Chris and Dennis Wilson, yet again.

[michelej1]

From Mojo 2002

Ed Roach remembers coming to blows with Dennis at Christine McVie’s home when she and The Beach Boy were involved. “It was over a woman,” he admits somewhat sheepishly. “A ridiculous fight all over the house, while Fleetwood Mac were out on the road. Christine had bought an antique piano bench from Tallulah Bankhead, worth $10,000, and Dennis cracked it over my back. I jumped and grabbed the crystal chandelier to kick him like Errol Flynn and the whole thing came crashing down. It was crazy, and the excess fuel in our systems didn’t help.” And, it must be pointed out, the woman they were brawling over was neither Dennis’ girlfriend nor Ed’s domestic partner, but the wife of another Mac member. As the ’70s progressed, the penetrations were no longer so golden.

But the Dennis Wilson who burned Christine McVie’s pool house to the ground – prompting her pointedly dry remark to Gregg Jakobson, “A bit excessive, your friend Dennis, isn’t he?” – was also the same man-child who had a large heart composed of red and white flowers planted in McVie’s garden, where he serenaded her backed by a string quartet. (That Chris ultimately wound up with the bill in no way diminishes the gesture of a man who, when he had it, happily gave away everything he had.)

***

The last time I saw Dennis Wilson was in a Hollywood restaurant. He was with Christine McVie, whom I actually knew much better. She waved me over and asked if I’d met Dennis. When I reminded him of our previous encounters, he responded with such enthusiastic affirmation that it was obvious he didn’t really remember them at all. You didn’t feel inclined to take this personally, because Dennis was so fully in the moment, and (usually) so much fun to be around, that people simply treasured their time with him and forgot the rest. But was he really “in the moment”? For with all his manic embrace of experience, in every moment he inhabited he was already restlessly reaching for the next one. His inexhaustible reserves of energy would never allow him to alight in any one place for very long. And woe to those who tried to hang on; his personal highway was littered with the wrecks of five marriages and countless relationships. It was as if he thought that if he kept running as fast as he could he might somehow arrive at a place where he and the world would finally be in sync. He never did. No one could keep up. Beneath that tidal wave of charm, fellowship and good cheer, he just might have been one of the loneliest men alive.