The shifting sands of time

He heard voices, did drugs, and fell apart. Can the Beach Boys’ 50-year reunion tour put Brian Wilson back together again? Andrew Romano reports

BRIAN WILSON, the lumbering ‘savant’ who wrote, produced, and sang an outlandish number of immortal pop songs in the 1960s with The Beach Boys, is swivelling in a chair, belly out, arms dangling, next to his faux-grand piano at the cavernous Burbank, California studio where he and the group’s surviving members are rehearsing for their 50th-anniversary reunion tour, which begins this week.

At 24, Wilson shelved his most avant-garde album, Smile, and retreated for decades into a haze of drug abuse and mental illness; 45 years later, he has reemerged, stable but somewhat screwy, to give the sun-and-surf thing a final go.