Note-perfect liner notes: garnering an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...
The rhapsodic chords made a quite a contrast to the raspy coda that punctuated and garnered such frenzied teenage screams when lone-wolfed at the tail end of “Graduation Day” on 1964’s Beach Boys’ Concert.
“'I was sitting out in the bleachers during a sound check,'” recalled Daryl Dragon, the classically trained son of composer/conductor Carmen Dragon, half of Captain and Tennille, and touring keyboardist with the Beach Boys, “'when I heard these amazing piano chords coming from the stage. I looked up and it was Dennis, which kind of shocked me. Like a lot of people, I only knew him as a wildman drummer. I didn’t even know he played piano! When I asked him who’d composed the gorgeous music he was playing, he said, "I did." I was floored. Dennis had none of the formal training I’d had, but these were chords my instructors would have killed for. He didn’t know the names of the notes, nothing.'”
But such startled surprise as Dragon’s over the only surfing and often dismissed Beach Boy turns out to be a variation on a theme in Ben Edmonds flip-through but thorough and enthralling section of liner notes, entitled "Love Remember Me: Dennis Wilson’s Dreams Delivered," niftily provided in the accompanying booklet from the 2008 two-CD Legacy Edition of Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue, the bolt from the blue solo masterwork from 1977 marked by Dennis’ wistful, brooding balladry and gruff but affecting vocals. (More pages of liner notes are offered by Jon Stebbins and David Beard, while the reissue itself also contains unreleased tracks from his subsequent Bambu album which remained unfinished at the time of Dennis’ 1983 drowning death.) As Edmonds notes, James Guercio, who paved the way for Wilson to record the first Beach Boy solo album, was also unexpectedly overwhelmed by his raw talent when Wilson sat at the piano and played “'these changes, incredible harmonic progressions, that were far ahead of most musicians I’ve worked with. There’s also a spiritual side to his music that touched me. His is some of the most personal, heart-wrenching music I’ve ever heard.'”
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