The Fallen Boys of Summer: RIP, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone

 Just when music fans with indelible memories of the Sixties were getting used to the death of Sly Stone, Brian Wilson followed him within 48 hours.

The conjunction of deaths had an all too sad symmetry: both gone at age 82, with their heyday as pop trailblazers 50 to 60 years behind them, undone by drug abuse, with occasional reappearances in the spotlight that started and electrified admirers.

The critical and commercial peak of each man lasted for about five years. At first, to the wide public that snapped up their hits, most, if not all, of their behavior seemed a matter of the kind of eccentricity that often accompanies artistic genius, like Wilson wearing a fireman’s hat while directing a promo video for “Good Vibrations” or Stone donning long wigs and hats.

For Wilson and Stone, the expectations generated by their success proved too immense to handle. Somewhere along the line eccentricity shaded into instability, then worse: mental illness (Wilson) or homelessness (Stone).

By 1975, canceled concerts and musician departures meant the effective end of Sly’s band. The Beach Boys carried on, even braving multiple changes in popular taste. But at roughly the same time that the Family Stone folded its tents, the Beach Boys became no more than Mike Love’s nostalgic troupe. 

Canceled concerts followed, then isolation from collaborators, a vacuum in their bands’ leadership, and concluding with declines on the pop charts. Their creativity then came only in fits and starts. Wilson admitted to Rolling Stone that he became “too concerned with getting drugs to write songs.”

Eventually, reality fractured Wilson and Stone without destroying them. 

That is not what I remember them at their best, though. Then, while listening to their best records—the Beach Boys’ entire Pet Sounds LP, “Good Vibrations,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Don’t Worry,” or Sly’s “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” or “Everybody is a Star”—I can only marvel at their effortless mastery of sounds and styles.

But, although the Beach Boys and Sly and the Family Stone released records throughout the calendar year, I—and, I suspect, many other fans—think of them overwhelmingly in terms of summer.

Wilson ran with his brother Dennis’ suggestion that the group record songs appealing to the carefree, hot-rod-and-surf culture then springing up in California, giving rise to a whole string of hits: “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfer Girl.” Stone and his band became indelible parts of the counterculture with their summer 1969 appearances at Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival.

During his glory years, Stone created what sounds like a quintessentially Beach Boys tune: “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” In fact, the Beach Boys, nearly three decades after their time atop the charts, recorded a cover version for their Summer in Paradise CD.

For fans of the two groups, their peaks occurred during our summers, too—when our energy seemed as endless as the world that beckoned to us.

But, for all the aural complexity of their masterpieces, they won the allegiance of listeners with simple, effervescent messages of joy and love.

Decades ago, we could never imagine Wilson and Stone getting old, any more than we could imagine we could. Their bodies may have died, crumbling as much from their Dionysian excesses as from old age, but they live in the endless summer of memory, where youth is forever golden.

(The image of Sly Stone that accompanies this post was taken in Berkeley, CA, on Apr. 16, 1982, by Sarfatims.)

Flashback, June 1963: Brian Wilson Takes Studio Helm for Beach Boys

As the eldest of the musical Wilson brothers and co-songwriter of their first original hits, Brian Wilson was already the center of attention for The Beach Boys. 

But in June 1963, the 21-year-old took on even greater importance as he assumed the role of producer, moving the band into some of the most innovative territory in 1960s pop music even as the additional pressure from it all endangered his fragile psyche.

I became interested in this topic because of the brief scenes devoted to Brian’s studio sessions for Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations” in the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy.  

If music employs elements of mathematics, then the story of how Brian solved so many harmonic equations simultaneously—all within the tight space of a 2 1/2-minute pop single—makes him seem like Einstein discovering the formula for relativity while everyone else is merely adding 2 and 2.

Paul Dano’s Brian in Love and Mercy is, initially, remarkably self-assured for someone so young, coaxing skilled studio musicians towards the sounds he hears in his head. He’s not dictatorial or arrogant in his perfectionism, just hyper-focused—until he finally hears what he has in mind, producing the most beatific of smiles.

