fine alternative version, with Dennis singing the lead, is among the bonus tracks included in the new package).
By the time Dennis recorded Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977, the Beach Boys were in creative and financial disarray. With Jakobson co-producing and providing some of the lyrics, and an advance of $100,000 from James William Guercio, the head of Caribou Records (and occasional bass guitarist with the Beach Boys), Dennis set himself to stretch his talent as far as it would go. He took his cue from Brian's willingness to expand song-structures and to search for combinations of sounds far beyond the norm in the idiom from which they had sprung.
Above all, the album is an essay in the exploration of texture. Heavy strings and a gospel choir mark the opening track, River Song, which also introduces the ecological theme that recurs throughout the album, notably in the title track. The strategic use of banjo, bass harmonica and tuba on other songs marks an intelligent use of resources that Brian had been beginning to exploit on the abandoned Smile sessions. The fondness for ponderous, four-square rhythms is a characteristic drawn from Dennis's own drumming with the Beach Boys, as astute and original in its way as that of Ringo Starr with the Beatles; somehow, he was able to give momentum to mass. You and I, however, is as light as a feather: written with his twice-wife Karen Lamm, from whom he was in the process of separating, it recalls the simplicity of the songs on Friends with which he started his composing career almost 10 years earlier.
With its textures and densities constantly in flux, often within the same song, and allusions to many forms of American vernacular music coming and going in an instant, the variety of moods on Pacific Ocean Blue is exhilarating. The brief eruptions of quasi-Dixieland collective polyphony from a horn section that intersperse Dreamer are almost cinematic in effect, conceptually well ahead of anything else being attempted at the time.
Before the album came out, Dennis was already recording its successor, to be titled Bambu. It would, he promised, be "a hundred times what Pacific Ocean Blue is". Life, sadly, got in the way, but the remnants form something more than a majestic ruin. He was clearly continuing the search - which we now think of as typically Wilsonian - for new ways of colouring words and music. And in Love Surround Me and I Love You, we can hear two further glimpses into the lifelong erotic reverie of which his days and nights with the Manson gang were such a toxic distortion.
Pacific Ocean Blue: Legacy Edition is out on Sony-BMG on June 16.
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