I had no idea the Beach Boys were ever clean-cut for the first several years of my awareness of them. My initial introduction to the Beach Boys was the hippie Beach Boys.

This was due to my brother. He is 10 years older than I, and played all kinds of music, from soul to rock of the 60s and 70s. We had a musical house, and my dad’s contribution to it was country, folk, and big band, although for a man his age (40s) at that time, he was very open-minded about music. I inherited that from him.

My brother had two Beach Boys records, Sunflower and Endless Summer. The covers to both showed the typical 70s band look: lots of hair, both long head hair and bushy facial hair. So, it was quite a surprise to me when, at some point in the late 70s as a 10- or 11-year-old, I discovered the clean-cut version of the Beach Boys via some television special.

This is my personal quirk about the band and something I thought of when I heard of the passing of Brian Wilson at age 82. An aside, this is the same age that another significant figure in American music, Sly Stone, passed at earlier this week. Sort of remarkable, given their history, that they made it to such an old age.

In any event, my appreciation for what Wilson did with the Beach Boys matured and grew as I aged and learned more about the mad genius behind their music. Wilson was certainly a troubled soul; the stories about his eccentric behavior became legendary, such as the ones about riding around LA in the back of a limo for hours at night, or not leaving his bed for days. A homage to this was one of the better songs about suffering depression ever written, titled “Brian Wilson” by The Barenaked Ladies:

Wilson himself mined his depression to create some gorgeous music. One example of this is a portrait of a depressed young man remembering what it was like to be a sad, lonely teenager.

But of course, early Beach Boys was largely about girls, sun, surf, and fast cars. They even had a song called Fun, Fun, Fun, and like some of their early compositions, it was basically a white-guy mashup of Chuck Berry and doo-wop. If you are going to call a song Fun, Fun, Fun, it better be fun, and despite being a sad sack, Wilson and the boys deliver.

Beach Boys love songs could often be bittersweet and as gorgeous as a sunny California day. This one is about a drag racer’s girlfriend telling him not to worry about a race he has a bad feeling about. The tune has a beautiful foreboding, like he is destined to meet his doom despite his best girl’s comforting words.

Now we get into the Wilson genius period. I am remiss to admit that I cannot recall which Beatle, John or Paul, said this about God Only Knows: It was the only song that caused so much of an emotional reaction the first time they heard it that they teared up. Some say it’s a perfect pop song, and I think there’s quite an argument to be made for that. The Beach Boys harmonies in the mid-break of this song give me chills.

Sometimes the Beach Boys seemed to anticipate trends right before they happened (a few other examples are a bit further down). The following two tunes are sort of like a weird mashup of prog rock and doowop. First is perhaps my favorite tune by the boys, Good Vibrations. Here is the official video of the song, which inexplicably includes a girl playing with a basketball and a Monkees-esque imagining of them as incompetent firefighters.

The other example is the deeply odd Hero and Villains, where Wilson seemed to be trying to pack anything he could into a three-minute song. Like so many of his experiments, on paper it seems like it would be ridiculous, but he made it work.

The Boys hit a commercial rough patch in the late 60s into the 70s, as heavier rock took over and some rock fans viewed them as outdated and corny. However, I’d argue they did some of their best work during this period. The Beach Boys predicted the rise of the dream pop genre with  All I Wanna Do, which I heard a lot thanks to my brother.

On the follow-up to Sunflower, the Beach Boys continued to explore new musical boundaries. Given its dark album cover and opening track titled Don’t Go Near the Water, Surf’s Up was an ironic title for an album. But its title track and album closer impressed a lot of music lovers, including, as per Wilson, Leonard Bernstein.

Next was Holland, and I am running out of space here, but I put Holland up there with any of the band’s albums. However, they hit a rough patch creatively soon after.

But in 1977, continuing the theme of Wilson seemingly foreseeing music styles right before they happen, the band releasedThe Beach Boys Love You. A lot of fans had no idea what to make of this record of proto-New Wave and proto-synth pop. However, critics and fellow musicians swooned. Patti Smith even submitted a review in Hit Parader that was written in the form of a poem,

The less said about the Boys in the 80s/90s, the better. But I want to close with a track off That’s Why God Made the Radio, their final album, which was, in my opinion, a very nice swan song for new Beach Boys material.

And I’ll let that be the last word.