The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (91 page)

At 7 pm two days after Christmas, Scott left his home in St Peters to purchase a car battery and mysteriously disappeared – his car was found abandoned at a local airport. Nothing was heard from or about Walter Scott for nearly four years – during which time his ex-wife and her lover, Scott’s neighbour Jim Williams, were married. Then, on 10 April 1987, a grisly discovery was made in Williams’s backyard: Scott’s badly decomposed body – still hog-tied – face down in a concrete water cistern. On finding bullet wounds to his back, police rapidly accused Williams of his slaying – and began a double murder enquiry on discovering that Williams’s former wife, Sharon, had also been killed. Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence, the trial took nine years to reach court – largely due to the persistence of Scott’s elderly parents, even then. Williams was given two concurrent life sentences without appeal, while JoAnn Notheis was sentenced to five years for hindering the investigation. Both parties continue to protest their innocence.

Wednesday 28

Dennis Wilson

(Inglewood, California, 4 December 1944)

The Beach Boys

‘Maybe I just like a fast life - I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world. It won’t last for ever either, though the memories will.’

Dennis Wilson

Dennis Wilson only ever wanted freedom. It informed his life and, arguably, his death. The ocean offered him release and his ability to ride the waves, to his mind, made him the master of it. None of the other Beach Boys could surf, thus, in 1961, it was Dennis’s favourite pastime that prompted The Beach Boys’ great success. The extended freedom brought by this great success, however, encouraged pursuits of a more contentious nature.

The middle son of Murry and Audree Wilson, Dennis lacked the musical instinct of older brother Brian – rightly seen as the genius behind The Beach Boys’ sound – but was game to learn the four-part harmonies his brother loved so much in the songs of The Four Freshmen. Under the regime imposed upon them by their father/manager, the brothers, Brian, Dennis and Carl – along with cousin Mike Love and college buddy Al Jardine – set about blueprinting the sound that would change the face of American pop music in the sixties. Dennis Wilson, happy to remain in the background as his brothers took the fore, taught himself the drums. Thus, The Pendletones became The Beach Boys (Dennis’s suggestion), who became the top new group of the era with a series of hedonistic hits that focused on either the ‘hot doggers’ who graced the waves (‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’) or the hot rods that raced California’s boulevards (‘Little Deuce Coupe’, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’). Behind the apparent joy of their music, though, The Beach Boys were subject to extreme discipline at the hands of frustrated songwriter Murry Wilson. For his part, Dennis quite literally had his hands burned as a boy for playing with matches. ‘He beat the crap out of me,’ the percussionist would much later admit. Another of his father’s punishments was to remove his glass eye, stand nose-to-nose with Dennis – and knock him across the room if he even flinched. The result for Wilson was not the heightened respect his father demanded but the escalation of an already troubled lifestyle as The Beach Boys’ success grew and grew.

The Beach Boys - Clockwise from top: Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love and Carl Wilson: Hang on to your tuxedo

In 1966, The Beatles were cleaning up across America, their increasingly imaginative skewing of rock ‘n’ roll’s original manifesto forcing the Wilsons to rethink much of their own output. The result was Brian Wilson’s inspired
Pet Sounds,
an album believed by many to be a riposte to The Fab Four’s
Revolver,
though it stands up as an epoch-defining record without any such comparison, as rich in light as it is mellow in shade. Brian’s increased use of hallucinogenics was apparent by now – but over the next eighteen months pretty much all of the band had gradually been drawn further and further into LA’s hippy/drug scene. At a commune, Dennis befriended an apparently down-on-his-luck musician called Charlie, who swiftly moved himself and members of his ‘Family’ into Dennis’s home on Sunset Boulevard and relieved the musician of some $100K The Charlie in question was the demonic Charles Manson, who in 1969 committed a series of well-documented murders, including the infamous mass slaughter at the home of Sharon Tate, the then pregnant actress wife of film director Roman Polanski. Clearly, Dennis had no inkling of this a year previously, but was sufficiently concerned to have turfed The Family out of his house – though not before one of Manson’s songs, ‘Never Learn Not to Love’ (originally written as ‘Cease To Exist’), had been recorded by The Beach Boys. After the heavily amended track was issued (on 1969’s
20/20),
an incensed Manson revealed his mania by pulling a .45 on Wilson and threatening to kidnap his sons. (On learning later of Dennis Wilson’s death, the incarcerated but unrepentant Manson snarled: ‘He was killed by my shadow because he took my music and changed the words from my soul.’)

