Interview: Early Dennis Wilson Champion; Dan Addington

Pray For Surf ~ Interview with Early Dennis Wilson Champion, Dan Addington

PHIL @ Pray For Surf  ~ Dan, tell us how you found, then became a fan of The Beach Boys

DAN ~ It was my first and best musical love affair! It was the bicentennial, and I was a Jr high kid, having just moved from Alaska to Iowa. The Beach Boys were all over the pop culture riding the wave of their (first) comeback. Rock and Roll Music was a hit on the radio, and It's OK was getting a lot of airplay, too. Endless Summer had already been reintroducing a new generation to the band's early work. Brian Wilson was on the cover of magazines all over the newsstand, and the Beach Boys were touring. It was a perfect storm. I had heard of the Beach Boys, of course, but those songs from 15 Big Ones on the radio were what first grabbed my attention. I remember hopping on my bike and heading down to the record store. I wanted more, so I grabbed the first 45 I saw, a reissue of Barbara Ann. I didn't have enough money to by LPs yet, but I would buy a new 45 whenever I could scrounge a buck together. Soon, I headed down to the library, and my first Beach Boys album experience was checking out that first "Best of the Beach Boys" album. I couldn't take it any longer, so I scraped the money together and bought my first Beach Boys album, which was a Pickwick compilation of their best car songs called "Little Deuce Coupe". 

By the end of that year, I had gotten my hands on almost all the pickwick compilations, and played them all the time on my Sears turntable. I made cassettes of the songs and gave them to my friends. I remember riding my bike to the Dairy Queen with my best friend who also loved to sing, harmonizing on 409 the whole way. 

That next summer of '77, a friend's brother stopped by my house on his way to college, and he gave me some albums. Among them were two double lp sets issued by Reprise in 1974. One set packaged 20/20 and Wild Honey together, the other packaged Friends and Smiley Smile together. My mind was blown the rest of the summer. Can you imagine getting a huge dose of those four albums all at once after immersing myself in the early stuff? I still remember I put on a pair of headphones expecting to hear the beachboys of the early 60s, and catching an earful of She's Goin' Bald. That was totally messed up! Ha Ha! To this day, Smiley Smile remains one of my favorite Beach Boys albums.

PHIL ~ What caused your focus to turn to Dennis Wilson?

It wasn't until my 1st year after grad school that I decided to complete my Beach Boys collection with Carl and The Passions (1972) and Holland (1973), two albums that somehow had evaded me (along with most of the music listening population, it seems). As a mature listener and fan, I can't overstate how moved I was by these albums. Everything on them was amazing to me. But there were songs that I found especially powerful. On Holland, I was perplexed and intrigued by the mystery and power of Steamboat, and the first time I heard Only With You, I just cried. (Ahem, I mean, that's what I was told. I don't remember) and I swear it never fails to make me well up a little every time I play it. It's a perfectly realized statement of simple, humble connection with another person. On Carl and the Passions, from the previous year, there was so much great material, and I loved it all, but I felt almost haunted by Cuddle Up, another intimate love song that has almost hymn-like properties at the beginning, and moves effortlessly from a light piano and whispered lyric to a layered orchestral track. So many movements in such a short, intimate composition. It was unlike any song I had ever heard. Make it Good was a mystery to me. What was that? It wasn't Rock. A raspy voice and an orchestra, a seemingly free-form composition with no intro, no verses, no chorus. An ecstatic utterance, a swirling, echoing cry. I loved all the songs a=on these albums, but these were different. 

