The "Songs of Carl and Dennis Wilson" tour in May with Adam Marsland and the Chaos Band was a blast - thanks to everyone who came out and listened and sang along and bought CDs and put up with us all. We're not done just yet, though - we've got a live album in the works:
http://www.myspace.com/denniscarltour
http://www.myspace.com/adammarsland
Not only will this be a chance to hear some of the wonderful underrated works of Brian's little bros, we'll be showcasing some of our own tunes as well on this CD, recorded at our last Wilsonia show in June in Marina Del Rey. We've had a couple of intense mixdown sessions, and the tracks are sounding really nice... I'm very honored to be joining the Chaos Band for this musical adventure. I'll post a blog or two as we get closer to a release date, and Adam may be posting some "previews" soon....
(And now back to our regularly scheduled bio page)
A lifelong obsession with the music of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys has taken Alan on a long and slightly off-the-wall journey directly to the group itself. For Alan, his love of all things Beach and Boy goes all the way back to 1966, when he wore out his brother's copy of the SURFER GIRL album listening to "In My Room" over and over and over again... A persistent, at times rather lonely, fascination with the group's music followed... and a chance visit to a London record shop, where Alan stumbled on a copy of a BEACH BOYS STOMP fanzine led him to a worldwide community of serious Beach Boys fans, which in 1990 led to...
... of all things, a song. Alan, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and historical footage archivist, had been dabbling in music, having recently written and produced some songs for a childrens video... Les Chan, organizer of several west coast Beach Boys fan conventions, asked Alan to write and record a theme song for an event to be held in San Diego in the summer of 1990. The result, "Down South (In San Diego)" quickly became something of an underground hit, with bootleg copies passing along amongst Beach Boys fans all over the world - and the song itself, uncredited, was even included on a bootleg CD of unreleased Brian Wilson tunes.
Subsequent recordings, including another San Diego convention tune, Everybody's Waiting, and the semi-legendary Channel Surfing (which was later featured on the Varese Sarabande compilation CD WARMTH OF THE SUN - MUSIC INSPIRED BY THE BEACH BOYS), soon found their way into the hands of BB associates Jeff Foskett, Mike Kowalski, Gary Griffin, and Brian Wilson biographer David Leaf... which, in a very strange twist of events, led to Alan becoming directly involved with The Beach Boys as a documentary filmmaker and archivist. Since 1996, Alan has directed and/or edited a number of films for the group, including NASHVILLE SOUNDS, THE PET SOUNDS SESSIONS, ENDLESS HARMONY (for which he received a Grammy nomination in 2001), BRIAN WILSON 1999 (a short film that opened Brian's first-ever solo tour), GOOD TIMIN - THE BEACH BOYS LIVE AT KNEBWORTH and, most recently, a special short film for the 2003 CARL WILSON FOUNDATION event. Alan has also produced archival audio releases for The Beach Boys, including the ENDLESS HARMONY soundtrack compilation, and, with engineer Mark Linett, the 2001 release HAWTHORNE, CA. Just this year, Alan and Mark produced the new Beach Boys collection for Hallmark, SONGS FROM HERE AND BACK.
Currently, Alan is working with Brother Records and Capitol Records to organize, catalog, and preserve the mass of vintage Beach Boys tapes in their archive, and is deeply involved in the creation of a new official website / online music store for the group. In addition, Alan has also directed and/or edited documentary films for NASA and Delilah Films, including specials on The Monkees, Marianne Faithfull, and Earth, Wind & Fire, among others. Alan also has a company that specializes in archival film restoration, and provides historical stock footage for documentaries and broadcast clients.
Though Alan's own music had been on the back burner in the late 1990s, he recently found himself recording some new Beach Boys fan convention songs, as well as embarking on collaborations with Beach Boys lyricist Steve Kalinich and Wilson sons Carl B. and Justyn Wilson for the ENDLESS SUMMER QUARTERLY compilation, ONE IN A MILLION in early 2004. These recent forays back into the recording studio have rekindled "the bug," and Alan's finally releasing a full-length CD compilation of his own music, CHANNEL SURFING. Spurred on by former Brother Studios manager and former Dennis Wilson personal manager Trisha Campo, and with the help of PACIFIC OCEAN BLUE/THE BEACH BOYS LOVE YOU engineer Earl Mankey, Alan has finally gathered up all of the Beach Boys convention tunes and demos that brought him to BB-Land in the first place, along with a couple of excerpts from recent silent movie scores that he's prepared for American Movie Classics and the Classic Arts Channel, and a tune specially recorded for a Harry Nilsson fan gathering. For this release, Alan has received some enthusiastic support from Beach Boys Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston, Gerry Beckley (from the group America) and, most surprisingly, from Brian Wilson himself, who completely blew Alan away one recent morning when he called and left a message on Alan's answering machine saying, "I just heard 'You're The Beautiful' - your voice is fantastic! I didn't know you could sing like that, man!"
