Dennis Wilson’s “least favourite” song by The Beach Boys
Being in a band with your sibling, spouse or other close family member can’t be easy. Those supportive familial ties can sometimes go straight out of the window when it comes to agreeing on creative decisions, and tensions can rise when you feel like you have to put your foot down and berate the ideas of someone so dear to you on a personal level. The Beach Boys know all too well about this.
Having one family member in your band is arduous enough, but having three must be such an excruciatingly tough thing to navigate. With the brothers Wilson making up the core of the band, Brian, Dennis and Carl also had their cousin Mike Love to contend with at all times, and if you also want to include external powers that had a direct influence on their music in their early years, then having their own father, Murry Wilson as their manager must have been even tougher. The familial ties they all shared were inescapable, and that certainly caused them to butt heads on several occasions throughout their career.
While Brian has always been known as a mild-mannered individual, his brother Dennis was a little more unruly, and his decision to record solo albums throughout the ‘70s without his brothers was not one that was taken kindly to at all times. Despite their tensions, things would always be resolved and he would rejoin the band shortly after quitting, realising that such differences of opinion could never sever their relationship.
However, that didn’t mean that Dennis had to agree with everything his brother put out on the Beach Boys’ records, and he was never shy of making his feelings known that some releases weren’t up to scratch with their most ambitious works. With Brian being the principal songwriter in the band and the producer for all of their material, he would often get the final say in the direction things ought to be taken in, and this wasn’t always to the taste of Dennis.
Speaking to Vivien Goldman for Sounds Magazine in 1977, Dennis would pass judgement on some of the best and worst offerings from his older brother, and there were a number of disparaging comments that he decided to level at the chief Beach Boy.
While he did decide to plump for one of the most timeless and undisputed Beach Boys classics in ‘Good Vibrations’ as being his favourite song to play live, he was quick to follow up his praise for the song by critiquing what he thought was the worst effort from the group; their 1973 three-part suite ‘California Saga’. While it’s not the most reviled effort from the band ever, it also sees the band try and explore something that didn’t feel best suited to their strengths.
He would acknowledge that he had a degree of responsibility for the fact that some less-than-great material was ever released under the Beach Boys name and that he could have had more of a say in the matter, but he also pointed the finger at Brian for how “he chose to be the writer/producer for the Beach Boys,” before flying into a tirade about what he considered to be the worst album they group ever put out.
“15 Big Ones?” Dennis began. “I had a lot of fights over it, because I thought that Brian should be making original music. You really want to know? 15 Big Ones is a piece of shit. That’s the truth. I didn’t enjoy making it, and that’s the only one.”
He would go on to criticise the label for deliberately underpromoting the album and effectively allowing the band to reach rock bottom in terms of their career, but the fact is that it was never going to be good no matter how much interference there was from anyone. Yet, somehow, the songs from 15 Big Ones still don’t top ‘California Saga’ as being his least favourite.
