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does anyone have any cool stories or memories to share about Dennis (or any of the Wilson brothers)?  I read on facebook awhile back about a guy who attended a BB concert in the early 70's, and before the show started somehow he had cut himself; Dennis came through the crowd and saw that he was bleeding and literally ran to get him a band aid.  shows what a big heart he had  ;D. 

Yeah, I have memories of all three Wilson brothers. Visit with Brian was great, visit with Carl was great, visit with Dennis was not so great.

From a BB Freaks United newsletter I have somewhere. Europe tour 1980. Dennis stopped the concert and demanded the audience at a poorly attended show all move closer to the stage.

Always liked that one.

Really? What happened when you met Dennis?

Yea I wanna know too.

Summer at the Oakland Coliseum in either 1974 or 1975. Late in the day, the sun was going down, it was very warm and the ladies in the audience were dressed accordingly. In between songs the crowd had started to quiet down. Dennis was standing up front at the mic. All of a sudden he gets his face real close to the mic and with a low voice booming out over the huge monitors says, "Look at all the big t*ts". I remember looking at the people around me and they were laughing so I guess what I thought I heard was actually what I heard!  ;D

 :lol

Thanks for sharing that story, Mikie!

I'll save it for later. It was after a November, 1973 concert at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento.

 :lol  I can picture that right now

You sure he wasn't singing Ding Dang? ;D

Have you guys heard Dennis tell the "Nixon joke"?

And you know "streaking" was a fad for awhile in the early 70's, especially in colleges. Around 1974, Dennis use to streak the stage. How many concerts he streaked, I don't know. There's a picture of him somewhere running naked on stage and Carl standing there laughing.

just yesterday I was trying to search to see if I could find that joke  :thud (no luck  :lol  :()

Was that pic in the insert in the Love You album sleeve?

Can't remember hearing the Nixon joke but remember another be told about a swordsman and a fly…!

(http://www.danaddington.com/denny/dennystreak.jpg)

Dennis told the joke during the Beach Boys concert on August 24, 1973 at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Connecticut. He was very talkative that day, standing up front on the stage, interacting a lot with the crowd and generally having a good time. Jack Reilly introduced the band at the beginning of the show.   

A little background. Richard Nixon was President of the United States at the time. Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State. Tricia Nixon was Nixon’s daughter.

It's obviously much better when Dennis tells the joke, but here it is:


Dennis: "Hey, I’m tellin’ a joke!"

“He (Nixon) was walking on the beach by his San Clemente home and he was walking and looking down at the sand going “Ah, sh*t, what next?” Ya know, and he looks and it said in the sand…..somebody urinated in the sand and it said, “Richard Nixon is a Prick”. And he was outraged; he called all his aids, called the FBI, the CIA, he called everybody in. He said, “I want a urine analysis” (Dennis interrupts the joke with “Are you listening?”, and the crowd responded with, “Yeeeeeeesssss!”). "Awright. And I want a handwriting analysis within two days! So….two days later his big aide comes up and he says, “Sir, I have some very bad news to tell you. He said, “The urine analysis…it’s…well…it’s Dr. Kissinger’s urine. He said, “But the bad thing is…..it’s in Tricia’s handwriting”.

Excellent! Aye, I do remembering hearing now but many thanks Mikie, it gave me a laugh again.

 :lol thanks for the cool stories Mikie  ;D keep em comin!

 :lol :lol :lol :lol

That was hilarious... and a bit disgusting!

There's a couple of variations on the punch line, but I think this is how Dennis told it:

In the time of the Samurai there was a powerful emperor who needed a new head Samurai so he sent out a declaration throughout the country that he was searching for one. A year passed and only 3 people showed up. The emperor asked the first Samurai to come in and demonstrate why he should be head Samurai. The first Samurai opened a match box and out pops a little fly. Whoosh goes his sword and the fly drops dead on the ground in 2 pieces. The emperor exclaimed, "That is very impressive!"  The emperor then asked the second Samurai to come in and demonstrate. The second Samurai also opened a match box and out pops a fly. Whoosh whoosh goes his sword. The fly drops dead on the ground in 4 pieces.
The emperor exclaimed, "That is really very impressive!" The emperor then had the third Samurai demonstrate why he should be the head Samurai. The third Samurai also opened a match box and out pops a fly. His flashing sword goes whoosshh whooosshh whoooossshhh whoooossshhh. A gust of wind fills the room, but the fly is still alive and buzzing around. The emperor, obviously disappointed, asks, "After all of that, why is the fly not dead?" The third Samurai smiled, "If you look closely, you'll see that the fly has been circumcised!

I bet this got a better crowd reaction than any of Mike's jokes that night  :lol

haha Agreed.

OK, Mikie, your "not so great" visit with Dennis took place exactly five days after my extremely positive encounter with Dennis in Anaheim.  So it's time to acquiesce to the demands of your fellow board members and let us know what transpired!

My November 16, 1973 encounter with Dennis, posted on this board five years ago, can be found here -   http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,6658.msg110804.html#msg110804

A couple of additions - I'm now thinking the "blonde chick" was most likely Ginger Blake, and since Ed Roach filmed part of the concert, I'm now thinking he was probably the guy with Dennis.  If Ed happens to be reading this it would be great to hear what he might recall of the flat tire incident 41 years ago.

On November, 21, 1973, I attended a Beach Boys concert in Sacramento, CA. After the concert, we walked around the back of the building to watch the band members get into their limos and maybe get an autograph. One of them was Al. Standing next to me, I recognized the owner of a record store that sold used and collectible records a couple of blocks over. He held up a Smiley Smile album and asked Al to sign it. Al stood up and looked over the top of the limo, took the album and looked at it for a long time. He told the guy that he'd never heard the album before! What?? The store owner told Al that he had another copy and Al's limo followed the record store owner down to his shop, where he opened it (at around 11 o'clock at night) to get another Smiley Smile album for him.

