Remember 1967? When each new album was supposed to be an advance over the last? When the variety on Sgt. Pepper’s didn’t remind people of the Ed Sullivan show but of well, Dante’s Inferno? “A Day In the Life” as grandly depressed as T.S. Eliot. And Bob Dylan a better poet than Walt Whitman, who was stuck back there with words on a page, because electric guitars hadn’t been invented. When the idea of ’50’s rock revival seemed as impossible as Charles Manson. And heavy significance was just lying around even (especially?) in album covers, waiting to be discovered.

No one disagreed with this: it was just a question of who was included in. Some people thought the Beach Boys were, and as a matter of fact, thought that their next album after Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations” — first called Dumb Angel and then changed to Smile — was going to be the all-time great perception snapper. The greatest work of art in the history of Rock and Roll. Cheetah magazine had an article by I think it was Jules Siegel called The Surfer Who Discovered God or something, and even if it made Brian sound a little eccentric, maybe being eccentric proved he was a genius! Such seemed to be the intent.