You already know that the incredibly sunny look and sound of the Beach Boys just has to be rooted in a sex depraved, dope-addicted cult of demonic energy. It wouldn’t be american rock-n-roll from the 1960’s if it were any other way.
As the legend goes, Dennis Wilson picked up a couple of the Manson girls once when they were hitching from San Francisco down to Los Angeles. He was charmed and took them home for “milk and cookies”. That’s an extra gross, hippie bro way to say he paid some dirty hitchhikers to shag his brains out. Thing is, those hitchhikers were Manson girls, and the shag was actually sexmagick and poor Dennis Wilson was never really going to find his way back to his old life.
When the girls returned to Spahn Ranch, they dutifully reported their adventures to the sickest and dirtiest of all the hippie, pimp, drug dealers across the grimy country, Chuck Manson. Now, Charlie, of course, wanted to get down to Los Angeles and express himself in person to Mr. Wilson as soon as possible. A few days later Dennis Wilson came home to find The Family bus parked in his driveway. His palatial Rustic Canyon party house was full of naked girls, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Best of all, this scene vibrated with something wild and dangerous, something that felt like it might be teetering on the edge between the everyday world and what was called the Age of Aquarius. Chuckie’s scene had a vibe that both scared and seduced its victims.
Dennis Wilson would pay for everything for Charles Manson and up to twenty of his girls at a time for the entire summer of 1968. He would refer to Manson as The Wizard. He told people that The Wizard believed himself to be both God and the Devil and that, sometimes, The Wizard scared him. Wilson had also claimed in an interview that he intended to produce and release an album from Manson on his label Brother Records.
While the Beach Boys did perform, record, and release a Manson song as a B-Side to one of their singles, a full Manson album was never released and, by all accounts, was never recorded in the first place. Wilson managed to throw The Family out of his life after they racked-up over a 100k in parties and damages. He is lucky to have wrested them from his property at all, but their shadow would remain like an ethereal stain he would never entirely cleanse.
In later years he would claim he knew why Manson did what he did. Wilson said he was going to put the story in a book. But instead, of course, he drank a couple bottles of wine and took a slow dive into the cold, dark waters off the end of his yacht and drowned, right there, in the marina where he kept it parked.
By all accounts, the final years of Dennis Wilson were marked by heavy drinking and depression. We can only speculate as to what he might have taken to his grave. What we do know is that Dennis Wilson once fell under the spell of a dark man whose shadow eventually pulled him under, like a riptide, and out to sea.
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