Remember this was before the internet, before Youtube, before most of the Beach Boys books we take for granted were published, and any info that you COULD dig up was all about Brian Wilson. So, all I had was the music and the liner notes, and each one of these songs that intrigued me were credited to D. Wilson. Dennis Wilson. Dennis. The drummer. I started digging through the other later albums. 20/20, Friends, Sunflower, and finding the Dennis Wilson compositions. All the while, I had this faint memory from that second summer of my Beach Boy awareness in 1977, seeing posters for Dennis Wilson's solo album Pacific Ocean Blue in all the record stores in our town. Hmmm. I hadn't seen POB in any used bins since, but now, suddenly, I was obsessed and on the hunt, spurred forward by this new discovery of Dennis as a composer and a nagging memory of a solo album that once existed. It was the early 90s and CDs were a big deal at the time, and even the great record stores in Chicago were focused more on CDs than vinyl. There was no Ebay. I couldn't find a vinyl copy of POB anywhere. The holy grail was finally uncovered in CD form at a used shop. POB had been in print for less than a year in 1991, and this was one of those copies. I grabbed it, and just never stopped playing it.

PHIL ~ You began serious research; the late 90’s? How difficult was that before the music world had discovered Dennis?

DAN ~ Well, as I mentioned before, nothing existed yet, research-wise... at least nothing you could really find, and the actual music was all out of print. So it was a very fallow time. The years passed, and as the internet dawned, so did the opportunity to connect with fellow Beach Boys fans. The Usenet discussion groups were a great new way to have fast threaded conversation, and the Pet Sounds Mailing List and the Smiley Smile board emerged as leading discussion areas. Everyone was talking about Smile - it was the beautiful mystery of The Beach Boys' legacy. Meanwhile, my personal Smile was prompted by rumors that Dennis had begun a second solo album that people called "Bamboo". I was just discovering bootleg CDs in used record shops of unreleased Beach boys outtakes, and a I found a couple discs of seriously lo-fidelity Dennis Wilson material. These "unofficial" discs were like water for the fellow music enthusiasts I was talking to, and I was driven to find out as much as I could about Dennis, whose material always resided in the shadow of Brian and the Beach Boys as a band. 

PHIL ~ Who were you communicating with and connecting to back then?

DAN ~ Perhaps the earliest and most influential person I connected with during these early discussion times was musician and studio technician Jason Penick. He was just becoming a committed fan of Dennis' work when I started noticing his posts online. He was a student back then, living in Chicago and going to Columbia, studying music production. I was working at an art gallery in River North, and when we finally discovered our proximity to each other, we really got to work. He's a great guitarist, and we started playing music together and did a couple of bar gigs. We were both actively collecting and trading unreleased material, and man, when we'd find even a fragment of a Dennis recording, we'd go nuts. We worked hard to get material. As word got out that we were looking for this stuff, we were contacted by collectors, and two in particular gave us some alternate tracks to familiar Dennis tunes. Jason had access to Pro-tools, so we started doing our own mixes of these songs the way other people were putting together their own versions of Smile. We called our endeavor Cisco-discs, after my boyhood dog Cisco. We had our own version of Bamboo which had mixes no one else would find because they were ours. It really was thrilling. 

PHIL ~ A website resulted ...

DAN ~ Yes! This whole time we were documenting everything, and I was frustrated that there was no place online to find information about Dennis or his music. I started to think that maybe no one else was really as into it as we were, and the realization struck that maybe WE should put together a website. At this point, I think it was around 1995 or 96. We started writing, and I started putting together a site that looked pretty good on that tiny Windows 95 machine at the time! 

It's still exciting to recall the doors that opened up once that website was live. So many people contacted us about the music we were trying to uncover, and w really felt like advocates for the release of Dennis' music. It seemed a crime that not only was his solo album out of print in any format, but so was ALL the music he had composed for the beach boys that appeared on those post-Pet Sounds late 60s and early 70s albums. I mean, imagine it: a world without streaming services and Youtube, and world where all these albums were not available unless you lucked into the albums at a resale shop. I remember how excited we got when well known members of the Beach Boys classic 70s touring band started emailing US, asking for copies of our Dennis CDs to give as Christmas presents to his family. WHAT?! CRAZY! Before long, I was talking to Dennis collaborators like Gregg Jakobson, Carli Munoz, Steve Kalinich, Stanley Shapiro, and even Rev Alexander Hamilton, director of the Double Rock Baptist Church Choir, who sang on Dennis' River Song.

