Pacific Ocean Blue

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Pacific Ocean Blue is the only studio album by American musician Dennis Wilson, co-founder of the Beach Boys. [3] When released in August 1977, it was warmly received critically, [4] and noted for outselling the Beach Boys' contemporary efforts. [5] Two singles were issued from the album, " River Song" and " You and I", which did not chart. I'm not quite as enamored with this one as some of my Strange Currencies colleagues, but Dennis Wilson's lone LP offers further proof that Brian wasn't the only songwriting/arrangement talent in The Beach Boys. Reissue mixed at House Of Blues Studio, Encino, CA. Mastered at Sony Music Studios & Battery Studios, NYC. 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. Review Summary: Dennis Wilson briefly breaks free from the clutches of the Beach Boys and addiction to put forth the most sincere and passionate record the band and its members would ever produce.

Maybe it didn’t sound quite that severe in 1977. Pacific Ocean Blue, worn as it feels, is also a strikingly well-written and consistently pretty album. The hindsight, knowing that Wilson would spend six long years struggling to finish another album while battling his alcoholism and then would die at far too young an age, colors the experience of the album. It makes the elegiac parts that much more elegiac; the melancholic parts feel like foreshadowing. Cripes, what effort it takes Coldplay to clone Coldplay. The turnaround this time is that they don't re-enter the world stage as the defining British act of their era. Salut, Amy. Here the boys' purpose of being a bit sad, sometimes, takes them to a mystery location with a lass in the snow (seasonal!) and asks, 'If you love it, let me know.' I don't. Many will. C'est la vie. Paul Flynn Friends yet to be alienated by Dennis in his final years, recall an increasingly incoherent, unstable character – who felt no need to curb the excesses that were losing him friends. In a sense that’s not surprising. The seventies had offered Dennis Wilson and his lifestyle nothing but positive reinforcement. While his brothers floundered, he did whatever he wanted to and creatively found himself in the process. Only when he lost his studio in 1978 – and, with it, the ability to record spontaneously – did that winning streak finally end.But perhaps it's those easy connections - in addition to the obvious one of his older brother - that have always left me wanting slightly more from Pacific Ocean Blue. Don't get me wrong: it's a fine record; just not quite the "lost masterpiece" that its legendary reputation in some circles suggests. Pacific Ocean Blue, however, is a wonderful study in Beach Boys surfer soul imbued with the expressiveness of Dennis' piano style. It's also a meditation on a complex world, one devoid of the nostalgic innocence preached by the Mike Love-fronted Beach Boys of late, and its remastered, 2xCD Legacy Recordings release-- the first CD release of the album since 1991-- is astoundingly refreshing. While Pacific Ocean Blue now stands as a curious outlier in Beach Boys history and a one-off for its author, all of these depleted qualities actually do make it belong somewhere. The graveled sound of it, the strung-out character of it, the fact that it unfolds like one last, desperate gasp—all of these distinctions make it a perfect document of the late ‘70s, of the ‘60s greats and the promise of their decade running to ground. It’s the sound of the long hangover, of excess and its tolls exhaled into a disenchanted atmosphere. It came out the same year as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, but it has more in common with their 1979 release Tusk in that way. These are the big, blown-out end games of stories that began 10 or 15 years before, the idealistic dream of the counterculture giving way to all of the sex and drugs and subsequent comedown. Dennis was just 16 when “Surfin’” received airplay, and Murray, the Wilson brothers’ (Brian, Dennis, & Carl) volatile dad, used his connections in the music industry to get the boys a contract with Capitol Records. Dennis’s deft drumming created the driving foundation Brian built his catchy songs upon. With their stunning harmonies, and near continuous output of top forty hits, it didn’t take long for the Beach Boys to become a media sensation, and record selling behemoth. Eventually Brian Wilson, suffering from exhaustion and a deeply misunderstood mental illness collapsed, taking him off the road. The person who felt his absence both on, and off stage most keenly, was Dennis. Without Brian, his best bud, the band became something of a daily chore. While he loved his younger brother Carl, the band’s lead guitar player, he chafed under the leadership of their authoritarian dad. His cousin, the BB’s gum chewing lead singer Mike Love, also disapproved, and it tipped off a, sometimes violent, lifelong feud. Dennis had an irrepressible free spirit and big appetites. He simply refused to conform to their unyielding constraints.

