Part 9 of the Adult/Child saga.
The summer in the founding of the Republic of California is framed by declarations of independence at the end of spring and declarations of compromise to the limits of individual independence four years and three months later. It would not be a state that allowed slavery, but it would collaborate with those that did to return runaway slaves.
My first west coast ancestor sailed out as a 14 year old cabin boy in the year of 1849, working the riverboats that took prospectors inland to search for fortune before setting off to do his own placer mining. Later he joined the mule team supply train for the army’s efforts at quelling native uprisings, but that’s a whole separate saga for me to continue unpacking. The Wilson and Korthoff families, meanwhile, didn’t make their way out west until the 1920’s, coming from Kansas and Minnesota, respectively.
That Kansas accent1 in particular comes through the speech patterns of the Wilson brothers, defining their mid-century tone far more than the modern California drift. Sometimes that Minnesota “yoo” comes out too. Make a comparison between interviews with the Wilsons to the 2000 TV movie to see what The Beach Boys might be like as a bunch of California dude-bros with dude-bro accents. It’s pretty ugly. Especially when TV Brian starts doing drugs and they have him play the part from that point on like “Special Jack”. Uff da2, as Audree’s immediate ancestors would no doubt say.
Up here in Werstern Warshington we’re a little too wet much of the year for dryer accents not to end up turning into hunger dunger dang in the post-Pearl Jam era. Eddie Vedder famously joked that he wasn’t from around here since he had no sense of humor, but his San Diego voice soaked up that moisture as thick as if it were the jizzard they named their band after. The one time of year you can almost count on that moisture letting up is summer time. Every couple of decades it skips out so completely that it gets commemorated in song, but 19 out of 20 times you can count on a Summer in Paradise in Seattle. Too bad the Beach Boys blew it in 1992 when they landed here a week past the season’s end.
That wasn’t the only way they blew it. Truth be told, if there were a list of ways the band could blow it for themselves in 1992 they must have checked each and every one. Record a followup to your biggest hit 4 years too late? Check. Fail to write anything that sounds even halfway as decent as “Kokomo”? Check. Record it with an early version of Pro-tools so that it sounds even more sterile than your 80’s digital productions, yet completely stale and dated at the same time? Check and check. Center Mike Love while Carl Wilson dedicates his creative efforts to a side project and phones it in on for the Boys? Check. Not bother to bring Brian Wilson back even though he’s just extracted himself from the vice grips of Eugene Landy? Check. Re-record your first hit song in a way that sounds like INXS but sucks? Check. What kind of paradise is this? Sounds more like a fresh hell to me…
The tragedy is that Brian Wilson was spending that summer getting back on his game in a way that he hadn’t been since… gawd, Friends? These sessions were far more produced than Love You, but not modernist the way first solo album had been. This was Brian Wilson and Andy Paley working together as a two man band, recreating the wall of sound so adeptly that Phil Spector might as well have given Brian “This Must Be the Night” back in ’65. Paley had actually worked with Spector in the 70’s, which would sometimes trigger Brian’s paranoia still, some 25-30 years after his initial psychotic delusions of Wall-of-Sound-Bugs. In 2007, when Spector was arrested for murder, Brian was said to say “I told you so!” Whatever happened there, he never got over it. Be careful when you meet your heroes, they might just haunt your delusions for the rest of your life…
Life began for young Brian Wilson on the literal cusp of summer, June 20th 1942. Born under the sign of the Gemini twins, like Waylon Jennings, who would sing of that fact “there’s two side to me, and they ain’t even friends… when I’m bad, I’m bad, when I’m good, I’m the best you’ve ever seen.” And vice versa. What a dichotomy to embody. “In touch with their heart, emotional, deep, and dedicated… Believing in magic, they bring love into the world if their own heart is clean of hate.” But then: “Vindictive, jealous and unable to forgive, they get tied to matters from the past and find it hard to live in the moment. A bit dark and unaware of their influence on their own life, they give in to the energetic flow that might spin them out of their own control.” Both performers were stimulant addicts, starting with speed and moving on to mountains of white powder. But while singing through his nose would get Waylon busted by the man, for Brian the only punishment seemed to be personal.
June 20th signifies the time when the summer is obvious, inevitable and quickly approaching, but there are tails and leftover issues from the past that aren’t yet resolved. [Those born on this day] are given a task to manifest and live out stories that are buried deep in their family tree, and depending on circumstances and the amount of liberal love they got from their primal family, they will have a way of turning life for worse or better in a time of crisis.