Brian had only formed the Beach Boys two years earlier, but his mastery of songwriting and recording techniques was advancing rapidly. And he now had learned enough to know what hadn’t been working, and to try to do something about it.

He and the other Beach Boys had been quietly fuming about how hurriedly and cavalierly their initial producer at Capitol Records, Nick Venet, had arranged their first two LPs, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. As a bass player himself, Brian especially hated the poor bass sound coming out of Capitol’s studio.

Brian’s father, Murry Wilson, pressed Capitol to let Brian be in sole charge of the band’s production from now on. The record company reluctantly agreed.

On June 12, Brian took his engineer and studio right-hand man, Chuck Britz, into Western Recorders studio, where the Beach Boys worked on two of their seminal early hits, “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Surfer Girl.”

Two days later—still a handful of days short of turning 21—Brian turned to L.A.'s Gold Star studio, used by one of his musical heroes, Phil Spector—and, over the next four years, until a devastating nervous breakdown diminished his influence in the band, evolved into one of the most influential forces in pop music.

But more interesting to me ultimately was how Brian came by his musical acumen, what his innovations were, and why—along with Phil Spector, George Martin, and Berry Gordy—he ranks among the most influential musical producers of the Sixties.

To answer the first question: however Brian developed as a musician—the bassist and keyboard player in a rock ‘n’ roll band—was as basic as learning one’s ABCs. Even obvious early influences like Chuck Berry, The Lettermen, the Four Freshmen, and Jan and Dean could only take him so far.

He needed people who could fire his imagination. From the age of four, Brian was taken with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, bowled over by “everything” about it, he told NPR in an interview 13 years ago: “The chords, the melodic movement, the arranging, the impetus, the excitement, the beauty. It was just an absolute work of art."

Among slightly older contemporaries, Brian found a couple of others who provoked him into thinking how he could expand his musical palette.

As a composer and producer, Burt Bacharach was blending the complex chromatic shifts in jazz into three-minute pop melodramas of aching and loss.

The “Wall of Sound” created by Spector particularly affected Brian. He played one of the hits of the super-producer labeled the “first tycoon of teen” by Tom Wolfe, “Be My Baby,” “a hundred times every single day,” according to the lead singer on the single, Ronnie Bennett (who later married Spector). 

In fact, Brian wrote in the following year “Don’t Worry, Baby,” hoping vainly that it would be used by the man he regarded as the greatest producer in the world.

As Brian increasingly used the group of ace studio musicians known as “The Wrecking Crew,” other members of the Beach Boys—notably, Mike Love—began to chafe about where they would fit in with all of this. 

With so little to do instrumentally themselves, how long would they have to wait around in the studio till he got what he wanted? Where would deviating from their surf rock sound take them on the marketplace? How would they perform this in concert? And where would their own harmonies fit in?

On this last score, certainly, their fears proved groundless.  Brian adopted Spector’s method of doubling up on instruments, including ones that were quite unusual in pop music. (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, on Pet Sounds, featured two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion.)

But, as noted in Scott McCormick's September 2017 post from the blog “Disc Makers,” the Beach Boy leader also exercised restraint and allowed for more aural space, enabling more intimate harmonies—exactly his group’s forte.

A year and a half later, Brian’s crippling workload and frenetic songwriting-arranging-touring schedule led him to have a nervous breakdown while on tour, leading him to stop performing live so he could concentrate on the studio. It was the first indication of the mental health issues that would plague him from then on. 

But, even as he worried about how the Beach Boys would compete musically against a foreign invader on the U.S. charts—the Beatles—Brian would be creating work that would be imitated by fellow musicians and loved by millions of fans for the next 60 years and counting. 

Always musically adventurous, he was evolving the group from its Berry-based guitar foundation and surf-and-hot-rod teen subject matter to polyphonic pop symphonies that would take in a wider age group and world.

