Digging the beauty out of ruins: Dennis Wilson's Bambu

Of all the mythical albums that never were, it's amazing that one rather, uh, limited and terminally unhip band is associated with two of them. Smile is of course the most famous lost album in music history, but it's telling that another long lost treasure to many music afficionados is Dennis Wilson's never finished second solo album Bambu, an album that gained near mythical status more for what it might have been or could have been, spurned on by bits and pieces of it coming out on bootlegs, as they tend to do with all things Beach Boys. Wilson worked on the album feverishly during 1977 and early 1978, before circumstances - both of his own doing and of others - slowed him down, then all of a sudden it was a year later, Dennis was way into hard drugs, Bambu was put on the backburner, never to come back from there, before Dennis' stupid, maddening death in 1983. By that time, whatever Bambu was, or could have been, was nothing but distant memories of those that worked on it with Dennis. Most never forgot a bit of a delicate melody or a strong, emotive performance by Dennis - but that's all they were, memories. 

The great album that was to confirm the promise of Dennis' really strong debut Pacific Ocean Blue would never come out in an official release - until 2008, and even then it didn't. Not really. The form in which Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) was issued made it impossible to hear a great, or even particularly good album, in its haphazardly assembled form. But we'll get to that in a bit. Yet, going through the unfinished work, glimpses of brilliance kept showing up, and when you looked and listened real hard, there were more than just glimpses. 

One of the things one realizes when listening closely to the Bambu material is how much Dennis had learned from big brother Brian. Like Bri, Dennis would more and more start to compose the famous pocket symphonies, songs that were made of of several sections, or movements. Now, the cynic in me will probably say that the way Dennis worked on Bambu - piecing things together whenever he had inspiration, time or a moment in a recording studio - led to some of the songs moving rather incongruously from one section to the other. But the believer in me thinks, that maybe Dennis learned a lot more from Brian than his 'let's just go to the beach and surf' persona let on. Whichever explanation seems more likely, the proof is in the pudding. Dennis was easily the mpost adventurous and creative of the Wilson brothers behind Brian. 

This means that on Bambu you get something you rarely get from a Beach Boys album, and certainly any Beach Boys album after Holland/ Sail On Sailor - the music can, and does, surprise you. Take "Are You Real", a song that starts exactly like you'd think a Dennis song with that title would - like a big heartfelt Dennis ballad. But then,only about fourty-five seconds in, the song suddenly changes, the drums start to pound and a keyboard melody takes over that seems to have not much in common with the slow first part. It's Dennis' very own variation of a power ballad. Or check "I Love You". It starts as a sort of groovy love song, but only for about 45 seconds (again!) before the drums fall away and the song segues into an angelic choir chorale section which then about later segues into a solo piano melody...and the whole thing is clearly a sketch that's barely two minutes long. It wasn't much of a song that's why on this version of Bambu it segues directly into the lovely "If Love Had Its Way", on the official release issued under its working title "Cocktails" though it really isn't cocktail music. Which makes me come back to the way this material was originally released, and how that caused this album to be a real challenge to assemble.

Scrolling through my front page, I've seen that the biggest groups of items on this blog are by far alternate albums, something I wouldn't have bet on when I started thjs adventure more than two years ago. Some of these are really just resequenced or thinned out versions of albums, so while they are alternate albums, there isn't a ton of work I did on them. On the albums that I really did re-construct, I mostly had a precise idea what I was going for: knowing which outtakes or alternate versions of songs I would use, which songs I'd kick off, which songs would be the album or side openers and closers, and then just had to figure out some minor sequencing stuff in the margins. This is not what happened with this version of Dennis Wilson's Bambu. In some ways this is the alternate album I'm the most proud of, because I didn't know what I was doing, where to begin and if I could pull it off.  

But pull it off I did I say without aiming for false modesty. I think this is the best and most coherent version of Bambu that you are going to hear, a real album, full of the ebb-and-flow dynamics of an album. An album with beginnings, middles and endings to their two album sides. But boy, it wasn't easy. Like most people I got the Bambu stuff on the bonus disc of Pacific Ocean Blue. And while I was happy to listen to the music Dennis Wilson did manage to put down on tape between 1977 and 1979, I didn't listen to that bonus disc called Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) - which even got a separate release a couple of years later - all that much. I understand why this material was released the way it was: it's an archival release for historical purposes, with the accompanying problems: Haphazard, somewhat random-seeming sequencing; song sketches that go nowhere and don't have real endings...even when these were the cream of the crop, they were simply not presented in a particularly listenable form. 

This looked like a job for the One Buck Guy. But yeah, when I threw the Bambu material into a folder to at some point give it a try I had nothing: no running order, no real idea how to arrange stuff, just the vague notion that I should try my hand at this one of these days. So when I posted my rejiggered version of L.A., Light Album Relit a couple of weeks ago, and kind of immersed myself into that period for a bit, I gave this a real shot. And somehow, everything fell into place just perfectly. Opening tracks were easy, they had to be the two calypso numbers from Carli Munoz. And the indelible melody of "Holy Man" was immediately scheduled as the album closer. The "I Love You / If Love Had Its Way" felt right as the closer of side a. Then juggle the slower ballads and uptempo number. 

"Tug Of War" was one of the best numbers Dennis had composed and recorded for Pacific Ocean Blue, a typically entrancing ballad with enough little weirdness, slight psychedelic flourishes added, to stand out from the work of a man who did many, many heartfelt ballads. I still feel it shouldn't have been bumped off the Pacific Ocean Blue in favor of "End Of The Show", but it obviously had to become part of Bambu now. The only number not from the official release is "Wild Situation (Reprise)", taken from a bootleg, which has no verses and few lead vocals from Dennis, with the harmony/ group vocals (and the drums!) really high in the mix, giving it a decidedly different feel, and making it the most Beach Boys-sounding track on the release. I just love how different and lively this one feels compared to the 'official' version with these group vocals (and drums!) way buried in the mix...

It's a shame that this music wasn't released at the time, a waste really, much like the life of its creator between 1979 and 1983. With these tortured genius guys like One Buck Records favorite Gene Clark, it's always easy and more romantic to blame the record companies or this and that in outside circumstances (and the loss of his own recording studio, co-owned with Carl and sold in 1978, did put a huge dent into the progression of Bambu), but let's be real: These guys fucked up a lot of stuff in their life, both privately and professionally, all by themselves, and no amount of retrospective love is going to erase that. Dennis, especially, took some exceedingly stupid, horrible decisions in the last years of his life - that life, like his body, his voice, and his music ending up in ruin. 

But the music remains, and it doesn't care about any of that. Everything that made up Dennis Wilson - the unparalled expression of longing, the party-ready womanizing guy evident in groovers like "Under The Moonlight" ("The young girls go into a rage") or 'School Girl", even the self-mocking sense of humor ("He's A Bum"). Dennis was all that, and all that is on Bambu, and now finally in a version that deserves to be played and replayed. He is singing to an unknown female (presumably) in the opener that he is her "constant companion", but really, music was his constant companion in those few, feverish years when inspiration flowed abundantly and beauty followed. Now, let that music flow again...