Feelings will guide them as a river they cannot get out of […] Their brain works in the strangest of ways, sometimes seemingly dark to people in the outer world, but mostly just in sync with the center of the Earth […] If they connect with their Soul on an ultimately intimate, spiritual level, they become magicians […] who truly have a message from “the other side” to share with the rest of the world.
– June 20th, zodiacsign.com
The first time Brian Wilson connected with his soul on such an intimate level was probably when he got back from that grueling Australian tour of early 1964 and sparked up a joint. Ahhhh… Slow down, tune in, and drop into a deep reverie. What the fuck am I doing spinning my wheels like this with the boys on the road? The whole cosmos is right here with me. He was a creator, an orchestrator – those were his core gifts. He only performed to put those gifts out there. He would begin the sessions for their next album, All Summer Long, that spring, before heading out on more grueling tour dates around the states. All Summer Long would drop at the peak of summer ’64, and it would be the early watershed of the Beach Boys recorded output while Brian still toured.
A summer later, the next expansion of that soul-seeking reverie would be revealed to the world and collected on the album Summer Days (and Summer Nights!). It was the song that would put California on the map as a culture unto itself in the mid 20th century. Its opening was a pseudo-orchestral overture the likes of which had never been heard before in modern pop-rock, and the inspiration would be a new kind of “sunshine” that would soon be sweeping the nation: the psychedelic mind-fuck of LSD.
I’m gonna be honest with y’all. I’ve had some transcendent psychedelic experiences, but they’ve always been on mushrooms. LSD and I just don’t agree with each other. Maybe it’s never been the right set and setting, but something about the chemical sunshine edge just kinda turns me off personally. But then, I’ve never been a speed or coke addict. Everyone I’ve known who swears by acid has been. Huh.
It must have been a good trip for Brian at that point, at any rate. Doors of perception were opened, and out came “California Girls”. But, perhaps it was more like Pandora’s box was opened? It starts off with beauties, but… then what? Before you know it Mike Love comes strutting out like a peacock with a beanie on, swigging apple juice and leading pink elephants on parade. By the time it’s over you realize the difference between summer in paradise and summer in Hell is not the quality of the sunshine, but making sure you have a shady space to take refuge before you get permafried – preferably with a door that shuts.
The first softly-cooked reverie dedicated to the summer came from a time that was just a bit more innocent, from 1963’s Surfer Girl. Much like the title track of the album, summer is defined a time of yearning dreams, time that slips away until you’re all alone together, looking into that California girl’s eyes. “Make it real, that summer dream.” Oh, mama. This is soft, sensual stuff. This isn’t woo summer break! This is trying to slow your heart down from beating out of your chest in anticipation, trying to get the butterflies in your stomach to settle. Oooh woah uhng. The degree of yearning is painful.
Brian Wilson was a 21 year old young man when he wrote and recorded that song. Surfer Girl was released at the tail end of the summer of ’63, on September 16th. Just six days to make that summer dream come true. He’d met the teenage Rovell sisters – 14 year old Marilyn and 17 year old Diane – the previous summer, when the Beach Boys had played a concert at… okay, I shit you not, I didn’t know this before I wrote the preceding paragraphs… Pandora’s Box. On Sunset Strip, of course. Brian’s pal and collaborator Gary Usher was dating a cousin of the sisters, Ginger Blake, who would later be paired up with the Rovells in Brian’s personal girl group project, The Honeys. But first Brian would pull his smoothest move by asking Marilyn for a sip of her hot chocolate and then promptly spill it all over her when he was done. No wonder he’d been working up the courage to try again for a whole year… When he did finally make his move, he was so ingratiated into the Rovell family they let him move right in with them in the summer of ’63. Marilyn was 15 at this point. Better under our roof than somewhere out in that crazy world, was the feeling in the family. They shared a bedroom with separate beds, for some kind of appearances sake.
Next year’s “Keep An Eye On Summer” was another sensual eyes-on-the-prize manifesto for the return of that summer babe. Six months later, Brian and Marilyn would be married, although there would always be a part of Brian that yearned more for sister Diane, who no longer shared a roof with him. A summer later the banger “Girl Don’t Tell Me” chastises a summer babe that ghosted our bro all winter. Suddenly there were girls from New York City to worry about. In fact, California was getting overrun with girls from all corners of the states and beyond. It was like a beacon was calling them. A scene was coalescing, a California sound, and The Beach Boys were its harbingers. Waves of sound were reverberating around the world, and it caught up a generation looking for for a new way to surf the waves of love. Add the birth control pill to the mix, and suddenly millenniums of morality geared around unwanted pregnancy could be dismantled and replaced with a free-for-all fuck fest. What could possibly go wrong? Especially if everyone is cool?
