Since their inception, Mike Love co-wrote a significant portion of the Beach Boys‘ songs, mostly with cousin Brian Wilson, who wrote the majority of the group’s catalog. And while brothers Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson also made contributions to the group, they didn’t co-write much with older brother Brian, who, once he learned the studio mechanics and crafted a more innovative approach to production, entered another stratosphere, melodically and lyrically.
Though the Wilson brothers rarely shared co-writing credit, several songs were co-penned by Briand and Carl, including “Our Sweet Love,” “Good Timin’,” “Friends,” and “Dance, Dance, Dance.”
“Carl was a very, very sensitive writer,” said Brian Wilson in 2007. “He was a sensitive person. He was a very good artist.”
By the late ’60s, Dennis started contributing more as a writer and co-writer—mostly with songwriting collaborators Steve Kalinich and Gregg Jakobson—and left behind a collection of songs cemented in the Beach Boys’ songbook with his first batch of songs featured on the band’s 1968 album Friends and continuing through 20/20 (1969), Sunflower (1970), Carl and the Passions – “So Tough” (1972), Holland (1973), and their L.A. (Light Album) from 1979.
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[RELATED: 4 Songs Dennis Wilson Wrote On His Own for the Beach Boys and Solo Work]
“Little Bird”
Unlike Carl, Dennis never wrote with Brian, who cited his brother’s Beach Boys song “Little Bird,” from the group’s 1968 album Friends, as a favorite. Originally, Brian had written “Little Bird,” but declined any songwriting credit to give his brother some recognition for his contributions to the song.
“Dennis gave us ‘Little Bird’, which blew my mind because it was so full of spiritualness,” said Brian. “He was a late bloomer as a music maker. He lived hard and rough, but his music was as sensitive as anyone’s.”
Brian added, “I helped Dennis on ‘Little Bird’ with the chord progressions and showed him stuff on piano. I thought his songs were remarkable. I thought he was a genius. Dennis was a really, really good person with a lot to say musically. I was shocked [when I heard his stuff]. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.”
Though uncredited, “Little Bird” could be considered the only Beach Boys collaboration between Brian and Dennis.
Outside of “Little Bird,” the brothers didn’t collaborate again, even on his Dennis’ solo debut, and his only release before his death in 1983, his 1977 album Pacific Ocean Blue. “I liked it, I liked it a lot,” shared Brian of his brother’s debut. “But I was never a part of his records except for ‘Little Bird.’ I added some stuff to ‘Little Bird,’ but basically he was on his own.
When asked if Dennis ever asked for Brian’s input, he said, “No, he [Dennis] never did. He sort of played it cool with me.”
Pacific Ocean Blue
A collaboration between Brian and Dennis likely never happened because of their deeper mutual admiration and respect for one another as musicians and their urgency for one another to stand out, individually, as artists.
“When my record was finished, Brian was the first to hear it,” recalled Dennis in 1977. “In the middle of some tracks, he’d say, ‘I can’t stand this’ and walk out of the room. Sometimes he’d laugh. Sometimes he’d cry. I guess he was thinking that he’d seen me grow up as a musician.”
Though Brian said he knew Dennis’ Pacific Ocean Blue tracks, he later said that he had never heard the album since it was too painful to listen to. “After Dennis died, people used to ask me all the time what I thought about his solo record, ‘Pacific Ocean Blue,’” said Brian in his 2016 memoir, I am Brian Wilson. “I have said that I never heard it, that I won’t listen to it, that it’s too many sad memories and too much for me. That’s sort of true, but not really. I know the music on it. I was around for much of the time in the mid-’70s when Dennis was cutting the record. I loved what he was doing.”
Brian also said that his favorite song from the Pacific Ocean Blue sessions was “You and I,” adding, “I love that cut. But I haven’t ever put the record on and listened through it the way I have with other records, or the way that other people have with that record.”
Pacific Ocean Blue timestamped Dennis coming into his own as an artist. “This was when he fully accepted himself as an artist,” Pacific Ocean Blue co-producer Gregg Jakobson told Mojo in 2002. “Brian had shown him chords on the piano, but as he’d become more proficient, the music that came forth was not derivative of that. Having his own studio helped tremendously. With a little encouragement and the right tools, Dennis took off.”
“He is a Master.” —Dennis Wilson
Dennis was always in awe of his older brother’s virtuosity in the studio and around a song. He once called Brian a “master” and admitted that he was “dumbfounded” by his brother’s talent.
“He is a master, musically,” Dennis told Melody Maker in 1976. “I am dumbfounded at him. I am in awe of him. When you sing on something like ‘In My Room’ and then sit back and listen to what he’s done, not just with my part, but with the song.”
He continued, “When you realize, I’m devoting my life to Brian on a musical level, and the rest of the group all feel the same way. When Brian plays something for us, we just gape. It gets very emotional.”
Shortly after the Beach Boys opened their studio in Los Angeles in 1974, Dennis recalled that Brian’s excitement was “infectious” on the rest of the band.
“Brian is like a little kid in the studio, like a kid who’s just discovered sex for the first time,” said Dennis. “He rushes around playing this and that, and telling us to play this and that. The enthusiasm he still has is infectious, really.”
Photo: Mark Sullivan/Getty Images
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