‘Pacific Ocean Blue’ and Dennis Wilson’s tragic allure of the ocean
Nobody was quite sure what Dennis Wilson was looking for when he decided to take a swim in the Marina Del Rey on December 28th, 1983. Maybe it was some of the belongings that got tossed over the side of his boat amidst the divorce from his wife three years earlier. Maybe he was simply looking for an escape from the waters he spent so much of his free time in. Whatever it was, Wilson’s swim quickly turned deadly.
Just six years earlier, Wilson released his sole solo studio album that doubled as a tribute to the untold possibilities and carefree waves of the same ocean that killed him, Pacific Ocean Blue. Filled with pained ballads, emotional odes, and plenty of aquatic imagery, Pacific Ocean Blue remains the perfect portrait of Wilson, including both the triumphant highs and the staggeringly painful lows.
By the time Wilson finished work on the album, The Beach Boys were in complete disarray. With the infrequent presence of Wilson’s brother Brian, the remaining members fought for control over the band’s musical direction. Dennis had already failed to produce a solo album at the start of the decade, and a hand injury required the band to hire Ricky Fataar as their new drummer, further exasperating Wilson’s already-escalating drinking problems.
While he recovered, Wilson did what he had always done: he retreated to the ocean. Dennis was famously the only real surfer in The Beach Boys, and his athletic build made him a stark contrast to his brothers Brian and Carl. Dennis was always the odd one out: where his brothers were introverted and intellectual, Dennis was impulsive and excitable. His lower, raspy voice also didn’t fit in with his brothers, but it did give The Beach Boys a slightly rougher edge to their pristine harmony work.
By the time he recovered enough to resume his drumming duties with the band, Wilson began to seriously reconsider making his solo album. A handful of songs had been left dormant for years, and now he had written a number of additional tracks (including parts of Billy Preston’s ‘You Are So Beautiful’, depending on who you ask) in the interim. By 1975, Mike Love had almost fully converted The Beach Boys into a nostalgia act, leaving Dennis little choice but to complete his own album if he wanted to see his songs be released.
Pacific Ocean Blue is by no means a perfect album. If your own tastes trend away from the schmaltzier side of late-1970s yacht rock, then much of Pacific Ocean Blue will be tough to stomach. But Wilson’s gritty edge helps lend additional weight to ballads like ‘Thoughts of You’, ‘Time’, and ‘Farewell My Friend’. With every weathered croak and creaky vocal hum, Wilson opens up an entirely new world outside of the exacting perfection of The Beach Boys’ material.
The prime example of Wilson’s ability to translate his unique sensibilities to the kind of music that audiences had come to expect from a Wilson brother is ‘River Song’. Featuring Carl on co-lead vocals, ‘River Song’ props Wilson’s soulful howl up with a lush wall of sound that nearly reaches gospel levels of energy at its peak. Through his choked bray, Dennis longs for escape from the city life that was stifling him. It remains a beautifully bittersweet encapsulation of the black sheep of the Wilson family.
Admittedly, the most alluring parts of Pacific Ocean Blue are the most macabre: the frequent references to wanting to return to the water, the eroded croak that years of drug and alcohol abuse turned his voice into, the pained love songs that could be directly traced back to Wilson’s own crumbling personal life. Pacific Ocean Blue had every right to be a car crash, thanks to the realities of Wilson’s daily life, and he doesn’t do much to shy away from those ugly realities.
But rather than let his demons overtake him, Wilson appears to transcend throughout Pacific Ocean Blue. Messages of resolve and optimism abound throughout the album, indicating that Wilson was seeking a sort of therapy in the music he was making. There were also signs that Wilson could be more than just a ballad singer: ‘Dreamer’ employs dry funk, ‘What’s Wrong’ is a rollicking rock and roll tune, and ‘Pacific Ocean Blues’ finds Wilson carving out a solid identity as a blues rock howler.
Unfortunately, Wilson couldn’t quite live up to the promise that Pacific Ocean Blue laid out for him. Attempts to record a follow-up were constantly stifled by Wilson’s erratic behaviour, and the lack of tangible commercial success behind Pacific Ocean Blue quickly cast the album into obscurity. For a number of years, it was almost impossible to find the album in any format – a tenuous relationship between Caribou Records and its distributor, CBS Records, kept Pacific Ocean Blue from ever having a consistent availability or pressing status.
In the meantime, Wilson kept touring with The Beach Boys, although drug and alcohol abuse caused Dennis to quit and rejoin the band numerous times. Wilson also felt a sense of resentment from his bandmates: although Pacific Ocean Blue wasn’t a major hit, it did begin to eclipse the popularity of the band’s most recent LP, Love You, and would go on to outsell the M.I.U. Album. “They kept telling me I had my solo album now, like I should go off in a corner and leave The Beach Boys to them,” Wilson told Rolling Stone in 1977. “The album really bothers them. They don’t like to admit it’s doing so well; they never even acknowledge it in interviews.”
The water continued to be a refuge for Wilson away from the tumult of The Beach Boys, but soon his own addictions were beginning to take a toll. On the front of Pacific Ocean Blue, Wilson appears heavily bearded, years removed from his refined good looks of The Beach Boys’ heyday.
Rocky relationships with Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie and Shawn Love, the alleged daughter of Wilson’s bandmate and cousin Mike Love, caused Wilson to continue to try and find refuge in the friendly arms of the ocean. On December 28th, 1983, those friends arms turned fatal, and Dennis Wilson drowned off the coast of California.
Ultimately, it was decided that Wilson’s body should be returned to the same waters that gave him so much life and, ironically, wound up taking that life as well. At the time, only Navy veterans were allowed to be buried at sea, but President Ronald Reagan overruled the custom to make an exception for Wilson. With that, Dennis Wilson became forever committed to the Pacific Ocean, the same place where his legacy largely sits with Pacific Ocean Blue.
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