The trouble came when humans became crops to be harvested at too tender a time. Spring maidens were being plucked by Fall freaks whose own moral boundaries had been steadily shredding since the beatnik daze, and the new summer dudes they’d cultivated into the freaker scene were more than happy to partake of the early harvest. And along with sex came the drugs, with boundaries blurred in a way that makes the two a kind of feedback loop. Was the sex cultivated to lure seekers to the drugs, or was it the other way around? When it’s good, it’s good, when it’s bad – it’s the worst scene you’ve ever seen…
In the summer of ’69 it was about the worst we’d seen at that point. Brian Wilson was voluntarily committed to a mental institution for the duration of the season, and Dennis was still at least loosely enmeshed with the Manson Family. This latter fact has often been disputed, with the official story being that Dennis left the family to be evicted from his house when he went on tour, and then was later threatened and creepy crawled by the family after breaking off all contact in 1968. But, let’s look at the man’s own words, published in July 12th, 1969’s Record Mirror:
“The house was in Pacific Palisades but there were hordes of people with binoculars and the police got the idea that it was an orgy and drug scene. We were on that to start with, but we soon got wise. Too many people — mostly girls — got on to it and we had to move. Now we have an old movie lot owned by a blind man3 who lets us run the place. We try to make it productive by helping anyone we can who looks like they need it. In the beginning, there were just a few girls living there besides myself and the other guys. We’d make love and discuss things while contributing to one purpose — to help others. The girls would go out on the streets and beg money from those that looked like they could afford it, then bring it home. I’d say go out and don’t come back until you have five dollars.
“Later, I might say, do you love me? They might say yes and I’d say, then go out and bring back another woman. Soon there were large numbers living there. We’d all combine efforts as if we were all writing a poem. We’d get the good and the bad from everybody until the end product was fantastic. I gave all I had to bring this about. We would make clothes for those who needed them or give the money to charity. We might decide to do all our talking by singing to one another for a day. All of us gave what we had and had a good time. There is so much in the power of love.
“This power is spreading. The evolution is continuing. Think of all the history we had to go through to get where we are; to find happiness. Those who fight, let them fight. I went through all that when I was a kid. Even then I knew it was wrong, but I was caught up in what was expected of me. I used to go around punching people in the mouth and knocking out teeth. Now I am totally apart from violence. I’m never even approached by it. […] The love and the peace will spread as soon as man looks into the mirror and learns to love himself. As soon as he realizes love.
“You can hit out at it or run from it, but you just run into it in the end. You can’t escape your being. I just try to be myself. I don’t feel responsible for all the bad things that go on in the world. I just try to set an example and I know they will eventually follow. I want to have a good time. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to communicate through music. I’ve seen a lot of the world, but what can be bigger than life? All of us must do what we feel. If I want to make love to a bunch of 15-year-old girls, I will. If I want to make a million dollars, I will. If I wanted to fight, I would. Do what makes you feel right. People are caught up in too many decisions. The framework of society is made up of too many hard decisions. Answers that come quickly and easily are the best ones. Your lungs make a decision every time you breathe.”
“Some people can be consistent in schedule, others can be consistent in change. All people have hands, yet they all have different fingerprints. Culture and those aspects are a lot of rot. We are the Bible of now and I am very much in love at this moment. Life is good entertainment. Love is the ultimate. If man were to know that God was inside him, he would not have to look outside for love. Plant the seeds of love and fullness. It’s pretty heavy, isn’t it?”
Uff da.