Legacy Recordings released a special 30th anniversary, 2-disc edition of Pacific Ocean Blue on June 17, 2008. [36] It includes material from the Bambu sessions. [37] [38] A limited edition 180-gram vinyl multi- LP box set was also released on the Sundazed label. [34] [39] The 62-year-old soul man has turned to youth for his first work in three years, but producer ?uestlove of the Roots and songwriters Anthony Hamilton and Corinne Bailey Rae have returned the compliment by making Lay It Down sound like Al Green of yore. Stunning in places ('I'm Wild About You'), pedestrian in others, the song remains the same, which is achievement enough at Al's age. Steve Yates In the thirty years since, Pacific Ocean Blue’s reputation has risen with the superlatives lavished up on it by fans such as The Verve, Primal Scream and The Charlatans. Unavailability has also played its part in pumping up the myth – so much so that you wonder if, heard in 2008, these songs stand to disappoint. In fact, key moments of Pacific Ocean Blue square dramatically up to your loftiest expectations. Mills, Fred. "Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue Reissued w/Unreleased Bambu". Harp Magazine. Archived from the original on 2008-02-28 . Retrieved 2008-02-28. Spring '08 LPs From Madonna, Coldplay, The Roots, Mudcrutch, Elvis Costello: Rolling Stone". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on April 9, 2008.

Contributions

a b Haggerty, Dan. "Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson's Solo Album To Be Reissued". 411mania. Archived from the original on 2008-06-01 . Retrieved 2008-02-28. Instead, when 15 Big Ones came out in 1975, effectively marking the band’s inexorable decline into becoming an oldies act, Dennis took the songs he had co-written with old pal Gregg Jakobson to Jim Guercio, head of Caribou Records – and duly became the first Beach Boy to release a solo album. Pacific Ocean Blue went head-to-head with The Beach Boys’ next album Love You, Dennis outsold his brothers by two-to-one. After Dennis died, people used to ask me all the time what I thought about his solo record, Pacific Ocean Blue. 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. My favorite song that he ever made was ["You and I"]. ... 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. [33] Release history [ edit ] Contains a print of a handwritten comment by Dennis Wilson & an LP-format Booklet with Photographs & Texts for his first solo-album.

Thompson, Paul. "Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue Finally Reissued". Pitchfork Media. Archived from the original on 2008-03-06 . Retrieved 2008-02-28. Here’s the funny thing about the album: It’s actually reminiscent of the Beach Boys mythos, in its weird way. Written by the guy who actually lived a (wild) version of the life the band depicted, it’s naturally an album that feels influenced by life on the coast, life on the water. Whether in “River Song”—where Wilson sings, “It breaks my heart/ To see the city”—or on “Pacific Ocean Blues,” there’s an ecological bent to plenty of his songs and lyrics. But like everything about him as a figure and about the album, there’s a more haunted undertone, hearing his paeans to this life with the knowledge that it would eventually be the sea that would take him away.Nearly 25 years after Dennis’s death, we’ll never know if this version of Bambu corresponds to the album that he confidently predicted would surpass Pacific Ocean Blue – especially bearing in mind the fact that this was an album that had been left abandoned by Dennis himself a full four years before he died in 1983. It was very out of the ordinary,” remembers Gill Goodman, the base commanding officer in San Pedro. He inspected Point Judith, the 82ft patrol boat assigned to the burial. Goodman was direct with the vessel’s commanding officer: “Don’t screw this up.” Hooper, Mark (2008-01-29). "Catch of the Day: Dennis Wilson". London: guardian.co.uk . Retrieved 2008-02-28.