This Day in Pop Music History (Carl Wilson, Beach Boys' Glue to Brother Brian’s Genius, Dies)

Feb. 6, 1998— Carl Wilson, the youngest of three brothers who formed the nucleus of the Beach Boys—and the one who kept the band together when his siblings spiraled into mental illness, substance abuse and family feuding—died at age 51 of lung cancer in Los Angeles.

As chief songwriter and studio mastermind, Brian Wilson has always been rightly seen as the group’s genius (as I myself acknowledged in a prior post on the making of the band's masterpiece, Pet Sounds).

But Carl made his own distinct creative contributions from the beginning—and, when Brian stopped touring in the mid-Sixties because of a nervous breakdown, and Dennis Wilson grew ever more wild and dangerous in pursuing women, alcohol and drugs, Carl took on a larger role in the studio and on the road, functioning as the group’s de facto leader.

None of this could have been easy. But Carl also had to maintain the Beach Boys’ sense of experimentation while keeping in the fold lead singer and cousin Mike Love, whose unwillingness to stray far from the band’s original surf sound and subject matter increasingly threatened to turn the group into a nostalgia act.

From the start, Brian knew that Carl, four and a half years younger, was open to new sounds, learning how to play guitar from imitating Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley chords and, in the mid-Sixties, learning the 12-string Rickenbacker as well.

As Brian’s mastery in the studio increased, his confidence in his kid brother’s harmonies grew, and he featured Carl more and more on lead vocals, including two of the Beach Boys’ seminal songs in their most musically innovative period, “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.”

Still only 14 years old when the band’s first hit, “Surfin’,” climbed the charts in 1961, Carl would be all of 21 when Brian’s collapse during the Smiley Smile sessions thrust him into the role of studio leader, too.

The Beach Boys’ turmoil in this period was a microcosm of what the nation was also experiencing at this time: generational conflict (the Wilsons’ abusive father Murry sold publishing rights to their songs for what turned out to be a comparative pittance); flirtation with Eastern religions (Love visited the Indian ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi); drugs; violence (Dennis even briefly shared his home with Charles Manson); and Vietnam (Carl filed for conscientious objector status).

Yet the group was being written off as hopelessly square, as musical tastes turned sharply towards harder rock.

Carl was not without his own problems, particularly as he hit his 30s, including drugs, alcohol and a painful divorce. But he displayed a resilience that his older brothers lacked.

In the process, he not only overcome his own issues, but spent much time trying to release Brian from the clutches of his psychiatrist-Svengali, Dr. Eugene Landy, and served as an emotional anchor for his nieces and nephews when their fathers fell deeper into personal difficulties. (Dennis would die in a drowning accident in 1983.)

Brian’s waning presence in the band was much discussed—overwhelmingly to its detriment—in the post-Smiley Smile period. But in many ways that criticism was unfair. Much of the Beach Boys’ most interesting work—including mainstays of their live shows for nearly the next half-century—was recorded in this time, including “Darlin,’” “Sail on Sailor,” "Friends," and two particular favorites of mine featuring Carl on lead vocals, “Wild Honey” and “Long Promised Road.”

It might have been, though, that Carl’s most significant contribution during these years of critical and popular neglect was just to keep the band together as a touring unit. Though the band would never again have the sustained chart success it had experienced in the early to mid Sixties, audiences and critics would come around again to see them as seminal influences in popular music.

There were times, particularly in the early Eighties, when the internal strains of leading so many dysfunctional band members wore on Carl. 

In 1980, annoyed at the group’s lack of rehearsal time and its choice of material, he quit and released two solo albums. Their commercial failure, and the other band members’ vow to change, led him to rejoin two years later—though, for the next decade and a half, he increasingly yielded to Love on the Beach Boys’ musical direction.

The Beach Boys have continued to perform up to the present, but they have become increasingly riven into Love and anti-Love factions. Something irreplaceable died with Carl 25 years ago—an amazingly sweet, pure voice that reflected the singer’s gentle spirit and soul.