Truth be told, there’s nothing unusual about Dennis’s attitude among the rock stars of the 60’s and 70’s, but I can’t think of another one being so brazen about it. It’s a completely uncompromisingly subjective morality that treats the other people in the equation as objects. Maybe that was the trip Manson got Dennis on. Maybe the first compromise came with Charlie crossing Dennis’s typical male boundaries. The deeper you get into Manson’s trip the more you realize how he weaponized his own fluidity to destroy other people’s boundaries. Stories of initiation of male members into the Family featuring Charlie getting down on his knees don’t always just end with toe kissing…
Like California, The Beach Boys were a group that began their summer with innocent sunshine soaked reveries of freedom and ended them with ungodly compromises for the sake of keeping that summer alive. In 1980, after kissing Bruce Johnston’s toes to get him back as producer, the final result of that compromise was released by the original band, Keeping The Summer Alive. As previously discussed, the album cover is beyond ironic in summing up the struggle of the band. Just take a look for yourself:
The album that Bruce helped the band deliver is just tragically mediocre on all levels. 1980 was a transitional year for studio production, and this album is caught right in the middle of that transition and lands in a place that’s both murky and garishly bright. “Are you sure we don’t sound like a plastic version of The Bee Gees?” Brian asks in a behind the scenes video. That honestly might be too kind of an assessment.
The album has one almost masterpiece that will hopefully be given a decent remix someday, “Goin’ On”. It’s an autobiographical doo-woppy song of heartache, with the line, “awaken me, beautiful dreamer,” revealing how close to the bone it cut. Roughly a quarter century later a documentary about Brian Wilson would be called “Beautiful Dreamer”, and it would open with Brian playing the lullaby, “beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.” Brian’s eye lit up. “That’s me!” he declared. “Beautiful dreamer, wake. Brian Douglas Wilson.” Sure thing, boss. It may have been a bit of a stretch, but you know it meant something to him, and it makes the rest of the heartache of “Goin’ On” land like a sledgehammer when you recognize it, in spite of the “Plastic Bee Gees” vocal production.
Dennis’s dreams were pretty much dead at this point. He’d been working hard to followup Pacific Ocean Blue since the sessions for that album ended in 1976, but the sale of the Wilson’s Brother Studios two years later ground progress down to a halt. No longer could Dennis simply command the twilight hours of the studio, he would have to go out and book a studio like any other L.A. bum. Instead of pulling himself together and making it happen, he began his descent into the abyss. If his chaos could no longer be productively, creatively accommodated, it would simply consume him and his loved ones.
Brian was in the depths of his own fathomless void. Landy was gone for nearly 4 years now, and Marilyn had finally ended their marriage the previous year, no longer knowing how to hold space for someone that didn’t even want to be there. Brian had disappeared the previous summer, attempting to hitch hike to Mexico and ending up in San Diego. When he got there he found a bar with a piano and began playing for drinks and tips. “The cops found him in Balboa Park under a tree with no shoes on, his white pants filthy, obviously a vagrant, with no wallet, no money,” Stan Love later recalled. Nearly comatose, Brian was taken to the hospital and treated for alcohol poisoning.
For Marilyn, this was officially the beginning of the end, feeling she no longer had a place in his life after the call she got from the hospital. He said he thought they should separate. “He told me he wanted to know what it feels like to be a bum.” He couldn’t care less about being a husband, a father, or a productive member of society. They filed for a legal separation on July 15th. Their divorce would be finalized the next year.
A year later the band would be expecting Brian to keep the summer alive whether he wanted to or not. This was no longer a relationship of accommodation, this was going to be tough love, with nothing to hide behind and nowhere to escape. The defining visual moment of this era is the before-and-after of Brian getting his beard shaved for the first time in years. What emerges is like the old Brian from a jar of formaldehyde. It looks like someone pickled him at his pudgiest a decade earlier, and now he’s being pulled back out and put on display as a side show, like the mermaid at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. Is this really keeping the summer alive? By the time he gets on stage it looks more like Weekend At Bernies.
On June 21st, 1980, this taxidermied version of The Beach Boys was recorded for posterity at Knebworth, England. They kick off the show with their classic ode to the girls of their home state, with Dennis and his accompanying rhythm entourage milking the intro like “Thus Spake Tharathustra”, before Mike kicks in with his nasaliest take on the tune, like he’s trying to play up an American accent to the Brits. Then they slam into “Sloop John B”, with “Brian Wilson!” really sounding pretty damn good. But when they cut to him singing “I feel so broke up, I wanna go home”, you know he means it. This probably isn’t the worst trip he’s ever been on, but it’s gotta be close from the looks of it. Then Mike comes in with a kazoo up his nose and ruins what is otherwise probably the best live recorded take on the tune.
