It was Brian Wilson who wrote all those Beach Boys songs about catching waves and surfin' safaris. But brother Dennis, the mischievous family member most reluctantly welcomed into the group, was the Wilson boy who actually worshipped the water. Ironically, lifelong beach bum Dennis Wilson drowned in December 1983 at age 39, mere feet from a marina.

In cutoff jeans, he'd been diving off a boat slip in Marina Del Ray, searching for personal belongings that had fallen or been tossed overboard during the years he'd docked his sailboat there. Wilson, a chronic drug and alcohol abuser, was drunk at the time, an autopsy showed. His new wife, his fourth, wanted Dennis buried at sea; it was his wish, she said. The Reagan White House, which had only recently embarrassed itself by uninviting the Beach Boys to play a huge Fourth of July event on the Mall in Washington, made a special allowance, permitting the kind of sea burial usually reserved for navy personnel.

Wilson's young widow, 19-year-old Shawn Marie Love, who bore him a son a year before his death, was the alleged illegitimate child of Mike Love, the Wilson brothers' cousin and fellow founding member of the Beach Boys. During Brian's wilderness years, Mike Love and Dennis grew increasingly antagonistic toward each other as the band lurched on without its leader. Not surprisingly, Dennis' marriage to Shawn aggravated matters; a mutual restraining order was handed down to keep the two cousins from attacking each other.

If the Beach Boys still have a squeaky-clean reputation as "America's Band," it has survived in spite of wild child Dennis' propensity for streaking onstage, his drinking binges with Fleetwood Mac and his youthful pilfering of his tyrannical father's glass eye. Then there's the little matter of his good friendship with a charismatic would-be songwriter named Charles Manson, but that's a Twisted Tale of another magnitude.

(Wilson's one solo recording, the long-out-of-print 'Pacific Ocean Blue,' is scheduled for release in an expanded 30th anniversary edition in April.)