Comfortable with his legacy as one of pop music's great auteurs, Brian Wilson has picked up a career that was left in tatters in 1967, when he succumbed to drug addiction, mental illness and the pressure of being labeled a genius at the age of 24.
"I'm thrilled to death to be working, are you kidding?" says the 62-year-old composer of virtually every Beach Boys song. "I work hard. I go on tour, I do my shows, it's fun work, and it gets me off my ass."
With the recent release of "Smile," a re-recording of the masterwork Wilson abandoned to paranoia and substance abuse in the late 1960s, the headlines have been screaming "Brian is back!"
But Wilson seems childlike—even fragile—in a telephone interview from the road. He answers each question carefully but briefly.
"All those years, we didn't think the world was ready for it," he says of "Smile," which entered the Billboard album chart last week at No. 13. "We thought it was too advanced music, so we shelved it for 38 years.
"I never thought about it all these years, but my wife, and my managers, and my publicity agents all told me about nine months ago that the world was ready for 'Smile.'"
Although "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" appeared as Beach Boys singles in the '60s, excised from the unfinished "Smile," many of the songs existed only as fragments, half-finished tapes and incomplete ideas.
"We checked the tapes just to get refreshed, and we changed 'em around a little bit, and then we created a third movement for it," Wilson says.
Original "Smile" lyricist Van Dyke Parks came on board to help Wilson and his band finish things off.
Revisiting what amounted to his jump-off moment of madness wasn't easy, he admits. "It took me back to a memory of when we were taking some pretty bad drugs—LSD, marijuana and amphetamines. And that that brought back some bad memories, but we got over that."
He says he's "thrilled to death" with the end result. "My band is like the greatest band I've ever worked with. They're very good musicians, and they sing better than the Beach Boys."
From the beginning, Brian was the heart and soul of the Beach Boys. His early songs—"Surfin' Safari," "I Get Around" and so many other California surf 'n' hot rod classics—led to some of the most sophisticated pop in history, including "In My Room," "Don't Worry Baby" and the otherworldly "God Only Knows."
That song, along with the hits "Wouldn't it Be Nice" and "Caroline, No," were part of the Beach Boys' masterpiece, the 1966 album "Pet Sounds." Wilson wrote all the music, arranged it and produced the record while the other Beach Boys were on tour.
When they returned, the band—including Brian's brothers, Carl and Dennis—thought the songs were strange and non-commercial. But they laid down their vocal harmonies anyway, trusting Brian's seemingly bottomless creative well.
In England, "Pet Sounds" was reviewed as the most brilliant American pop ever made. Paul McCartney to this day calls the album a direct influence on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Wilson considered "Sgt. Pepper" a challenge, and sought to up the ante with "Smile," which he conceived as a sort of trippy journey through the history of Americana (song titles included "Vegetables," "Do You Like Worms?" and "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow").
But he abandoned the project. While the Beach Boys soldiered on without him, dropping the odd "Smile" song onto their albums over the next few years, Brian entered into a lengthy period of mental problems, radical therapy and—ultimately—feuds, both personal and legal, with the group's lead vocalist, Mike Love.
Now, Carl and Dennis Wilson are both dead.
"I go straight ahead," Wilson says. "I don't think about my brothers. My brothers died, they're gone. They're gone from me."
Meanwhile, Love and Bruce Johnston still tour as the Beach Boys, heavy on the surfin' tunes.
"I don't talk to Mike and Bruce anymore," Wilson says quietly, before calling his old bandmates a string of expletives.
Things aren't any better with the other original Beach Boy, Al Jardine, who left the outfit several years ago. "I talked to Al about two weeks ago for the first time in many years," Wilson says, the disgust evident in his voice.
How did that go? "Not too good. I called him, and he didn't want to talk to me."
Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written about Wilson's deeply troubled years.
How does he feel about having his personal problems aired like so much dirty laundry?
"It doesn't bother me, because I get my sleep at night," he says. "It just doesn't bother me."
He has nothing but good things to say about the Wondermints, his studio and touring band.
"They're all in their 30s, so they're really young people," he says. "I'm 62 years old—it's really hard to keep up with those guys, those little whippersnappers.
"My wife makes me work, even. It's my wife who gave me my solo career in the first place. I told her, 'Melinda, I don't think I'm going to be able to do it.' And she goes, 'I know you can do it.' And I said, 'All right, I'll try.' And I swear to God, it worked."
Next up for Wilson is a rock 'n' roll album, which will include several collaborations with McCartney.
"We used to be rivals, now we're real good friends," Wilson says. "He's a wonderful guy, a very up kind of person."
What's his favorite among all the labels he's been given? "When they call me a genius," he says, "it means a lot to me."
Does he think he's a genius? "I really don't know from a genius," Wilson responds, and it's obvious that he's smiling as he considers the question.
"I don't know."