Dennis, who’d barely been present at the album sessions, is in fine form throughout. He still looks fit and hearty, ready to go for a sail when the show is over. He’d only just begun giving up at this point, being permanently wasted, but still mostly functional. He drives the band through a storming “Darlin’” and a rollicking “School Days”, with Al Jardine in his sharpest white pimp outfit, just casually strutting his stuff like the stud he was back then. He was probably the only truly well adjusted member of the group in 1980, enjoying his abode in the heart of Big Sur with the lovely Lady Linda.
Carl, oh Carl, has recovered from the horrors of Australia two years prior, and delivers a near perfect “God Only Knows”, just absolute heart-meltingly beautiful. As the song heads into it’s climactic outtro he flashes a radiant, joyous smile, then sings “everyone, everyone”, to the refrain of the song. A few songs later Al delivers a rollicking “Cotton Fields” that merges into “Heroes and Villains” and it’s pretty great. Maybe this band is more half alive than half dead after all? Then an obviously intoxicated Dennis bellows out “We love YOU!” You can see the concerned look in Carl’s eyes as he leads the band through the song’s climax. How much shit is gonna hit the fan tonight? Is Dennis gonna be our hero or our villain?
Recognizing it’s better to get him up and at it than down and dirty, Carl says “Let’s hear it for our drummer, my brother,” and Dennis steps out and grabs a mic and him and Mike Love make flirty eyes at each other and Dennis saunters up right next to him. It’s pretty hilarious, like some serious fuckery is happening between these two. Their voices sat in similar places in the vocal stack, so it’s almost like, yeah we’ll see who sings this part better if we do it side by side. Total cocksmanship. Mike may have had the big dick energy in the group, but it came with big forehead energy and that nasal twang. Dennis was almost the total package, but at this point his spirit was held in a paper bag that had been reused a few times too many and was destined to blow out at any moment…
Towards the end of the show Dennis steps into the solo spotlight and semi-coherently declares “What a beautiful England.” Then he delivers a song that Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher claimed credit for, but other folks claim Dennis had at least one, if not both hands in writing, sharing the keyboard with Preston at a hazy daze party. Andrew Hickey called up someone else who was mentioned as being there to get his recollection of what went down:
As Gerry [Beckley] remembers it, a group of people including himself, Dennis, Billy Preston, Preston’s then boyfriend whose name he couldn’t remember during our call, Billy Hinsche, and Danny Hutton were all out at the Rainbow Bar and Grill partying, and then went back to Beckley’s apartment, where Preston started playing the piano, playing a fragment of a tune. They all, being among the greatest harmony singers in the business at that time, started singing along, improvising harmonies. Occasionally one or other of them would push someone else to one side and play about on the piano a bit.
Gerry didn’t remember much of the detail of the night — everyone there was at least a little intoxicated — but he’d remembered it as a nice time. Later he recognised the Joe Cocker song as the one that Preston had been playing at his house, and after that he noticed Dennis singing it at Beach Boys gigs. He spoke to Dennis about it, saying how nice it was to see Dennis singing that song because it reminded him of that fun night they’d all had together, and Dennis said “Yeah, when we wrote it.”
“We” here meaning not just him and Preston, but him, Preston, *and Beckley*. Beckley was flabbergasted — “what do you mean we wrote it?”
Dennis said “Don’t you remember? You wrote the bridge!”
Gerry says that he has no actual memory of writing the bridge to “You Are So Beautiful” — as I said, he doesn’t have the clearest memory of the night in question — but he says it’s entirely plausible that he did, and that once Dennis had said that it does sound like the kind of chord changes he would use (and as soon as Gerry said that to me, I could hear the similarity too). Gerry doesn’t claim to have written or co-written the song — he says as far as he’s concerned Billy Preston and Bruce Foster are the credited songwriters and that’s what matters, and if he *did* contribute to it at all he has no memory of doing so.
But given that Gerry’s version of the story matches very closely with what Billy said, I think it’s at least plausible that the only time Dennis Wilson actually co-wrote a hit record, he didn’t get any songwriting credit.
I’m not sure if that’s more of a shame than Dennis’s greatest ballad being more well known as a sitcom character’s wedding serenade, but it sure is a pity. What a bunch of vultures, and this is how they treat their fellow man – just imagine how much respect they extend to women and children…
LATE BREAKING POSTSCRIPT:
Ah jeeze… this went up on Facebook today (6/7/26):
Saying “uff da” again definitely doesn’t cut it this time. Fucking hell…
6/8: The original post has been modified with the addition of one line: “All I ever wanted was a damn, ‘I’m sorry.”
