When I saw Brian Wilson and his band at Jones Beach Theater, at what proved to be one of The Beach Boys leader’s last shows, he barely made a sound except to sing the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Phil Spector-produced pop masterpiece that inspired and obsessed him since he first heard it in 1963. It was a sad, affecting scene, one which typified the myth of him as a “broken genius.”

Wilson’s cliched reputation as a musical master akin to Beethoven or Mozart originated with a publicist who was hired to promote his masterpiece, Pet Sounds. It took some time for the label to stick, but after Wilson’s death earlier this month at age 82, he was all but universally lauded as a musical genius.

It’s often difficult to judge the merits of our contemporaries accurately, and Wilson was one of the great eminences of the still-dominant Boomer generation. Admittedly, Wilson’s towering reputation rests on somewhat precarious foundations: He is revered mostly on account of a single LP and a handful of exceptional singles. Still, for a miraculous period during the mid-1960s, Wilson produced songs of a sublime beauty that one does not expect to find in pop music.

In our present cultural dark age, this feels even more true than it did in the early 1960s, when Wilson started with Chuck Berry as his basic model. The arc of Wilson’s growth, from “Surfin’ Safari,” to his creative apotheosis just four years later in 1966, is one of the most remarkable in the history of 20^th century music.

Pet Sounds is Wilson’s bid for greatness, but his crowning achievement overshadows his other fine work. “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” and “Warmth of the Sun” capture the tender emotions of youth with remarkable power. “Don’t Worry Baby” overflows with musical splendor. In just under three minutes, Wilson evokes the ecstasy of a summer’s day without once mentioning the beach. The harmonies are glorious. The guitar part, only two notes, seems to float at the top of the sky. The bittersweet melody, sung by Wilson’s wonderfully expressive falsetto, is breathtaking. Even when Wilson was under pressure to churn out the hits, his albums contained beautiful deep cuts like “Please Let Me Wonder” and “Hushabye.”

On Pet Sounds, Wilson touched the musical heavens. From the angelic opening bars of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” to the quiet, melancholy closer, “Caroline, No,” the songs on this album have a wondrous beauty that can still move listeners decades later. How did Wilson pull it off? God only knows. One can try to list his musical gifts, which are well-known: a rich talent for melody, an ear for lush harmony, and so on, but this does not really capture what was special about Wilson.

What sets him apart from all other pop writers is the purity of his vision and his quasi-religious sense of vocation. Wilson wanted to create the most beautiful sound that human ears are capable of hearing in three minutes, or 30. He called Smile, his legendary unfinished album,a “teenage symphony to God.”

At his best, Wilson’s music certainly sounded like it came from somewhere above. Down here on earth, Wilson was dealing with more worldly concerns: he was competing with the most legendary songwriting duo of the century, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the pressure was killing him. The Beatles had a classically trained producer, George Martin, to polish their act. The Beach Boys just had their shy, unassuming brother, who did all the producing, arranging, and writing himself.

Pet Sounds was the closest Wilson came to achieving his beatific vision. After his glorious streak in the mid-1960s, Wilson showed dim reflections of his former brilliance on tracks like “This Whole World” and the borderline autistic Love You, which contains a beautiful song about fatherhood, in between musings about Johnny Carson and the solar system. His lost, sprawling masterpiece, Smile, offered hints of untapped “genius” on the captivating “Surf’s Up.” But he spent most of his life banished from musical Eden by drugs and a soaring ambition that had nowhere to go after “Good Vibrations,” except down.

But let us not dwell on the dark side of a life that had so much light to share with the world. At his peak, Wilson transcended the overblown pretensions of psychedelia that seduced his contemporaries, and he left us with songs of the purest and most inspired beauty, songs that can only make us bow our heads in thankfulness and wonder. No less than Paul McCartney called “God Only Knows” the best song ever, and who are we to disagree?

All Americans can take pride in Wilson’s accomplishment, but his music belongs to the world.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/brian-wilson-touched-the-musical-heavens/