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Hearing Surf's Up for the first time (from the album of the same name), I decided that nobody, including Brian Wison, would likely ever top what he and VanDyke Parks had achieved. That opinion has stood the test of four decades.

Gotta agree with that.

Surf's Up blew my mind when I first heard it in 1971. I grew up with the Beach Boys, and was probably as pleasantly surprised as any of their fans, by that masterful recording. It went so far beyond anything they'd ever done before.

I absolutely love that album. Out of the 1,000 or so tunes burned to my hard drive, Feel Flows and Surf's Up are in my top ten favorites.

It is sad that most of the BBs' audience could not follow where Brian was going.

And I hasten to add, not just Brian. Because of his psychological problems, the other BBs had to step into his huaraches; they carried much of the weight on Sunflower, Surf's Up, and Holland.

It allowed us to better understand what Carl, Dennis, Al, Bruce, and even Mike could do when they took the lead.

I am especially moved by Carl's work on the track Surf's Up. He made a production with Brian's 4-year old demo track as the seed. To do this, he took his older brother's incomplete vocal and finished the solo--seamlessly--in his own voice, and then the complex coda with all the other BBs.

None of the aforementioned albums were perfect, of course. But they were, for me, unprecedentedly interesting, and incomparably moving in places.

Holland might be the quirkiest of them all, especially if you consider the bonus disc that featured producer Jack Rielly narrating that goofy story of the kid and the transistor radio fairy. But when you're in the right mood, listen to Carl's Sail On Sailor or Trader; or, for that matter, Mike Love's California Saga, with his understated readings of Robinson Jeffers.

But, as I mentioned at the beginning, this music had gone places the masses could evidently not follow.