40th Anniversay of Pet Sounds recording

One of the greatest albums of all time. Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, and Sloop John B are about as close to musical perfection as we'll ever see again... BBC -- Forty years on from the recording of Wouldn't It Be Nice, the legacy of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys remains undimmed, despite a subsequent roller-coaster ride featuring mental illness, mass murderers and serial litigation. [...]By January 1966, Brian Wilson, still only 23, seemed to have the world at his feet. A glittering string of hit songs - including Fun, Fun, Fun, Little Deuce Coupe, Surfin' USA and California Girls - had established him alongside Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards as a leading light in rock music's burgeoning aristocracy. But, beneath the surface, Wilson - a musical genius despite being totally deaf in his right ear - was deeply unhappy. Just before Christmas 1964, the pressures of writing, producing, arranging and performing had culminated in a nervous breakdown. Eschewing the rigours of touring, Wilson withdrew to the privacy of his state-of-the-art recording studio. Heavy drug use, especially of marijuana and LSD, led him into a netherworld of auditory and visual hallucinations, obsessive thoughts and bizarre behaviour. As Wilson says in his autobiography, also entitled Wouldn't It Nice: "If madness is an inability to adjust to the way people are supposed to act, then I was on my way, since except for functioning in the studio, I was increasingly unable to get in step with the rules." Paradoxically, it was this psychological maelstrom, plus the urge to respond to The Beatles' recently-released Rubber Soul, that contributed to the album that many regard as Brian Wilson's masterwork, Pet Sounds The tortured genius of Brian Wilson. These songs will always sound current no matter when they're played... I grew up in the 80's, and was a teenager in the 90's, but I knew 50's and 60's rock better than I knew modern music. I fell in love with the Beach Boys because of their early hits, but their later songs, especially Pet Sounds, made them enduring music masters. As a kid, me and my friends, would do our own American Idol to every Beach Boys album we had. Of course we were our own judges and there was no Simon to tell us we were horrible. We'd host concerts for our parents, jump around on our stage (aka my bunk bed) and play guitar with tennis rackets and baseball bats. Now, anytime I hear a Beach Boys song, I always hum/sing along. That's timeless music.