But a phone call that really resounded for years to come was from Jon Stebbins. He was tentative at first in an email, asking what I knew about Dennis and his music. We talked soon, and hit it off. He told me he was working on a book on the life of Dennis Wilson, and just wanted to chat. Of course, he already knew more than I did by a long shot, but it was nice, for both of us maybe, to feel like there were others out there who were really advocating for Dennis' work. I loved those conversations, and was so excited when his book "Dennis Wilson, the Real Beach Boy" came out. That was when the floodgates started to open. The press that spun off of that book's release got Dennis' name in every major press outlet, each new Beach Boys compilation CD included a previously unreleased Dennis track, and Jon continued to build a slow, steady case for the eventual release of Pacific Ocean Blue. Jon is a very generous guy, and I was thrilled to see that he included my name in the liner notes of POB's eventual 2 disc release. That was a big deal. And without Jon spearheading that effort and being such an articulate advocate, I honestly don't believe that reissue would have happened and there'd be no legit way to listen to his solo music.

The capper event was the Dennis Wilson Bash, which was held at Chez Jays, LA (an old Dennis Wilson haunt) in December of 2003. Stebbins asked me to co-organize the event and help promote it on the Dennis Wilson website, which was really rolling by then. Betty Collignon was also a co-organizer, and it was a fantastic event. For a couple of midwest guys (Jason went out with me), it was a thrill to meet all these family members, musicians, and fiends in person for the first time, and to be part of the house band. (Check out this link for a complete description and pics of that historic event>>>) 

PHIL ~ What does the casual fan not know about Dennis? His contributions to The Beach Boys?

DAN ~  I don't think there is such a thing as a casual Dennis Wilson fan. He's still kind of a deep cut, so if you know his music, you're probably pretty well informed. That's my take, at least. Now, if you mean casual Beach Boys fan, they may not be aware of Dennis as a songwriter at all. More as the drummer and sex symbol of the band, which by the way were important contributions in their early years. The casual fan may not know how inventive Dennis was at the piano. They may not know that, in spite of being mostly self-taught (and who knows what that really means growing up in THAT family), he was surprisingly adept instrumentally. The common story is that they got Dennis to play the drums 'cause he wasn't very musical but could beat on stuff. Well maybe at first it seemed that way, but by 77, he was playing nearly all the instruments on his album, the FIRST solo album by anyone in the band. I also think there's a misconception about his voice...that he always had a raspy tone and limited range in contrast to his brothers. Sure, that was the type of voice he ended up with, which gave him a different kind of expressive timbre, but sing along with some of his music. He's not singing bass. He has a great range, and gets pretty high in full voice. I never met the man, but I think the humility, generosity, and grace that people who knew him always talk about are defining attributes that go against the type he was often made out to be...you know, reckless, wild, cocky. He was complex, and it would be a mistake to either pigeonhole him or to lionize him, but a simple sense of humility and uncynical wonder pervades his interviews.

PHIL ~ Dan, you are an artist and owner of an art gallery. Where do you see "art" or hear an artist in Dennis' work?

DAN ~ Well, the word artist gets thrown around a lot, but my perspective on visual art leads me to some thoughts about Dennis as an artist. There are certain attributes that I have come to believe in as defining or describing artists. Curiosity, a unique individual path, not merely crafting a product, but seeking out new ways to express something. Believing in craftsmanship, and pushing your technique in new directions. having a maturing point of view that is consistent but still experimental. Once you become familiar with Dennis' work and history, it becomes apparent that these ideas describe him and his art to a T. 

PHIL ~ Do you hear a spirituality, a connecting to God, in Dennis' work?

Dan - I hear a deep yearning for peace and meaning and connection in his work. I don't think he or any of the Wilson brothers strayed that far from the church connection of their youth. As Dennis matured, he did some of his best work with Steve Kalinich, and according to Steve, Dennis really resonated with the overt spiritual themes in Steve's poetry. There are spiritual references throughout POB, both in terms of religion in references to Jesus and to the hope of an afterlife, but also in his reverence for nature and creation. When Dennis would use sacred music tropes in his compositions like hymn-like organ passages, or the gospel choir on River Song, it wasn't for cheap effect. He was striving to evoke spiritual meaning in the music.

