999,891: Dennis Wilson — Love Remember Me

Love Remember Me - Dennis Wils...

I used to want to be Brian Wilson. Back when I took a lot of acid, something about being a fractured genius with a grand piano in a sandbox really sang to me. In a later period, when I’d settled into the simpler pleasures of off-brand beer and cheap Mexican brick weed, Dennis became the more appealing figure.

Dennis, the youngest Wilson, never had any expectations on his shoulders, save scoring with the chicks and going surfing. When he emerged as the Beach Boys’ greatest talent in the wake of Brian’s well-publicized meltdowns, he was probably just as shocked as anybody. He didn’t have the knack for the studied, precise Works of Art™ that flowed from Brian’s mind, but his songs – and his singing - were full of fire, heart and truth.

By the time he recorded this track for his failed Bambu album sessions, his voice had been reduced to a drunken mumble of a snaggletoothed beach hobo. He didn’t so much sing, as push the words out. When he wasn’t shoving them, they would gurgle upward and then droop toward the floor, sticking in his beard.

His drooling vocals on “Love Remember Me” benefit its simplicity. The ragged, childlike view of love would be rendered too precious in another’s hands and throat. Peter Pan, approaching 40, is upended by the intimacy he never had from his family or his lovers. When Wilson cedes the vocals to choir for the extended, meditative coda, he becomes his own hype man, burbling and babbling “Yeah” and “Come on” over and over and over, while the choir promises that his love will come driftin’/tumblin’/gently down on whoever would be so lucky to have something so pure.

Having spent the opening of the song reminding himself that love is as normal as living, dying, laughing and crying, you get the feeling that he doesn’t know if he can give the love he claims and that the coda is his chant, his prayer, for his benefit.