The Smiley Smile Message Board

I have a few questions about my Idol Dennis Wilson Tonight

1.  Who is Lori and Denni?
2. Are they really Dennis's Former Wife and Daughter
3. Why did Dennis Drown or did he fake his Death?
4.  No Disrespect but Did Dennis really want to  kill himself

I am doing a project about Dennis Wilson and why he was so messed up

Briefly...

1 - the same person: Sherri Hutsell, a hoaxer.

2 - No, and no.

3 - He drowned because... some of us feel he'd just had enough. Just desperately needed some peace. No, he didn't fake it. His body was identified by family members.

4 - See #3. Personally, I don't think it was a conscious decision but you can see why some might think so.

Jon may care to fill in the finer detail from his higher vantage point, but I think he broadly agrees with me.

Re: #3. Some have postulated that:

1. When he came up for air, he hit his head on the dock and knocked himself unconscious.
2. After repeated dives, the lung capacity decreases with each dive. There's a stress of pulmonary gas exchange in the lungs and blood when you hold your breath for long periods. As a result, he lost consciousness and drowned.
3. It's possible he'd just blacked out in around 12-15 feet of water. He had lost consciousness previously while intoxicated. At the time he drowned, he had a blood alcohol level of around .28 (0.08 is the legal limit in California) with traces of coke in his system. He also had an enlarged heart and liver which didn't help matters.

Am I seeing things or did Surfer just ask questions that were actually answered by by other board members without him being called a troll??

There's hope! :)

Alot of great questions,

somewhere i'd read dear dennis hit his head coming up for air on the underside of the Harmony

How could that happen when the Harmony wasn't even docked there?  The Harmony was long gone, but he was looking for things that he'd thrown overboard from the Harmony years before.

the Harmony long gone.  OK.  what I had heard then was the day dear Dennis drowned was the final day under his ownership title

probably better to stick to one story when you're posting

how's that?

Dennis was forced to sell the Harmony in 1980 to satisfy delinquent bills and bank loans. I doubt he still had the boat title on December 28, 1983.

The Harmony was repossessed in summer 1981 when Dennis repeatedly failed to keep up with the payments.

My source for the 1980 date: "Death of a Beach Boy" February 24, 1984 issue of People magazine. 

Gaines: December 28, 1983. Dennis called manager Bob Levine to make conditional plans for a 30-day detox program with the hope that he could get help with financing to buy the Harmony back.

Wasn't the Betty Ford Clinic a well known and popular rehab clinic in California back in the late 1970's - 1980's? Too bad Dennis couldn't get there.  Time just ran out I guess. 

If I can have only one Beach Boys solo album it must be Pacific Ocean Blue.

Founded late 1982. Other programs existed prior to that one.

You can have more than one Beach Boy solo album.

Nope. Just need one.  ;D

Nah, only one to a customer.  I'll take P.O.B.

Said article also states the following:

"After the funeral service, the band gathered at co-manager Tom Hulett's house. "We were sort of having a wake," says Love. A nondrinking vegetarian, Love nevertheless showed up with four bottles of the most expensive champagne he could find. "Dennis would have wanted it this way," he said."

Touching gesture from Mike, huh ? Problem is, it never happened. My source: Mike Love at Epsom this year, in conversation.

Just Mike trying to re-write his history and cleanse his image

Congratulations Chris, you've managed to achieve what few have: discovered the limits of my patience and tolerance. I bid you farewell sir, and will respond no more to your asinine comments. Being a major league collector is no excuse.

When an article doesn't just paraphrase or cite anonymous sources, but presents a direct quotation attributed to a specific person, and does so in an article relatively contemporary to the event in question (in this case just a couple months after Dennis' death), I find it much more difficult (though of course never impossible) to believe they just pulled that quote out of their ass. Being a relatively high profile piece, I would think something would have been said by Mike or other band members if People Magazine had written a story fabricating quotes from band members.

The band members (all of them, not just Brian) have been known to be forgetful and selective and try to re-spin things. I can't ascribe a precise percentage to which side of this story I believe more. But I'm not prepared, when presented with a direct quote from a publication, to 100% dismiss it because someone says 30 years later it never happened.

Even when that "someone" is the person alleged to have said and done what the article claims ? Need I point out that for Mike to deny that any such thing happened more than somewhat upsets the notion that he's all about making himself look better at any cost ? The other alternative, of course, is that I simply made up what I claimed I was told.

Man, having M&B as your only BBs insiders is clouding your judgement. Mike might have misrembered or is fibbing to preserve his TM guru master image to a fan like you.

Wrong by a factor of, oh, roughly, 350%.  ;D

AGD has a network of spies and informants operating under such deep cover that they never get out of bed! It's well-rested gossip.

You have to admit tho, the man does kinda dodge and weave around the earlier drug and alcohol use topic depending on the TM angle/cousin critique he's pursuing in an interview.

