This once-buried treasure from August ‘77 is the very definition of a cult classic, like Skip Spence’s Oar or Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos. The sole solo album from the least significant (yet still considerably talented) Wilson brother, Pacific Ocean Blue has been expounded upon aplenty. Much of that revisionist praise hits the mark, but boasts of ‘you must hear this before you die’ strike me as overinflated.
Like many latter-day Beach Boys fans, I first heard dear drug-damaged Dennis’s fractured masterpiece in ‘08 when his long out-of-print studio foray was reissued in a hefty CD package that included remnants from a ‘78 follow-up (Bambu) he never finished. Entranced at the time by both its backstory and unexpected depths — within which you’ll spot traces of Pink Floyd and ZZ Top and Joe Cocker alongside a Wilson & Co. style prevalent since Surf’s Up in ‘71 — I now admire its mere existence more than I actively enjoy what’s inside.
Mind you, much of it is fascinating, multilayered and strangely moving. But the real reason I’ve tossed this onto my page has less to do with tunes than what its cover signifies for Christine McVie, my ongoing deep-dive subject. Consider this a marker for the parallel saga of her love life, how its manic highs and messy lows spilled into her songs time and again.
Don’t mean to give off even a faint whiff of untrue men-made-her stench when I say it’s critical to document her paramours alongside the professionals she worked with, as most of them inspired some of her best songs. And at this point in her story, not long after Pacific Ocean Blue appeared and then quickly sunk from sight, Chris was struggling unsuccessfully to make it work with Dennis.
While ‘You Make Loving Fun’ was about fleeting flame Curry Grant (then Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director), two songs on the band’s next LP — including one of their finest, ‘Hold Me’ — would reflect the joyful agony of her romance with the most self-destructive of the Wilsons.
‘Half of him was like a little boy,’ she’d later say, ‘and the other half was insane.’ That’s a formula for disaster.
And great music.
Other tidbits:
* The other Dennis-inspired piece on Mirage is ‘Only Over You,’ an apt title that cuts both ways, implying both impossible love (‘I’m out of my mind and it’s only over you’) as well as an imminent end (they’d stop seeing each other later in ‘82, not long after Mirage emerged). In every line her passion is palpable: ‘People think I’m crazy / But they don’t know / Thought love had failed me / But now they’re watching it grow / Angel, please don’t go / I miss you when you’re gone / They say I’m a silly girl / But I’m not a fool.’
* Despite my best efforts, I can’t quite pinpoint where exactly Christine provided backing vocals on a Dennis track, although the credits for the expanded edition of Pacific Ocean Blue indicate she did. As she isn’t listed among other players on this Music on Vinyl pressing, surely her contributions must have come during Bambu sessions that carried on intermittently in ‘78-‘79, by which time they were seeing each other. In the interest of documenting as many instances of Ms. McVie performing as possible, I’m taking it as true that she’s somewhere in these mixes.
* For yet another example of how tight-knit the partner-swapping circles of classic rock stars could be, consider that during the time Christine dated Dennis (‘79-‘82), he also divorced and remarried and divorced again Karen Lamm, momentarily the wife of Chicago’s Robert Lamm several years earlier. She not only added her voice to the choir backing on several POB pieces, she also added to the photography inside the gatefold. It’s unclear to me whether she or Dean Torrence (of Jan & Dean) took the cover shot.