As friend and songwriting collaborator Robert White Johnson said after in an interview for The Vinyl Dialogues blog:

“I don’t think Carl ever got the accolades that he deserved for his musical contributions, instincts and abilities. If it hadn’t been for him, the Beach Boys would have died a long time ago. He kept it together, he kept it going. He was the heartbeat, he kept it real, vocally and artistically. He was a true inspiration to me, even with his regard to his humanity. It doesn’t take me much to get teary-eyed thinking about him. I was honored to be his friend.”

Concert Review: The Beach Boys, Chautauqua Institution, NY

As Mike Love, frontman of The Beach Boys, prepared for a concert a week ago Friday night at the Chautauqua Institution, did he know that the local cinema was showing Love and Mercy? The question crossed my mind as I listened at the perimeter of Chautauqua’s famous Amphitheater to the band’s soundcheck a few hours before the show—and it has continued to obsess me since, as I struggle with my feelings about the performance by this legendary band.

Legendary—and much loved. “The Beach Boys got me through some tough times in my life,” another longtime fan suddenly burst out to me as we listened, with a few other Chautauqua visitors, before the show. The group itself experienced tough times in the form of main creative force Brian Wilson’s nervous breakdown while recording Smile, as recounted in Love and Mercy.

How much of the movie depiction of Love—as the band member who pressured Brian the hardest to stick to the formula that had brought the group success—is true? Hard for an outsider to say for sure. But the dark future implied in the movie for the group—that, in repeating its tried-and-true formula, it would become creatively dead—has been manifestly borne out by events.

I had decidedly mixed feelings before the show about attending this concert at all. There was the undeniable fact that this version of the group was not the one I had grown up with. Death had taken two of the Wilson brothers, Dennis (in a 1983 drowning accident) and Carl (from lung cancer, in 1998); the third and most crucial Wilson, Brian, and neighbor and fellow founding Beach Boy Al Jardine, have not toured or recorded with the group since the 50^th-anniversary “reunion” in 2012. That has left the Beach Boys in the hands of longtime hands Love and keyboardist Bruce Johnston (Brian’s concert stand-in since the 1960s).

Dangers clearly loom when an artist veers in the opposite direction and barely acknowledges the material that won him a fan base to begin with—something I realized last night at BergenPAC in Englewood, NJ, when Todd Rundgren performed a set so awful that it could have been the kind of bad performance art notoriously perpetrated by Joaquin Phoenix on David Letterman. So that made me grateful, in one way, that Mike Love and company showed some appreciation for its loyal audience.

In particular, the Beach Boys have also shown appreciation to Chautauqua. The group has been stopping there on tour every couple of years since the late 1990s. At a time when the inability of the Amphitheater to accommodate many popular acts has become an issue in the fight over its fate, that willingness to return had to be deeply appreciated by the programmers at Chautauqua.

Love and the rest of the group mined a full 50 songs for the three-hour show, and it’s a tribute to the depth of their catalogue that other well-loved tunes (e.g., “Sail On, Sailor”) didn’t make the final cut. With hits so old and so familiar, the options for making them sound fresh are limited.

To some extent, the tragedies involving the Wilson brothers that initiated the considerable personnel changes in the band have, ironically, helped by adding new voices and musicians.

Guitarist Jeff Foskett (who has toured off and on with the Beach Boys since the 1980s) earned a well-deserved standing ovation for the falsetto on the lead vocal for “Don’t Worry, Baby,” and Scott Totten, introduced by Love as the band’s “musical director,” proved equally adept, if not flamboyant, on his guitar.

But Love used video projections on giant screens behind the band to re-cast the songs. In some ways, this device worked, even though it involved doubling down on the notion that the Beach Boys are what is euphemistically known in the industry as a “heritage” act. (Film and photos from the group’s heyday, in the early 1960s, underscored how much they were indelibly of a particular time and spirit—the confident California of the early postwar period—in the same way that the Andrews Sisters were in WWII.)

