Dennis Wilson

Four of the ten sit in fire signs and only one in water, with three in earth and two in air. Fire moves first and does not ask, and the element that would weigh the consequences is almost absent. Wilson drummed for the Beach Boys and was the only surfer among them, which is to say the only one who actually did the thing the band spent a decade singing about.

The Sun sits at thirteen degrees of Sagittarius with Mars six degrees away in the same sign, and the Moon answers from Leo. Three fire placements across the two most outward signs there are, with identity and drive side by side, describes somebody for whom the water was never a subject to write about. The chart has no part of it that would have counselled staying on the beach. A drummer who actually surfed, in a band that sold the idea of it, is that distribution made literal.

The Moon makes easy contact with Uranus four hundredths of a degree from the exact angle, the tightest pair here: private feeling with a direct line to the planet that breaks every arrangement. A T-square holds Mercury, Saturn and Neptune, so speech is braced between limit and image with no outlet. Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were all retrograde at his birth, which turns the heavy end of the chart inward. For a musician whose speech was the least reliable thing about him in public, that bracing is the part worth noting.

He died at Marina del Rey on 28 December 1983, at thirty nine. The Moon that day was at its last quarter, the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details, and Uranus stood exactly opposite its own birth place, a tenth of a degree from precise. That opposition falls in the late thirties for everyone, and it arrived for him on the day itself. Jupiter was square its own place within a sixteenth of a degree at the same time, so the two planets that govern how far a life reaches were both exactly at odds with where they began.