Maybe it was because the peak years of Brian Wilson’s early creativity coincided with the (few) years that I listened to Top 40 radio, but I always felt that he and the Beach Boys deserved a special place in the history of song, comparable to that occupied by another musical favorite of mine — English madrigals.

Wilson and the Elizabethan tunesmiths both created false worlds about which simple but true things could be said. Madrigals were pastorals, inhabited by lovers — often shepherds and shepherdesses, who never seemed to get chapped hands from milking or dirty garments from mucking out stables and sheep pens. But they pursued each other, kissing and loving and breaking up. Their two subjects were, Oh how happy I am! and, Oh, how sad I am!

Similarly, Wilson and his colleagues sang of surfing and sand and T-Birds — all Californian and all carefree, until a surfer girl rejected you, when you asked Rhonda to help you get her out of your heart. There was never much for young ladies there, except dance beats, but they could listen to Joan Baez.

Wilson had an ear for harmonies and a knack for counterpoint, but he used them best it seemed to me in short song formats. (I once thought “Good Vibrations” was a good song, but I now see that I was mistaken.) On those canvasses, scarcely larger than postage stamps, he drew indelible pictures of frolic and yearning. Who knows how much better his songs would be if his high register had actually been pleasant.

Camille Paglia compared the Beach Boys to Lord Byron. That is a thought for another day. They were, themselves, a distillation of a moment that is still as fresh as it was 60 years ago.