But other old chestnuts chosen—and, especially, their presentation—left something to be desired. At age 74, having been married five times, how could Love sing with a straight face “When I Grow Up to Be a Man” (unless, perhaps, by dueting with one of his several grandchildren)?

Worse was a tune that Love prefaced by saying it constituted a tribute to those “in uniform.” Audience members who regarded it as a tip of the hat to the armed forces were soon disabused of that notion, when the video of “Be True to Your School” featured a nonstop succession of cheerleaders. The idea of a septuagenarian taking such unabashed interest in females five and even six decades his junior can only be described as creepy.

Over the years, never completely out of the group’s grasp, another alternative has existed, however lonely it has seemed at times. When Brian’s psychological issues proved overwhelming in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Carl stepped in to try to fill the gap by taking more of the creative initiative on Sunflower, Surf’s Up, 20/20 and Holland. While not as successful as their earlier work, these did yield some marvelous songs, including “Add Some Music to Your Day” and “Sail On, Sailor.”

The other alternative, of course, was offered by Brian. Pet Sounds has been celebrated as an aural masterpiece that forced the Beatles to step up their game with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but more fundamentally, it represented Brian’s recognition that the group could not keep singing forever about hot rods and surfing—and the need to “Be True to Your School.” It has stayed relevant because the theme of this first rock concept album—the exhilaration and heartbreak of adult love—can be sung and appreciated by anyone of sufficient age. 

The infrequent solo work that Brian has released over the years—notably, the CD Love and Mercy—was composed in the same vein. His current separation from the group condemns them to a continuous time loop that cuts them off from any contact with the future.

And yet…We can’t leave the current incarnation of The Beach Boys like this. Given the advancing age of Love and his old (and new) colleagues, this might be the last iteration of America’s most influential rock vocalists that I’ll ever see. It was a joy to be reminded not just of their irresistible ubiquitous hits (“Help Me, Rhonda,” “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Good Vibrations”) but also of their less-noticed gems that any other musicians would be delighted to have created (e.g., “Please Let Me Wonder,” “Disney Girls” and “Getcha Back”).

Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, on the Surfing Craze)

“Let's go surfin' now

Everybody's learning how

Come on and safari with me.”—“Surfin’ Safari,” written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by the Beach Boys, from their Surfin’ Safari LP (1962)

Though released as a single two months before, “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys entered the Billboard charts on this date in 1962, eventually peaking at #14. It would become the centerpiece of the group’s first album, released two months later.

“Surfin’ Safari” (labeled “Surf and Safari” at the time) was one of the songs featured on the demo tape that Murry Wilson, father of the three sons  that comprised the heart of the group, used to promote the young musicians to Nik Venet of Capital Records, who signed them almost immediately after hearing the demo in April 1962.

It was a fun (or, as the musicians would later put it, “fun, fun, fun”) record, brimming with influences such as the Four Freshmen and Chuck Berry. It’s also, indisputably, a song born of a time, place and mood unique in American life.

It’s hard to believe for a state with such a rocky economy these past several years, but Southern California in the early 1960s symbolized good times, in every sense. The defense and aerospace industries in the state were riding the wave of a postwar boom. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that, for the children of the white-collar workers at the heart of this boom, “catching a wave” came to have literal force, as a whole youth culture flocked around the state’s beaches.

Brian Wilson might have been the group’s principal songwriter and troubled genius (though not yet cracking under the effects of his abusive father), but it was younger brother Dennis Wilson who was the group’s only actual surfer. It was he who tipped off Brian and cousin Mike Love about the growing surf trend: “You guys ought to write a song about it,” he urged.

A month and a half ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks marveled over “The Power of the Particular”: “If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct musical tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific paracosm, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.”

The inspiration of this epiphany was the columnist’s astonishment over how Europeans could embrace so readily Bruce Springsteen, whose songs (particularly the early ones) are spiked with references to his home turf of the Jersey Shore. But the same applies just as much (perhaps even more so) to the Beach Boys.

