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Sometime in the mid to late sixties Brian Wilson went nuts. After an exhausting and band-splintering 85 recording sessions on that white-whale of sixties recordings, Smile, the Beach Boys' driving force suffered a nervous breakdown and quietly retreated into a private life of drugs and mental instability. As Wilson's mental issues deepened, his younger brothers, Carl and Dennis Wilson, took a more proactive stance in the group. The behavior of Brian - who became increasingly unreliable in the studio (when he even bothered to show up) - allowed Dennis and Carl to flourish as songwriters in their own right.

The extreme unpopularity of the group at the time ensured that these efforts, which could occasionally reach the dizzying heights of the Beach Boys' classic sixties peak, went largely unheard. Already by the late sixties - twenty years before their awesomely bad reemergence in Cocktail and Full House (Uncle Jesse drums!) - the Beach Boys were considered an oldies act, completely out of touch with the hippie generation. Dennis and Carl Wilson's contributions swiftly slipped into the vaults and went largely unheard.

Until now.

Luckily, L.A. pop luminary Adam Marsland has assembled a crackpot group of indie brats for the Songs of Dennis & Carl Wilson Tour, a ten-city Midwest tour this May. Marsland has high hopes for the tour, even if some Beach Boys fans are reluctant to embrace this tragically overlooked period of the group's career.

"They didn't come out with Smile, and for whatever reason they were really out of sync with what was going on in the sixties," Marsland said. "I think Dennis and Carl, as the youngest and most musically connected guys, and also kind of the hippest guys, were really trying to bridge that gap."

But unlike Brian Wilson, who drew his inspiration from fifties parlor rock and Phil Spector, the younger Wilsons found inspiration in some more unusual places. Carl Wilson, Marsland says, continued the production tradition of Brian Wilson, yet filtered it through a more stripped down sensibility. Dennis, on the other hand, was inspired by the dark orchestrations of Wagner, focusing on string-heavy orchestration and piano-based balladry.

"Some of Carl's stuff uses some really strange voicing and the production is kind of murky - which is kind of what's cool about it - but it makes it kind of challenging to pick it out," Marsland said.

Marsland's show will include an unreleased chestnut, the Dennis Wilson tune "Carry Me Home," which tells the very un-Beach Boy like tale of a soldier dying in Vietnam.

"It's a very, very dark song, that's why it never came out," Marsland said. "It sounds very current."

While the band was certainly looking for a challenge, it certainly doesn't hurt to have a bona fide insider onboard. Marsland was blessed to recruit Beach Boys archivist Alan Boyd into the fold, which allowed his Chaos band a unique insider's perspective.

"We've had a little help there.  The vocals are always the hardest to capture. You're going to hear it much more if somebody's off, and it's the Beach Boys, so it's really, really challenging."

For this highly unique tour Marsland has utilized an unlikely source to stir up the faithful: MySpace.com. The website allows Marsland to reach potential fans that traditional promotion - from street teams to in-store appearances - couldn't as easily be reached.

"I'm always cautious because I've toured a lot," Marsland said. "The hardest thing is to actually get people through the door. People always say 'yeah we're going and yadda yadda' but at the last minute they're watching Seinfeld and they forget.

"I can not overstate how much [MySpace] helped. It's incredible. What's really kind of neat about it is that when my band was signed back in the nineties, I was trying to do the same kind of networking thing on my own with a small label. It was very, very difficult. MySpace makes it very easy and in a funny way it kind of helped us. I came up in a time when you had to have a lot of tact to approach people about your band."

That doesn't mean Marsland, a veteran of 22 tours, is using the site as a cheap ploy, adding friends left and right, hoping somebody takes notice.

"I resent it. You realize a band's not going to be able to send you a big long letter - 'hey how are you doing' - but you can't treat fans like a piece of meat. It's not that we've never sent a random friend request, but I'd say 90% of the time we've talked first."

Marsland hopes the internet, along with some ties to the band, will help spread the word to the faithful. Marsland's troupe, which boasts Boyd and sixties/seventies white soul legend Evie Sands, spent over two months rehearsing, breaking down arrangements and mastering the dense sound of the original recordings. With so much work put into the recordings, Marsland is afraid of being pigeonholed as a cover band, or worse, blamed for using their connections to the band as a crutch.

"I wouldn't say it's for publicity, it's more to let people know that we're not amateurs," he said.

When Adam Marsland's Chaos Band debuted the material in Los Angeles, Marlyn Wilson (Carl's widow), Dennis' ex-wife, and several Beach Boy offspring showed up for the performance. Founding Beach Boy Al Jardine checked out the show's second performance.

"We worked so intensively that when we did the encore performance I got a sinus infection that put me out of business for about six months. That's how hard we worked on this stuff. We kind of want people to know we're going to pull it off."

Marsland isn't afraid of losing audience members by focusing on an unknown stage of the group's career, not just the hits. Instead, Marsland is relying on word of mouth, targeting the indie kids who'll in turn bring along their fortysomething parents. Besides, there are already plenty of M.O.R. Beach Boys acts around to fill that void.

"We just don't want to fuck this up," Marsland joked. "Dennis and Carl really built on the band's legacy and did something different. It just sounds so weird. It has some otherworldly quality to it. Sure the band did a lot of crap in that period, there's no question about it. That's part of the reason why you have to go in and pick out some of the gems.

"But how cool is a band that goes up and plays "Fun Fun Fun?" It's kind of lame. Yeah we're touring with other people's music, but we're picking something that says a lot about who we are."

The Songs of Dennis & Carl Wilson Tour comes to Vnuk's Lounge in Cudahy May 29. For more information visit http://www.myspace.com/denniscarltour.

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