On The Corner
Dennis the (Soulful) Menace
By Bill Bentley
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With thanks and permission from Stephen Kalinich and Bill Bentley___________________________________
It's hard being seen for only a small part of everything you are. Dennis Wilson was the drummer in the Beach Boys, the person who literally inspired the band into being. He was also the one who drove fast cars, chased wild women and always refused to be tamed. Sitting behind his drums, he attacked them with a pounding energy--a left-hander playing a right-handed kit--ferocious in his energetic enthusiasm. What most people couldn't tell was he also had an unwavering sensitive side and the desire to create his own music. He spent years exploring that creativity, right up until his drowning death in December 2003.
Poet and songwriter Stephen John Kalinich met the Beach Boys in the mid-‘60s and worked closely with the three Wilson brothers. Two of his collaborations with Dennis Wilson are on the new reissue of Pacific Ocean Blue, with many other songs still unreleased. Kalinich spent years in the studio and around Los Angeles with Wilson, and experienced a side of the man very few others did. Many of his memories are told here for the first time.
Sonic Boomers: Who was the first person in the Beach Boys you met?
Stephen John Kalinich: Brian was the first, but before I met him I'd gone into the Brothers office in 1965 or '66 with a paper bag full of lyrics and poems. I had hair down to my waist, wearing granny glasses and started reciting some things. The people there arranged a meeting with Brian. He loved my lyrics and ended up signing me as a writer. The first person I worked with was Carl; he recorded me and Mark Buckingham, when we called ourselves Zarathustra and Thelebeus, doing something I'd written called "Leaves of Grass." They then signed me as an artist, too, but radio stations didn't want to play it because they thought it was about marijuana. It wasn't. It was inspired by Walt Whitman's poem, and was about the unity of all living things. I didn't use marijuana or any other drugs. People used to laugh at me for not doing them. Later, Dennis would say to me, "Oh man, when I looked at the leaves when we'd be high I would see all these wild things." I'd always tell him you didn't have to be high to see the leaves do that. You can just do it naturally. Anyway, the recording didn't happen but I was still under a five-year contract with the Beach Boys, so I started hanging around. Then Dennis and I got together at their office and he suggested we write something. He'd never written a song that had come out on a Beach Boys album. He was living at 14400 Sunset, I think that was the address, which had once belonged to Will Rogers. I was sitting at his piano looking outside the window and I saw a little bird up in the tree. And that's how the song "Little Bird" started. I began writing this lyric and left it on his piano. Then he called me at three in the morning after I'd left at midnight and said, "Stevie, I've got the melody for the song." But he wanted me to change it so it didn't have the word "strife" in it. The original version went: "Before things become real they are first in your mind/a love thought draws others of its kind/so cling to every thought that is real and your life will be free/free from toil, free from strife, free from chains that hold you down/the little bird looked down and sang a song to me/free for love, free for life for which to grow/the little bird looked down and sang a song to me." Dennis didn't want the word "strife" in it. He was on a kick against saying it at that time. I thought there is strife in life. Now you don't hear the word that much. You hear despondency, but that was the pre-stress era during the ‘60s. So that part was cut out of the song. Dennis put the melody to it and the Beach Boys recorded "Little Bird."
SB: Was Dennis already writing melodies then?
SJK: I don't think he'd ever done one that he finished. I might be wrong, but that was the first song that came out that we did together. It was on the Friends album. It was during same period we knew this Unity minister who loved my poems. She sent me a card for Christmas that said, "Be still and know that I am God," and I got the whole idea for the song "Be Still" from that card. Then I was at Dennis' house and put the words on the piano again, and he put that lovely gospel, almost prayer, melody to it.
SB: So Dennis Wilson always had the musical talent?
SJK: He definitely had that talent, but I think these kinds of lyrics brought out that side, not the rock side, but the side that was almost hymnal. It was like white gospel. Brian was always aware of the commercial side and the beat, but Dennis came from such a purity of music that he wasn't thinking of selling it, he was just thinking of expressing himself. It doesn't mean after he wrote it he didn't think of that. I'm just saying he wanted to be creative. He was in awe of creativity. I would say of anything, it was his religion, it was his God, it was his grace--his music. He bowed before music.