Consider this: In “Surfin’ Safari,” the group summoned such California places as Huntington, Malibu, Rincon, and  Laguna. In another early group tribute to surfing, “Surfin’ USA,” the place-dropping was even more vigorous, with 11 different beaches in the state mentioned. It was all more than just a rock ‘n’ roll adaptation of the kind of “list song” that Cole Porter had made famous. No, this evoked an entire world—one that people all over, at that time, couldn’t wait to join.

A little over a decade later, the California Dream had already started to curdle, perhaps evoked nowhere more savagely and poignantly in The Eagles’ Hotel California song, “The Last Resort”: “They called it paradise/The place to be/They watched the hazy sun, sinking in the sea.”

The early 1960s were the Beach Boys’ sun-kissed moment—before Brian’s breakdown, before the band’s late ‘60s slide into an oldies group, before the death of the one true "beach" boy, Dennis in 1983. In 1962, with “Surfin’ Safari” and other tunes that Brian began to crank out (and soon tire of as formulaic), they were about to become America’s Boys of Endless Summer. None of the boys had any idea of the stress and storms waiting for themselves, their state, and their country in the next decade—and half-century.

(The photograph shows the Beach Boys at their so-called “Lost Concert,” 1964, a performance believed lost for 35 years.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Brian Wilson, in All His Sad Glory)

“Sometimes I feel very sad

(Can't find nothin' I can put my heart and soul into)

I guess I just wasn't made for these times.”—“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds LP (1965)

It shouldn’t shock me that Brian Wilson turns 70 today; after all, the troubled genius behind the Beach Boys has been on the music scene for half a century this year.

But unlike virtually all the other people in your life, whom you might see, day by day, age before your eyes, entertainers can seem frozen in time. The image of resolute, strong Kirk Douglas in Spartacus endures, even though the actor is 96, with his speech and gait noticeably slowed. My mind still flashes back to my family's first Beach Boys LP, The Beach Boys Today!, with songs such as “Dance, Dance, Dance,” “When I Grow Up to be a Man,” and “Help Me, Rhonda”--sung by young men barely out of their teens, and with the sun-kissed California early '60s wholesome look to go with it.

Though I heard the hits (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?,” “Sloop John B”) early on, it would be decades before I listened to the other songs from their classic album Pet Sounds. It was all a far cry from little deuce coupes, high school cheerleaders and surfing. In particular, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” hints at the pressure and pain that led to Brian’s breakdown in 1967.

When this song was first released, its lyrics spoke to the fragility of belief and sanity. But by the mid-1990s, when a documentary on Wilson that took its name from this song came out, the composer’s singing voice sounded frayed, revealing a different kind of fragility—the fragility of youth.

This summer marks the release not just of a reunion tour of the surviving Beach Boys members but also of a CD, That’s Why God Made the Radio. The title of one tune sounds especially elegiac, inevitably implying the fragility of life itself: “Summer’s Gone.” 

Perhaps it is, but not the pain, somehow made beautiful, from the young man who, nearly 50 years ago, sang for all of those who, like himself, felt they could never fit in, anywhere.

(Photo by Richard King of Brian Wilson during a performance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 2007.)

Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, With “Good Vibrations”)

“I’m picking up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations.”—“Good Vibrations” (1966), written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by the Beach Boys

Perhaps no other cultural realm supports Robert Frost’s contention that “Nothing gold can stay” as much as the music industry--and few bands have done so as powerfully as The Beach Boys.

The best of the Beach Boys comes from the poignant sense of a passage in time. Summer doesn’t last forever; the “Surfer Girl” can’t stay young eternally; the Pet Sounds song cycle that started with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” ends with “Caroline, No.” Is it any wonder, then, that the group’s production masterpiece “Good Vibrations” reigned atop the Billboard pop charts for only one week, reaching it on this date 45 years ago today?

“We were setting out to create a record that everybody would spook out to,” Brian Wilson told Paul Zollo in 1988. “It would scare people and that would be a really heavy record. And what we did was, we got so into it that the more we created, the more we wanted to create. You know what I mean?”