To be continued…
Meanwhile…
I hate asking for money, but I love drinking coffee. If anyone wants to buy me a coffee that would be awesome. Sometimes I run out of beans and it really slows me down…
Meanwhile, from the wayback machine of the internet archive comes an uncompromised voice from the Web Music Review Community, ca. 2004:
Cap’n Marvel’s record review:
Summer In Paradise
D+
And the shits just keep on coming. Summer For Parasites is a rock-bottom Mike Love solo album masquerading as a rock-bottom Beach Boys release, and has to rank as the worst thing to come out under the band’s name. You can’t blame Brian, because he’d cut himself loose, you can’t blame Dennis, because he was dead, but you CAN blame John Stamos, from TV’s high-larious ABC TGIF gentle family sit-com Full House, about a closeted gay father (American Funniest Home Videos host Bob ‘Hiding Severed Bodyparts In His Dressing Room Fridge’ Saget…), his two live-in lovers (oh yeah, like Stamos isn’t supposed to be ‘the leather guy’), and three nauseating daughters, including Kirk Cameron’s (who you may remember from such gripping religious-programming dramas as God Sees You Every Time You Touch Yourself and C4 In My Lunchbox and Jesus In My Heart: A Children’s Crusade For A New Millennium) fatass sister Candace and the insectoid sunken-eyed sideshow-freak Olsen twins…
Stamos, like the assmonkey he is, plays drums and SINGS DENNIS WILSON’S CLASSIC BALLAD ‘FOREVER’ LIKE PEOPLE WON’T KNOW HE’S CANNIBALIZING FROM A DEAD BEACH BOY. Good Christ! How low do you have to stoop? Already the only people who are going to buy this album are Beach Boys addicts who can’t stop themselves from letting Mike Love give ’em a good punch in the testicles every few years, and not a damn one of them isn’t going to know that Dennis Wilson originally wrote and sang this song, and that some stupid sit-com actor is now shitting all over it because he doesn’t have enough talent to sing or say anything that someone else hasn’t written down for him. Good move, Kasparovs.
Anyway, enough about people who aren’t Mike Love. This guy, who clinches the clueless jock award now for the twentieth year running, spends half of Summer In Paradise attempting to rewrite ‘Kokomo’, half of the time on dimbulb covers of classic songs he has no right coming within 50 yards of (‘Hot Fun In The Summertime’), half of the time covering his own half of the time attempting to rewrite the second part (the worst one) of the California Saga in a fit of simpering post-hippie drone. If the math doesn’t add up, it’s just because this album seems to take twice as long as it’s supposed to. None of these songs is worth a goddamn, because it’s all just derivatives of the same old broken-down junk this band’d been trundling out for fifteen years already.
The production is still 80’s plastic, all fake-dumbdrums and ‘ear candy’ production gimmicks, and sounds horribly, horribly wrong. Just against nature, like the fact that dunderhead retrograde jerkoff Mike Love somehow got to outlast all three Wilson brothers and Al Jardine and somehow inherit the Beach Boys band as his own. Disgusting, is what it is, and this album is every bit as awful as anyone who’s been paying attention has any right to expect it to be. Luckily it’s been 12 years since the release of this obscenity, and Love’s not made any moves to reconvene his band of nobodies and record a new studio album, one that would very well qualify for one of the very few F’s I’d give an album with actual chords and lyrics. Until then, try your best to keep your dollars out of Mike Love’s pockets.
Capn’s Final Word: Mike Love’s Nadir. Lemme say that again…Mike Love’s Nadir.
- Hutchinson, Kansas, to be precise. Check out this woman’s accent, she sounds like Brian Wilson if he was a lady! It’s like listening to the lost Wilson sister. Before Kansas, the Wilson ancestors were in Meigs county, Ohio. So the Wilsons’ post-colonial accent has roots in Appalachia, although far back enough I suspect the modern accent doesn’t really compare.
↩︎ - Via wikipedia: Uff da is a marker of Scandinavian heritage, predominantly heard in the upper Midwest, which has a significant population with Scandinavian roots. Its variety of meanings let it substitute for common obscenities. Within Scandinavian-American culture, uff da frequently translates to “I am overwhelmed”, somewhat similar to the Yiddish phrase oy vey.
↩︎ - George Spawn, owner of the soon to be infamous Spawn’s Ranch.
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