Sid Holt at The Nation:
Wilson was strange—probably mad—and it was his strangeness that contributed as much as his music to his reputation as a genius. Even in videos of the Beach Boys performing in the early 1960s, he appears to be searching for an exit. The breakdown that led to his forsaking live performance; the piano in the living-room sandbox; his panicked abandonment of Smile (the intended, and soaringly ambitious, follow-up to Pet Sounds); his wandering the aisles of his very own health-food store, the Radiant Radish, in a bathrobe—all became part of his legend.
And now Brian is dead, far outliving his brothers—the 39-year-old Dennis, who drowned in 1983 after a day of drinking, and the dutiful Carl, who died of cancer, then 51, in 1998—and most of his bandmates. (Of the Beach Boys most will remember, only his cousin Mike Love and his high school friend Al Jardine, survive.) More to the point, he had outlived the times he helped define. Yet the 45s and the best of the LPs—The Beach Boys Today!, Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), Pet Sounds, even Smiley Smile, which was definitely not Smile—endure. Come summer, the title of one of the Beach Boys’ greatest-hits albums, Spirit of America, never seems truer. It is the music my Gen X wife and millennial daughters (and as one day, I am sure, my Gen Beta grandson will) all demand with their hot dogs and Cokes.
more here.
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