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I don’t even remember when or where I heard it first. It was probably at home, on my FM radio, or maybe on a car radio driving somewhere with my parents. But I can remember the chugging strains of the piano keys, and Blondie Chaplin’s insistent vocals and the odd lyrics about “restful waters and deep commotion” and that cool bank of blissful background harmonies which pretty much rearranged my head in a nanosecond.

The song was “Sail On, Sailor.” The band was The Beach Boys. And I’ve been their faithful galley hand ever since.

Of course, it’s odd that my favorite song by my favorite musical group was only partially written by Brian Wilson, and he had nothing to do with the recording of it. If the stories are true, Van Dyke Parks practically had to force the bloated, drug-addled, cheeseburger-scarfing Brian to sit down at the piano and finish the melody so the band could have some possibility of a single for the “Holland” album. Ah, Brian. Who would have guessed that he would be the last Wilson brother standing?

Today is his 65th birthday, and I hope this magically gifted and troubled man is surrounded by family and love and peace and, yes, good vibrations. Considering the life he’s led, one of unimaginable triumphs and degrading lows, I can’t think of anybody who deserves it more. I don’t need to recount the Shakespearean surf saga of the Wilson family, it’s practically an industry unto itself. And the less said about the Iago of the band, Mike Love, the better. Ditto for Murry Wilson. And double ditto for Eugene Landy.

For me, it’s hard to imagine a world without Brian Wilson’s music in it. The Beach Boys were my first cultural obsession. (In some ways, they have remained forever so: Until recently, I was still subscribing to a Beach Boys fan magazine.) Of course, they were never cool and never less so than in the mid-’70s when I became hooked on them as my peers were jamming to Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan. I didn’t have anybody to talk with about what the music meant to me, and I’m not sure I could have processed my feelings about it, anyway. I was a pasty, pudgy, lonely kid growing up in an East Coast beach town, about as far away from being a bronzed surfer surrounded by babes and buzz and good waves as you could possibly be. I’d lie to friends that I went surfing and would carry around surfing magazines. Pretty pathetic, huh? Did I connect to Brian Wilson’s music because he wasn’t a surfer, either, but a person who understood and wrote convincingly about my adolescent loneliness and confusion? I don’t think so. The Beach Boys’ lyrics have never done much for me, and at times have been a struggle to look past. In the end, I think I connected emotionally to the music, that unknowable gift Brian has in building interlocking banks of harmonies and instrumentation and structuring them into pleasing and inventive musical patterns. And always, always with that driving beat, pulsing underneath. It’s that magical sound in his head, that radiant summery sound. It’s an ode to joy, and it has brought countless moments of it to me.

Basically, I don’t know the first damn thing about musical theory or composition, but I know what moves me. What moves me is the smooth harmonies that flow out of “Surfer Girl” and “Girls on The Beach,” or the musical ache of “The Warmth of The Sun” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” and “Til I Die” or the bouncy beat of all those surfing and car songs or the snap of Hal Blaine’s drum at the beginning of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or that lonely echoing beat that kicks off “Caroline No.” Brian Wilson’s music flows through my life, as surely as blood flows through my veins, and I am so grateful to him for it.

It hasn’t been easy being a Beach Boys fan. I can remember silently fueling my obsession with the band in the ’70s and the quizzical look from a friend on the day I found the “Sunflower” album in a record store and begged, begged, begged my pal to lend me the money to buy it. “Why do you like the Beach Boys so much?” he asked. People still ask it, and how do you explain what you love the most? (Oddly enough, my favorite Beach Boys music is the post-”Smile” period, when Brian was in bed and mostly out of the loop. The other members of the band, especially the greatly underestimated Dennis and Carl Wilson, had to contribute to such marvelous discs as “Friends,” “Wild Honey,” “Holland,” “Sunflower,” “The Beach Boys In Concert” and “Carl and the Passions: So Tough.”)

The first time I saw Brian Wilson in person, he was wandering backstage in a bathrobe. I could see him from my nosebleed seat in the audience. It was around 1976-1977, I must have been 16 or 17 and I was such a dork that I had to get my parents to drive me miles away to the concert as a birthday present. My parents (thanks Mom; thanks Dad) had to wait around the town while I went to the concert alone. It was the “Love You” era, the band’s last truly creative disc and, in my opinion, Brian’s last great work. At least, I got to see the original Beach Boys lineup. Brian sat at the back, noodling on the piano. Dennis sang “You Are So Beautiful.” As I sat by myself, I looked around and talked to some other people who I could tell were as enthralled by the music as I was. I wasn’t alone! It reminds me of Lester Bangs’ speech in “Almost Famous” about the fraternity of the uncool, and we surely were, moved by the Beach Boys’ music when the hip culture had pronounced it unfashionably square. I can remember at the end of the concert, Al Jardine walking offstage and twirling alone, still lost in the music. And all of us fans walking out after the concert and how people started spontaneously singing the harmony part at the end of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” What a treasure.

Happy birthday, Brian. God only knows what I would have done without you.

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Feel free to share your Beach Boys/Brian Wilson memories. And play “Sail On, Sailor” today. It’s still the greatest song in the world.

(Cross-posted at www.badfortheglass.blogspot.com)