During the next few years Wilson’s live work suffered and side projects foundered. One such was a duo with then unknown Daryl Dragon (later of Captain & Tennille fame), which fell apart in 1971 after the drummer severed several tendons putting his hand through a window. This also saw him bow out temporarily from The Beach Boys, who by 1974 were reduced to touring their hits to a new audience. In this decade, The Beach Boys managed only one Top Ten hit in their homeland (and even this was a cover – ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Music’ by early influence Chuck Berry in 1976). Wilson, however, became the first Beach Boy to release a solo record in 1977, although neither of his two albums proffered much commercial return.

Dennis Wilson somehow found the confidence to return to the band during the late seventies and, briefly, the rough-hewn ‘background Beach Boy’ was perhaps the most popular with their female audience. Wilson’s way with the opposite sex was widely known: he was to be married five times – twice to model/actress Karen Lamm in the seventies – and in 1979, after a brief affair with Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, he took up with 18-year-old Shawn Love. If the age gap didn’t turn heads, the fact that she was widely believed to be the illegitimate daughter of Mike Love probably did. Wilson won support from some family members in his attempts to persuade her father to acknowledge his responsibility – something Love denies to the present day. The internal pressure between the two, allied with Wilson’s continued reliance on alcohol and drugs, grew so intense that the only solution appeared to be to bar Wilson from concerts. Near-destitute, Wilson holed up on his 62-foot yacht,
Harmony
(his only real possession), until he had to sell it to meet debts – by now he was hitting the bottle as soon as the sun was up. With his situation becoming critical, the other Beach Boys somehow found it in themselves to pull him back on board in 1981 – but Wilson’s world had become so enshrouded by his drinking that this merely postponed his fate.

Three days after Christmas in 1983, he frolicked on board
Emerald,
the yawl of his friend Bob Oster, at California’s Marina del Rey. Here, Wilson boasted how he had lasted his latest detox course – perhaps not seeing the irony in giving out such information at the same time as tucking away several celebratory vodkas. Late in the afternoon, Wilson began diving off the slip where his own yacht had once been moored, retrieving a bizarre array of sea-corroded junk he had thrown from his craft years before, including a silver-framed photograph of Lamm. He was in a playful mood, so Oster and others gathered (including Wilson’s latest girlfriend, Colleen McGovern) were unperturbed as he continued to plunge into twelve feet of murky, freezing water clad only in cut-offs and a face mask. When he failed to surface, his friends remained calm, believing the Beach Boy to be hiding – he was known for playing practical jokes. The penny dropped as they searched the local bars around the increasingly deserted marina. At about 5.30 pm, Dennis Wilson’s lifeless body was retrieved from the water by passing harbour-patrol divers. Coroners put his death down to drowning, but a more thorough investigation suggested that, heavily under the influence, Wilson had hit his head on the underside of the slip, losing consciousness before he drowned. The ‘endless summer’ was over for the teenage hedonist who never really grew up.

A thirty-minute funeral three days later brought together many from Dennis Wilson’s past and present, including his mother, brothers Brian and Carl, Wilson’s first wife, Carol Freedman, and their daughter, Jennifer, second wife, Barbara Charren, and their two sons, Karen Lamm and Wilson’s estranged teenage bride, Shawn Love, and their one-year-old son, Gage. With a special dispensation from President Reagan, non-serviceman Wilson was then given the burial at sea that he had always wanted.

See also
Carl Wilson (
February 1998)

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1983:

Winifred Atwell
(Trinidadian pianist with an impressive series of 1950s UK hits - including chart-toppers ‘Let’s Have Another Party’ and ‘Poor People of Paris’; born Tunapuna, 27/2/14; unknown, 28/2)

Gene Bricker
(US second tenor with integrated Pittsburgh vocal act The Marcels, who had a US/UK #1 with 1961’s great ‘Blue Moon’; born Pennsylvania, c 1941; unknown, 10/12)

Black Randy
(US singer with LA punk outlaws Black Randy & The Metro Squad, whose set list included ‘Idi Amin’ and ‘Loner with a Boner’; born John ‘Jackie’ Morris, California; HIV complications)

Larry Darnell
(powerful early US R & B vocalist; born Ohio, 21/12/1928; lung cancer, 3/7)

Sidney Dunbar
(US doo-wop bass with The Calvanes, a.k.a. The Nuggets; heart attack)

Kurt Herkenberg
(German bassist briefly with celebrated prog/psychedelic rock band Tangerine Dream; born 5/9/1948; found dead from head injuries in a Berlin park, 11/7)

Richard Hughes
(US rock drummer with Johnny Winter (1973 -74); born 31/3/1950; suicide)

Hugh Mundell
(gifted young Jamaican reggae artist/producer; born East Kingston, 14/7/1962; shot dead after an argument over a stolen refrigerator while in a car with singer Junior Reid, 14/10)