And that’s just one record. If you’ve heard of any Beach Boys album—as opposed to their many hit singles—it’s likely 1966’s Pet Sounds, and what “Good Vibrations” did as a single, Pet Sounds did as an album, setting a new high-water mark for songwriting, composition, and production, and setting off a kind of creative arms race with the Beatles. It’s worth noting that the latter band’s legendary producer George Martin, so instrumental in shaping their sound, said that “If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music, I would choose Brian Wilson,” and Paul McCartney famously called the first track on side two of Pet Sounds, “God Only Knows,” “the greatest song ever written.” (Bob Dylan, meanwhile, is on record as saying, about Wilson’s studio prowess, that while he “made all his records with four tracks, you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”)
But while the handfuls of albums they released from 1962 to 1966 made the Beach Boys famous (and, along the way, sold the mythical view of California as a paradise of surfing, hot rods, cute girls, and, yes, good vibes to the world at large) and Wilson the first artist who wrote, arranged, produced, and performed his own songs in the studio—bringing in armadas of the best session musicians and painstakingly instructing them not only in the exact manner in which he wanted their parts to be played, but also in (sorry) what kind of vibes he wanted them to channel—that very exactitude, aided by an increasingly dangerous pharmaceutical intake, essentially caused the group’s creative immolation. (It probably needs to be said that the old bugaboo of intra-band “creative differences” was brought to new and volatile heights within the Beach Boys, the majority of whom wanted to keep mining their trademark sun-fun-girls sound all the way to the bank.)
Reading the blue-chip obituaries and the tributes from so many musicians (Questlove writing that “if there was a human being who made art out of inexpressible sadness… damn it was Brian Wilson” certainly got to the heart of the matter), it can be hard to remember that there was a time when Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were essentially forgotten by most of the people whose opinions mattered. After Pet Sounds, a string of vastly less popular albums—some of them containing breathtaking songs, with many of them favorably reappraised in later years—followed in the 1970s. But in the ’80s and ’90s, Wilson was essentially a hermit, beset by drug and psychological problems (and later living under the care of a psychologist who was eventually stripped of his license and issued a restraining order) and bitter feuds with band members (mainly his cousin, Mike Love, now MAGA-affiliated) who essentially ran the Beach Boys name—long the source of swoons, screams, and slack-jawed wonder—into the ground.