I believe that ANY kind of beauty is a gift of God, and I don't see "beauty" as something pretty, but as something that points towards truth with both passion and elegance. Does Dennis' work exhibit truth? I'd sure say so. It's been said that when Dennis recorded, it was like he was bleeding on tape. I get a sense from interviews that Dennis was a spiritual seeker. It's worthwhile to go on the journey of meaning with him through his art. And I don't think someone has to be a believer is a certain religion or in God to partake in and reveal spiritual truth through their art.

[ PFS Note:Hear Dan Addington on the Pray For Surf podcast>>> ]

PHIL ~ Please share your favorite Dennis song

I love so much of Pacific Ocean Blue, and songs like Thoughts of You and Time really stand out. They are a great meeting of bold sonic experimentation married to intimate lyrics and powerfully expressive performances. I think Barbara and Only With You are two of the greatest and most honest love songs I've ever heard. 

But the song that just always gets me, which was released on both Endless Harmony and the POB re-issue in two different mixes, is All Alone. It was a collaboration with Carli Munoz, and when heard now knowing the context of his life, the opening strains of "If I could live my life again, I'd never do you wrong, you better know" are almost too much to hear. It's very popular to put up a no-regrets front today, but this song is more honest than that, ending with the broken "In the sadness that I love you, left behind, I'm standing all alone." It's vocally heart-rending, but there's nothing self-pitying in the delivery. He owns it. If this song doesn't come immediately to mind as you read this, take a minute and check it out here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FteUZPgFHyM

PHIL - What's your favorite Dennis story.

DAN - If you mean a story ABOUT Dennis, well, you never know how much is true, right? I do like the oft-repeated story that, to profess his love, Dennis had a bed of roses shaped like a heart planted in Christine McVie's yard...and that some time later, the bill for the romantic landscaping arrived in her mail. That's a good one!

I have two brief personal stories: 

1. I was in High school, and I went to what was probably my 3rd Beach Boys show, around 1980. The stage was in the round. Dennis broke a stick, and threw it over his shoulder and kept playing. That broken drum-stick landed at the feat of my best friend, who was the drummer in our little high school rock band.

2. I'm a big Todd Rundgren fan. A few years ago, I got to go backstage at a Todd Rundgren concert because the opening act had seen my Dennis Wilson website and wanted to talk about his music. 

PHIL ~ Give us your perspective on the legacy of Dennis Wilson?

DAN ~  I guess there are two sides to the coin when you are in the Beach Boys. Without the band, Dennis might not have ever been a professional musician, but because of his membership in the band, he is associated with a type of music in the public ear that doesn't really typify their total musical output, and certainly doesn't come close to the work that Dennis did with or without the band. Therefore, it makes it hard to convince the uninitiated that the drummer of the surfin', hot-rod lovin' Beach Boys was not only merely a good solo artist, but was a creative, artistically expressive musician with a unique vision and voice. So it's tough for the music to find a huge popular audience. But so many more know about this music, now that much of his solo material has been released and streaming services have made it available. The odds are so much greater that larger audiences will continue to discover his catalogue. He's a real musician's musician, and when I talk to people in the music industry, artists or otherwise, so many more seem to know about Dennis now. And the music press seems happy to keep the conversation alive.

Dennis' legacy is that of a musician who pushed far past the expectations of all those around him, most remarkably his own family and band. As a sonic artist with a unique vision who strived to give voice to that vision in spite of marketing assumptions. As a cautionary tale, as if rock needs another one of those. I think his music ages well, and is unique enough that it transcends the styles of his or any other day.

PHIL ~ Thank you Dan. Final thoughts...

DAN  ~ Thanks, Phil. It's always great to discuss our favorite musicians with you. Pray for Surf!

• Rare Beach Boys videos @ YouTube.com/BB45s
• Our Prayers for The Beach Boys @ Facebook.com/groups/BeachBoysOurPrayer/
• Surf's Up: A Beach Boys Podcast Safari Facebook.com/PodcastSafari