Hey, all you surfin’ dudes and hardbody wahinis, check out this thing on TNT. It’s a tribute to the surf god, Brian Wilson! An American genius! The wizard of Bellagio Drive, sonic sorcerer, creator of perhaps the most perfect rock album of them all—Pet Sounds. A unique event! A long-awaited, star-studded special! Two hours of encomiums, cover versions, old footage of the Beach Boys when they were the Beach Boys, publicity stills. Oh boy! Or, uh, I dunno—is this really such a good idea?

To begin with, the tribute thing—once you get over the contrived anticipation of the occasion, the celebrity debris and all the sports utility vehicle ads—you have to ask yourself, "What—other than a kind of celebration of itself—is the point of this?" All these famous people—Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Elton John, David Crosby (any time you see David Crosby in something, beware)—all these cool guys and hip chicks paying homage to Brian, their idol (more or less). Or are they? I mean, you could also come away with the feeling that, hey, Brian Wilson is a great artist because we dig him. A bunch of famous people saying that this guy is good because we like him so much we’re gonna sing his songs. A tribute to us, basically. Gee, what famous friends this guy Brian has. Ach! Too much monkey business. This stuff really brings out the Grinch in me.

But, wait. First thing, on comes the Boys Choir of Harlem singing what seems like a celestial alphabet. Harmonized phonemes! A kabalistic chant! Perfect. Because Brian really is a religious composer in the tradition of Saint Teresa of Avila—the quest of the soul toward the divine. But you know they ain’t gonna pursue that route. And, sure enough, the next thing they do is run into it and wreck it.

Ricky Martin singing "Help Me, Rhonda." He should have called it "Check Me Out, Rhonda." Jeez, Louise! It’s a hyperactive lounge lizard in plastic pants searching for the inner meaning of the damn thing—as if it were some Johnny Mercer lyric that needed Sinatra’s phrasing to pull it out. There is no hidden meaning, you idiot, it’s a pop song—I yam what I yam—a clean Southern California soft machine. Help me, Rhonda, indeed! It made you long for go-go dancers like the ones seen in an old Beach Boys clip they showed. There in all its hokey innocence was body language that meshed perfectly with Rhonda’s sonic gears. That was meaning in the Zen-surf sense of the word, baby.

Paul Simon comes out and does a dignified acoustic "Surfer Girl" but, of course, making it sound like "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme." In other words, kinda deconstructing it back into the folk chords it so plaintively and ingeniously leapt out of. Pleasant, unassuming, archaizing—but what is the point? Actually missing the point of Brian’s transforming spell.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to go through the whole deal, song by song—what would be the point of recapitulating the excruciating agony? I’ll just hit on a few true horrors and leave it at that.

Elton John, how about that? And God only knows why, too. He’s become the Sylvia Miles of our time. The man will show up to the opening of an envelope. And that suit, Reg! It looks like your tailor hadn’t finished the alterations. And, by the way, what is Jann Wenner doing singing backup vocals? Get out! Please, Jann, don’t tell me it’s all come down to this. And then there’s Billy Joel, looking like Bluto in a tuxedo, oozing and Copacabanaing through "Don’t Worry Baby." Hey, I am worried, man, very worried. Somewhere along the line, this guy compromised with the mystery tramp.

Then there’s the leaden, oleaginous narration supposed to fill you in a bit on Brian’s curriculum vitae. Brain freeze! The gears of my mind actually seized up. I went into a kind of trance that can only be induced by an excess of droning, banal, misguided, rock-lit formulaic pap. Dear Recording Angel, I heard phrases such as "Brian’s genius finally allowed rock to be art"—I really did. Yes, let’s give rock an MFA, for god’s sake. Listen, the guy who wrote this stuff, David Leaf, a Beach Boys biographer I do believe, probably wrote some profound stuff and then the producer came along and said, "Dumb it down, this is television, boy."

C’mon, wasn’t there anything you liked at all in this tribute? Sure. My two favorites (aside from the opening) were Wilson Phillips (you can’t go wrong with genes like that from Dad and Mom) and, of course, Brian himself. It’s painful to watch Brian these days with one side of his face paralyzed from a stroke, but he looked good, actually. And his one song was pure Brian: soulful, reflective, compassionate, simple as a parable—the kind of story the Buddha might have sung if he’d come from Southern California.

One of the problems with a Brian Wilson tribute is that you really can’t tinker with the celestial machinery of his songs. Most cover versions of Brian’s songs fail because they won’t let the song be. In a sense, the only thing you can do is try and flawlessly duplicate his songs—but what in the end would be the point of that? They are perfect to begin with—all you’ll end up doing is cluttering the impeccable sine waves of the original with your own jangled vibrations. Brian’s sound is unique to him; it’s like the cry of a very complicated bird whose call encompasses everything he’s experienced and transmuted into an ineffable frequency—plaintive, otherworldly and resonating, as if it were some extraterrestrial code beamed from the furthest reaches of inner space.

I hung out with the Beach Boys for a while in 1967, trying to decipher the Brian enigma. I never did, but I glimpsed pieces of it. Brian approaches sound with an almost kabalistic fervor. The world was fast becoming transparent, and surf, for him, had by then transubstantiated into a mystic essence. In "Surf’s Up," waves represented, he said, "the eternal now," a Heraclitan analog for the ceaseless lapping of a hallucinated present on an ever- receding consciousness. He carried around a child’s plastic tape recorder on which he played the opening notes of "Be My Baby." Over and over again, Brian would play those four Masonic notes. Boom boom-boom pow! Boom boom-boom pow! Boom boom-boom pow! They followed him wherever he went, like the leitmotif of a character in an opera. They possessed for Brian an almost mystical significance. He saw them as some sort of cosmic code. He felt that through this sonic key he had unlocked a universal mystery, as if all sounds participated in some mysterium tremendum, a sort of pre-verbal language that intimately links humans, animals and inanimate things.

What the whole dopey puffed-up tribute thing missed was the essential sweetness and ingenuousness of Brian. In some ways, Brian is the most elusive of all rock stars. By now, we’re familiar enough with Dylan playing three-card monte with his identity to have stopped trying to guess which shell he’s under. Brian’s inscrutability is of a different order entirely. For one thing, he never really developed a public persona like other rock stars. His tract-house, kid-next-door manner was somewhat akin to Andy Warhol’s "dumb" act, a way of letting people patronize him while leaving the boy inside alone. It isn’t as if Brian was trying to be deliberately deceptive; he’s just the kid who never came out to play.

He lived in his head—where else would you go as a child with a monster-of-a-father like Murray Wilson? And that’s why he adapted so effortlessly to the studio—the studio was a materialization of Brian’s brain, a model of the room inside his head where he first heard those celestial sounds.