Presuming you didn't make it up, it falls back to Mike. Its seems very inconsequential an issue either way to be re-addressing it some 30 years after the fact.
It does make one wonder why no-one in the BBs organization questioned the People mag quote at the time ( at the very least, there was no public mention of a problem, if they did bring it back to People)    

I've posted this elsewhere but here is a video in which Paul McCartney talks about one of his favourite songs, The Coasters' Searchin'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kmDI-mw-Q (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kmDI-mw-Q)

He talks in this video about how it was a song that The Beatles used to play at the Cavern, how it was frequently requested and how John would sing lead and he and George would sing back up.

Trouble is: John didn't sing lead, Paul himself did. And he did it regularly - this song was a regular in The Beatles setlist. One of the few setlists available from the pre-recording days has Searchin' on it, and The Beatles performed it during their failed audition at Decca. We have a record of this - we KNOW that 1982 Paul is wrong. This isn't just about some quote. He is legitimately not correctly remembering that he regularly sang the lead part of a song 20 years earlier.

You know that by 1982, Paul had smoked roughly a metric ton of weed ?

I'm confused… so Mike didn't lug bubbly to Dennis's wake because Macca smoked weed years after forgetting he sang Searchin' in the Cavern?

;)

By Jove, I think he's got it...  ;D

I had nothing to do with it.

Folks don't have any problem dismissing Brian's current recollections if they're contradicted by contemporaneous interviews. I think the People article is far more likely to be correct than Mike's decades-old recollection.

People Magazine didn't make it clear if they were talking to Mike or Steve Love.

quotes straight from the official transcript here
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0%2C%2C20189414%2C00.html (matches the scan http://archive.people.com/people/archive/jpgs/19840116/19840116-750-28.jpg)

goes back to quotes purely credited to Love after comments from the writer, but doesn't actually say they're (now) talking to Mike.

Because they're not - for one thing Mike would have no idea of either Dennis' income or how he spent it.

er, what I was trying to say (Autistic spectrum related communication difficulties getting in the way >:( :-[) is the article doesn't actually say it's Mike who's providing this quote.

"After the funeral service, the band gathered at co-manager Tom Hulett's house. "We were sort of having a wake," says Love. A nondrinking vegetarian, Love nevertheless showed up with four bottles of the most expensive champagne he could find. "Dennis would have wanted it this way," he said."

"The band". That is, the surviving Beach Boys. How many people with the surname Love are there in The Beach Boys ? Christ on a tandem, I know I can be willfully obtuse at times but compared to some posters here, I'm strictly minor league. Here's the complete final paragraph from the People article:

"After the funeral service, the band gathered at co-manager Tom Hulett's house. "We were sort of having a wake," says Love. A nondrinking vegetarian, Love nevertheless showed up with four bottles of the most expensive champagne he could find. "Dennis would have wanted it this way," he said. Mike and Brian shot some basketball. "I told Brian I thought the best thing we could do was write a song for Dennis," Love adds. "We didn't work on it that night. We just talked and toasted Dennis and the New Year. We were all so much a part of each other that I'm sure we'll miss him every single day the rest of our lives. There's no way we'll not miss him."

I've gotten drunk on Mike Love's champagne.  It was goooooooooood.  Say what you will but the man knows his champagne.

Were you actually kicking it with Mike Love or just drinking his bubbles?

I don't care if it happened or if it didn't happen. I just want Mike to know that "It's OK" to drink champagne--just as long as he's not drinking it from that dangerous little jug of his!!!  >:D

Andrew, while we're at it, since it seems like you cover a wide range of topics with Mike, are you planning on sharing some kind of interview transcript, or was it just an informal, off the cuff exchange. Cuz I remember you saying you were going to interview Mike a fan months ago, but maybe I mistook that for you simply saying you would be talking to him.

The thing i do not understand is why Mike Love hated Dennis?  They were bro's from 1958 when Dennis and Mike went Surfing together and got Girl Friends and had drinking Root beers with the girls!  I smell something fishy about Mike and Dennis

So did they.  ;D

I found some information.

Love would later claim that he and Pamplin were asked “to prevent [Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson] from providing cocaine and other dangerous drugs to Brian Wilson.”
In January 1981, Love and Pamplin followed Dennis Wilson to his house in Los Angeles. They observed Wilson consuming cocaine with several other people. They kicked down the door posing as police officers. Stan Love and Pamplin then chased Wilson, beat and kicked him, struck him with a telephone, slammed his head into a bedboard 12 times, and threw him through a window. According to Love, "it was one of the most brutal beatings ever."
Wilson would later press charges. In March, 1981, both Love and Pamplin agreed to a mutual restraining order [4] in a Santa Monica Supreme Court. Love was fined $750 and Pamplin was fined $250 for the beating. Both were put on six months probation.

The person who was behind this Attack was Mike Love!

I've heard that it was the Illuminati behind the Attack....

Surfer, you should read into the Illuminati and let me know what you think!! The Wilsons were all members, and the Love clan desperately wished to be part of the secret society, but were denied entry due to Brian Wilson's negative attitude about them. That's why there was so much animosity between the Loves and Wilsons.

It's all thanks to the Illuminati that the band continues to enjoy success in the 21st century....

That was Mike's brother Stan, not Mike himself.