No, not really. But Wilson, his brains undoubtedly scrambled after years of mental anguish and drug use, did make a kind of sense almost immediately afterward in the same interview collected for Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting: “That record came together like nobody’s business. That really was a good record.”

Years ago, I remember, the baseball reliever Mike Marshall tried to analyze strikeout king Nolan Ryan’s success from the point of view of kinesiology. I remember thinking how beside the point it was to deconstruct what really was a phenomenon, maybe even a gift of the gods.

And that is how I feel about Wilson and the creation of “Good Vibrations.” You can talk all you want about the four different studios employed and the textures each created; the double- and even triple-tracking of voices to make them sound like 20 altogether; the use of unusual instruments such as a cello and a theremin; and the care lavished throughout six months of production and $10,000 in expenses—an unheard-of cost at the time.

What remains true, in the end, is that Wilson—in the precious moment before his psyche fractured amid record-company pressures, battles with cousin and group lead singer Mike Love, drug use and residual damage from abuse by his father—seized a creative bolt of lightning and produced textures of voice and instruments that nobody—not even himself—had ever achieved before on the pop-music scene. From what I have seen on You Tube, even his band (and despite Love’s recalcitrance and Brian's absence from the stage, they remained Brian’s) never came close to capturing in concert the same kind of excitement that exploded across the airwaves in late 1966.

The paradox of the Beach Boys and the youth culture they epitomized is that, even as their moment as leaders of pop music passed, they managed to create what Wilson correctly told Zollo two decades later was “an eternal record. Something that will recur in eternity.”

Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, Mourning “The Girl I Used to Know”)

“Where did your long hair go?
Where is the girl I used to know?
How could you lose that happy glow?”--”Caroline, No,” written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, performed by the Beach Boys from their Pet Sounds LP (1966)

Unlike “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Caroline, No" never made it into Billboard’s Top 10, peaking only at #32. But if it doesn’t have the infectiousness of these two singles, nor the sheer grandeur of “God Only Knows,” it’s nevertheless an indispensable part of Pet Sounds.

The LP, which was released on this date 45 years ago, might have been the 11th studio album for the Beach Boys, but it was the one in which they made a decisive transition from their traditional subject matter of surfing and hot rods in favor of something more ambitious and adult. With unrivaled vocal harmonies and dense, multilayered tracking owing more than a little to Phil Spector's "wall of sound," it was a kind of pop symphony--a parallel made explicit 11 years ago, when Brian Wilson toured the country playing the album with local symphony orchestras.

In this concept album about the course of a love affair, “Caroline, No” concludes matters on a note of heartbreak. That indelible image of long hair gone perfectly symbolizes loss of innocence. Here was arguably pop music's most troubled genius, opening a window into his heart with this song and the even more plaintive "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (which provided the title for a fine 1995 documentary about the Beach Boys' major creative force).

Pet Sounds might have driven a wedge among the Beach Boys (Mike Love questioned the wisdom of Brian’s movement away from their longtime commercially viable hits), but their fellow artists recognized it for the pop landmark it was. Paul McCartney, a particular admirer, sought to top it with the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Wilson in turn tried to counter with Smile before Brian Wilson's nervous breakdown led to a truncated version of that project, Smiley Smile.

Too bad lead singer Love was so obtuse about Pet Sounds' move into new territory: A musician in his sixties looks downright foolish singing about being true to your school, or "When I Grow Up to be a Man." On the other hand, the exhilaration and torments of love can be understood whether you're seventeen or seventy.

For all the aural pleasure it provides, I also associate Pet Sounds with two films that define the era in which it was made. The later film, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, marks its protagonist’s introduction to the magic of rock ‘n’ roll in the form of “God Only Knows.” A quarter century earlier, over the closing credits, Warren Beatty’s Shampoo commented ironically on the empty emotional life its stud protagonist had been left with by playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

But more often than not, when I hear the latter song--and the wondrous album from which it sprang--my heart swells with joy.