SB: How did your song "Rainbows" on Pacific Ocean Blue come about?
SJK: I was out in his backyard and it was a sunny day. We saw a multi-colored peacock run through the yard. The sun was shining, and I said, "Rainbows shining on my shoulder/sunshine warming up my day." That started from first seeing the peacock. The only other peacock I've seen in L.A. was at P.F. Sloan's 40 years later, so maybe peacocks are a thing with songwriters.
SB: What kind of man was he around the time you met him?
SJK: He wanted to get into being a composer and really express himself. He just loved it. In the mornings I would go to Brothers studio in Santa Monica, and we would sit on these big pillows and he would get someone like a classical pianist to play Bach for us on the piano. We used to go out to eat a lot, and we'd go to Mr. Chow's and hang out with different people. I was with him when he met Karen Lamm, who he would later marry. He had a driver named Ellis St. Rose, a wonderful man, who drove us in a brown Rolls Royce, a Corniche coupe. Ellis would call me the Prince and Dennis Little Lord Fauntleroy.
SB: Was Dennis a generous person?
SJK: He was very generous on one level, but he was also tempermental. He loved women a lot, and was almost always very good to them.
SB: Was there room for his creativity in the Beach Boys?
SJK: There should have been, but I think with all the combination of different people I don't think there was an opening like he needed. I believe he could have added so much. I don't even know if Brian at that time, because Brian was so involved with all their hits, if Brian could have given him the time. I don't know for sure, though; it's just my opinion.
SB: What other things did you and Dennis work on?
SJK: From the idea of the songs we had written, we thought up a concept of doing 60-90 one-minute songs and make them really inspirational. I am still working on that, but Dennis was the first who did that kind of thing with me, to put a feeling out there, which might seem corny to some people, but for reverence for life. Dennis was so compassionate. He loved the music. But again, he had a temper at times, and would say, "I don't want to hear anymore of that spiritual stuff today, get out of here." We almost came to blows a few times in the studio, and when he was going into a down period I tried to help, but he would reject it. We had a volatile friendship at times. On Pacific Ocean Blue, he asked me to co-produce the album with him before Gregg Jakobson came onboard, but I turned it down. I felt that at times the way he tried to take lyrics and not credit me for them. I think I was overzealous a bit, trying to do things my way. But when he heard my words, he would be inspired to write the melody. I always did the words first with Dennis. I don't know how he worked with other people, but when he worked with me it was always the words first. Never once did he have a melody first. The words inspired the melodies, at least in my relationship with him. That is something that is significant, I feel.
SB: How proud was he of making Pacific Ocean Blue?
SJK: He was very proud of it. He loved his music.
SB: What happened with the next album Bambu?
SJK: It never came out, and they've patched it together in a way that Dennis probably wouldn't have. I think the complications of his life and different problems kept him from finishing it. I said once that I felt Dennis drowned before he hit the water. He was spiritually advanced, but he didn't always live it out in actions. He did things that he knew were wrong and didn't want to do, but he did them anyway. Most people would forgive him, but I would hold a grudge a little longer, like he was wasting my creativity. Now I'm at a level that I realize the universe knows what's going on. Even if people do things, I don't know if it's karma, but I think life has a built-in way of knowing what you've done. So you can fool the world, but if you're not in your heart being 100 percent honest, you're not living an authentic life. I think musically Dennis tried to life the authenticity, but there were times he would lose control.
SB: Was he an impulsive person?
