Launch Radio Networks has issued the following report
from Howie Edelson:

REMEMBERING BEACH BOY DENNIS WILSON

Follow up:

Today (Monday, December 4th) marks what would have been Beach Boys' drummer and cofounder Dennis Wilson's 62nd birthday. For most of his life, Dennis was overshadowed by his older brother Brian, who wrote most of the group's hits, and by his younger brother Carl, who sang lead on songs such as "God Only Knows" and "Good Vibrations." As a youngster, Dennis was considered the least musical of the Wilson brothers, but it was his idea for Brian and cousin Mike Love to first write about surfing. It was the Wilson's mother Audree who urged the group to include Dennis, who was then forced to play drums because he couldn't play anything else.

Although his playing was only used sporadically on the group's recordings after 1964, his heartthrob good looks and powerful live drumming provided the group with a much need boost in the wake of the "British Invasion." Brian Wilson often used direct instances from Dennis' life as the foundation for Beach Boys songs, including "Fun, Fun, Fun," "Let Him Run Wild," and "Surfin' U.S.A." Dennis sang lead on the group's 1965 remake of Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance." He began contributing songs to Beach Boys albums in 1968, and everyone in the group was surprised at the spiritual quality of his work.

Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine told LAUNCH that he's still amazed at the depth and beauty of Dennis' songs: ["Oh, he was the most underrated member of the band in those terms. His compositions, I think, were stronger, and they got stronger and stronger as we went along -- as he went along -- until obviously he couldn't go any further. And I just think that given time, you know, he would've been the... probably the best composer in the band, outside of Brian, of course. Yeah, he just had that natural, intuitive instinct about music and lyrics. He always... he was the kind of guy who could get to the point without beating around the bush and, you know, could just nail it."

While Brian slowly retreated from the group in a haze of mental illness and drug abuse, it was Dennis' songs on albums like 20/20, Sunflower, and Holland that kept the band's artistic vision advancing.

His personal life was less successful, including four failed marriages and a year-long friendship with the infamous Charles Manson.

In 1977, he became the first Beach Boy to release a solo album, called Pacific Ocean Blue.

In recent years, it's come to light that Dennis' greatest success was in cowriting the Joe Cocker hit "You Are So Beautiful" with Billy Preston in 1974, for which he did not initially receive a credit. Friends that were there that night have gone on record claiming that Dennis contributed integral portions to the song, but that he refused to be credited, explaining that he was "just helping a friend out." Dennis went on to perform the song at nearly every Beach Boys show starting in 1975.

Carnie Wilson, who is Brian Wilson's daughter and Dennis' niece, told LAUNCH that she thinks about her uncle regularly: ["I had a crush on Dennis, he made my stomach feel funny. And my memories of Dennis was, like, him getting on the ground like he was proposing to me, kneeling down in front of me whenever he saw me and he would kiss my hand in like 20 places. That was his thing. And he was wild and sexy. You know, wild. Just out there."

Dennis Wilson drowned in Marina Del Rey, California, on December 28th, 1983, at the age of 39.

In 2004, an illegitimate son of Dennis' was reunited with the Wilsons, thanks in part to the efforts of a Beach Boys fan website.