Al was serious! I kid you not. He said he'd never heard the entire Smiley Smile album since its release six years before.


Follow-up post by SBonilla (who use to post on this board. Steve, are you still around?)

The record store was The Record Exchange; I owned it, along with Tom Darling (later of the Twinkeyz).  The incident in question took place back stage (someone from KZAP, Dennis Newhall, maybe, had slapped backstage passes on us) . I had brought along Smiley Smile and Carl and The Passions to be signed (just in case).  When I handed SS to Al to be autographed, he looked at it and said, Wow, "I don't have this one." The strangest part of the whole thing was Mike Love contemplating the palm of his hand the whole time.  There was an after concert 'party' at the C Street Saloon; hardly anyone showed up. I was able to sit at the table where Dennis, Blondie and Ricky were. 

Same concert. November 21, 1973. My friend Tim and my girlfriend were with me. After the concert, we went outside and stood on the sidewalk near the street where a limo was parked. Dennis came out of the auditorium from the side door and a girl followed him into the back seat. After the car door was closed, the limo didn't move for awhile and the window was down, so Tim and I leaned over to say a few words to Dennis. My girlfriend was leaning on me with her arm around me. All of a sudden Dennis leaned out the window and says to Tim, "What are you lookin' at, f****t?" Needless to say, Tim is straight as an arrow, but......it wasn't cool of Dennis to say that to a big fan of his.

To this day, Tim is still a big Beach Boys and Dennis fan, but this always comes up when the subject of the band is discussed.

Maybe Dennis was having a bad day?
And what did Tim say back to him?

Yeah, Dennis had a bug up his ass about something. The girl with him wasn't Barbara, but she was pretty good looking with long hair. Tim didn't say anything back to him - he was as surprised as we were when Dennis said that.

 :( wow that was really rude of him.  I don't care if he was having a bad day or not, you guys came out to see them perform and put money in their pockets.  without the fans they would be nowhere, even Dennis said that.

Ouch!!  But thanks for sharing the story, Mikie, even though it was a bummer to read about Dennis' behavior that evening.

Does anyone know about the story where this girl broke (a glass window, if I remember right, of a door to someone's office) and she was freaking out and told Dennis about it.  then he took her to that office and put a stack of money on the desk and asked the guy "will this cover it?" (which it did).  then the girl was relieved and asked him how he wanted her to pay him back and he said that her smile was payment enough.

I've been trying to find that story for awhile now, has anyone heard that one before?

Haven't heard that story before, Retrokid, but here's another one about Dennis:

http://www.danaddington.com/denny/ashley.html

Imagine if a certain other band member said the same thing...

You must mean Bruce, right? ;D

Thanks again Mikie  ;D.  I've seen that one a long time ago and forgot about it  :lol and I thought the one I mentioned had been on that site too.  Maybe I read it on facebook or something, I thought it was really sweet  :-D

I heard a lot of "bad" Dennis stories when researching my book but everyone I talked to seemed to cut him a lot of slack.  Almost everyone I interviewed said he had a good heart and was great company.  But no one denied that he could be a real pain in the …. and his addiction to alcohol slowly changed him into a person nobody really recognized by 1981.  But even when he was young he had a quick temper and could be aggressive. 

This one isn't personal, obviously...but I thought it was funny enough to add to the mix. I don't know if it's been repeated on this board before. This was posted to another musicians' forum in the early 2000's, it might still be archived exactly as posted.

This was a musician who was part of the band backing one of the Beach Boys' supporting acts during the early 1967 tour, who was also pretty young at the time of the tour.

NOTE: ***I'm paraphrasing this*** short of getting the exact quotes/story.

This musician said Dennis took a Cadillac convertible with him on the tour, loaded up in one of the trucks in the band's touring caravan, so he could unload it when they hit town and go cruising for women in those towns they were playing. Once Dennis invited the guy to get high, in this Cadillac which Dennis had sitting inside the venue. They were toking up with the windows rolled up when someone started banging on the windows. I guess the young guy must have thought it was the cops or security busting them for the dope.

It was Bruce Johnston, asking what they were doing and saying that they'd get busted for doing it.

Paraphrasing the punchline, Dennis handed the guy the joint and said "Don't worry, he's on salary."

Well that confirms our assumptions that bruce was the life of the party

 :lol

This is corny as can be, however, it's a nice showcase of Dennis's weird side to his wild//creative/positive/playful/fit ones. If you look it that way, it is an interesting story. Of course, all the BBs are weird, but mostly we know it's Brian, Bruce (remember he gets inspiration as a songwriter from reading the greeting cards?), Mike.

I know that a couple of people's moms attended the T.A.M.I. show  :). did anyone else here get to see them in 1964 or '65?

I've had another Smiley Smile board search falilure: There was a thread once where someone, under the heading of something like "What Beatles fans think of the Beach Boys" that linked to a long thread about the Beach Boys on a Beatles forum. there was a guy on there (the Beatles forum) who shared lots of memories about Dennis.

Anyone better at searching than me, or who already know what I'm talking about?

is this it?


eta: There's a funny story about meeting Dennis & nearly getting into a fight with Mike here. http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/index.php?topic=8423.msg281407#msg281407

eta2: nice bit about Dennis from the same poster http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/index.php?topic=8423.msg282748#msg282748

from Ben Edmond's Mojo article (http://brianwilsonfans.com/a_dw.php)

Thank you so much I was looking for this everywhere!  ;D