SJK: Completely. I told him not to act that way, and that was our point of conflict when I challenged him on things. People didn't stop him a lot of times, and they loved hanging around with famous people. All these people claiming to be great friends with Dennis now, they either did drugs with him or were in the background. When we created, it was just him and me. No one else was in that circle. Brian is that way too. Never once did Dennis let anyone else in, or ask their opinion. First of all, I wouldn't tolerate it. I'm a strong character to work with, but the Beach Boys really didn't need me. They were already famous when I met them; they gave me a break. My big opportunity was to work with Dennis. I think he had great melodies in him, and they came out of pure feeling rather than intellect. Dennis was a feeling melody writer. I think Brian has both, but Dennis was like an ocean gushing out. His cracked voice, instead of a deficiency, adds emotional tones. Nowadays people want to make records like that, and they pray for a voice that was his naturally.
SB: How long was it between making the two albums?
SJK: It was different periods. There were dozens of songs we did that are probably sitting in drawers somewhere. When I wrote with Brian, like "California Feeling" and "Child of Winter," the lyrics came first with him as well. When the music comes first, the melody is more predictable. That's my observation.
SB: Do you think it was hurtful to Dennis that Pacific Ocean Blue wasn't more successful when it was first released?
SJK: It might have been somewhat hurtful, and some historians now are saying it wasn't unsuccessful, but for that time it wasn't a big record. That's the reality of it. What people say now might not be how it really was then, but I'm trying to address the pure authentic side. Was I selfless? No. Did I not think of myself? No. I was all the human things that people are, but no one wants to claim. That's the thing that was real about Dennis. He was a conflicted, passionate, wonderful, incredibly excited about life person who had a lot of flaws, just like all of us. What's wrong with that? Isn't that what makes him human? Nobody knows what's going on anyway. We just do the best we can to fumble along.
SB: Did you and Dennis stay close after the album came out.
SJK: We stayed close even until a few days before he drowned. He would call me, but sometimes we didn't see each other as much, like during the Bambu sessions period. But we were in touch. And we created a work that only a few people know about. It's called "Life Symphony." It's a series of poems and observations on life, like communication, death, war. We never got to do the melodies to it. Someday I will do them, and dedicate it to Dennis. It started out as a 35-page poem about him. And then it has all the different parts about life. And we wanted to make a movie to play on the screen while we did the poetry and music live.
SB: When was the last time you saw Dennis?
SJK: I think it was about a month before he died. He would sink into depression a lot, and his body had started deteriorating. They said when he drowned he dove into the water to try and find Karen's (Lamm) picture. The thing to remember is Dennis was a spiritual guy in a human situation who had a lot of demons and he mastered them less than most people. To say he lived fully is really not true. That wasn't the impulse of his creativity. His creativity came out of his pain, but I think as he worked that out it could have gotten stronger. I didn't do drugs. I tried to encourage him not to. I recognized he had a really God-given inspirational talent and was a pure from-the-soul kind of artist. That's what he wrote. He was a soul writer, at least when I worked with him. And he had real rock & roll in him too, like very few people I've ever heard. Those two things together are what Dennis Wilson always was.
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The first time I met Dennis Wilson he jumped over the counter at Nick's Liquor on Washington Boulevard near the Venice pier and grabbed a half-gallon of Kamchatka vodka. Running out of the store like a thief, the clerk looked at me funny and said, "It's weird. Dennis always does that, but we just add it to the tab his accountant pays every month." It was fall of 1983, and Wilson was on his way down. We'd talk about music and drums over the next few months, relaxing on the beach or the street outside the Sunset Saloon at the edge of Marina del Rey. The musician had painted himself into a psychic corner, banned from Beach Boys shows and not sure how many moves he had left.
Record producer Harvey Kubernick was putting together his next spoken word collection then called Neighborhood Rhythms, and was asking people to contribute something inspired by where they lived. I could think of nothing more appropriate than Dennis Wilson, and recorded the poem below. A month later, the Beach Boy was dead, and for awhile an eerie silence fell on that area known as Hamburger Square, honoring one of its most memorable neighbors. By then, Johnny Rotten had bought a big house one block away and an era had obviously ended. Still, the Beach Boys' ghost stayed on.
--Bill Bentley
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Thank you Billy
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