Over a shivering harpsichord, Brian Wilson's mournful vocal rises. "I've been trying hard to find the people that I won't leave behind." Some clip-clop percussion. "Every time I get the inspiration to go change things around, no one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found."
It's prophetic indeed. I Just Wasn't Made for These Times pre-empted the disappointing sales that its parent album would achieve. Pet Sounds was the 11th studio LP that 23-year-old Wilson had written for the Beach Boys. The winning formula of sun-drenched harmonies and juddering platitudes to surf-loving teens was so effortless for a composer of his aptitude that the band might churn out three albums a year. Pet Sounds tore up that map and plotted a kaleidoscopic course for enlightenment, but even some of Wilson's own bandmates weren't up for the journey.
"It was like, who would like to help me with new things?" Wilson says of the sentiment of I Just Wasn't Made for These Times. He's on tour as he talks to Spectrum, off in some vortex between New Jersey and Reno. 
"Who would like to help me with what I'm looking for? As a guy who took a lot of drugs, you know?"
With the wisdom of hindsight, Pet Sounds has been ranked the best album of all time by NME, The Times and MOJO magazine, also making it to Rolling Stone's No. 2 spot. Ironically, it was pipped by Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Paul McCartney admits it inspired.
Yet in 1966, Pet Sounds failed to achieve gold certification. The record label had so little faith that it torpedoed it by simultaneously releasing a Best of, which charted higher. "Just stay calm, and normal service will resume as soon as possible," Capitol seemed to be saying. Only, normal service never really did resume.
Wilson is the van Gogh of music - that's the conclusion of The Church's Steve Kilbey. In 1981, on tour with his dewy new band, Kilbey had a revelatory experience of Pet Sounds during a  summer's night on the Gold Coast that had all the right ingredients: good vibes and a bag of marijuana. The album went on to dominate The Church's tour van tape deck.
"This is what geniuses are up against when they're way ahead of the Philistines who are going to review it," Kilbey says. "No matter how much praise you or I pour on Pet Sounds now, it's too late for Brian. People tell him how brilliant Pet Sounds was in interviews, and he can only say, `Oh ??? yeah.' What can he do? It's in the past now."
Well, yes and no. In   March and   April 2016, Wilson, and his 11-piece band, including original member Al Jardine and long-term cohort Blondie Chaplin, will perform Pet Sounds and some greatest hits at Bluesfest, the Palais in Melbourne and the Sydney Opera House.
"The other Australian promoters are drooling with envy," Bluesfest promoter Peter Noble says.
Wilson performed Pet Sounds in Australia in 2002, but the release of the 2014 biographical movie Love & Mercy, starring Paul Dano??? and John Cusack, has reinvigorated interest. With lingering detail, the film recreates the experimentation in the studio during the making of Pet Sounds, juxtaposing that frenzy of creativity with the more dormant Wilson of the 1980s. Noble senses audiences are hungry to make amends.
In 1965, Wilson was happily confined to Los Angeles, after suffering a panic attack on an aircraft. While the rest of the Beach Boys toured the world, he holed up in Gold Star Studios and Western Recordings for nine months, racking up quite the bill. Many of the Wrecking Crew, his session musicians, had already worked with Phil Spector, whose signature Wall of Sound style was honed at Gold Star.
Wilson still ranks Spector among his top three producers, alongside George Martin and himself. "I didn't copy the Wall of Sound," he says. "I was inspired by it, and I learnt how to produce records, but I was not copying Phil Spector. There was no rivalry. Our rivalry was with the Beatles, with Paul McCartney."
Wilson's home-cobbled effects on Pet Sounds included his own dogs barking, bicycle bells, horns, soft-drink bottles, plucked piano strings and a train. Then there were the instruments not ordinarily found on pop records: the accordion, finger cymbals, timpani drums, 12-string mandolins, vibraphones and the Electro-Theremin.
Wilson recorded onto a four-track, spending weeks on individual segments of songs. "I worked at night mostly," he says. "I had a notion to write good songs at night versus the day."    
For Wilson, the technology of the studio was another instrument. Contemporary acts such as Tame Impala, Empire of the Sun and the late Avalanches would probably agree.
"Oftentimes on rock records you don't notice what the production is doing, but this took it to a high-art level," the Sydney Opera House's head of contemporary music, Ben Marshall, says.     
In general, it was the British who understood Pet Sounds. Famous fans included Stones manager Andrew Oldham, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Cream and the Who. One track that did become embedded in psyches the world over is God Only Knows. This exquisite baroque pop has been covered by everyone from David Bowie to Taylor Swift, and was dubbed by McCartney "the most beautiful song ever written".
Cloud Control's Heidi Lenffer???, for whom the Beach Boys were the essential family road trip soundtrack, has closely studied Wilson's use of structure and harmonics. "From a technical perspective, God Only Knows is a masterclass," she says. "The lyrics in the verses deal with dark philosophical reflection, then that tension is explored through the chords. They never have a root note, and yet it's the root note that gives a chord a sense of resolve. The only point of resolve is every time the chorus comes along with its central message."
When I put this to Wilson, he agrees. "The chorus should always be happier than the verse. The chorus should be the happiest part of the song," he says. "God Only Knows was tough because I really had to work hard at the arrangement.
"My brother, Carl, sang the lead. He's a great singer, and I knew he wanted to sing a good song, you know? He never had a chance to sing many songs in the Beach Boys. I recorded a background track with the orchestra and as soon as I did that, I thought, `This one has got to be for Carl.' "
For all intents and purposes, though, Pet Sounds was a Brian Wilson solo album. The Beach Boys were only drafted in to do their vocals when they returned from tour, dismayed at the departure from surf pop that greeted them. This change of tack drove a wedge between Wilson and Mike Love, who toured Australia as the Beach Boys in   November.
Wilson, however, had set his sights even higher. The next album, Smile, was to be his most ambitious yet, throwing further influences into the mix, such as yodelling, psychedelia and folk. Ultimately, the support wasn't there. Pet Sounds marked a downswing in chart fortune for the band that lasted until That's Why God Made the Radio in 2012. The Beach Boys had lost their footing. Wilson had, in every sense, peaked.
"The flip side of intense genius is intense disarray, which is exacerbated by taking psychedelic drugs," Kilbey says. "It's very hard when you've done something that you think is brilliant and nobody likes it or the whole carnival has moved on. You can imagine this 23-year-old, completely bewildered by the lack of success. You can see how he would become demoralised after following his instincts and making this incredible music."
Wilson says now of Smile, "It was the most complicated music that I ever did. I told the record label it was too far ahead of its time, and they agreed with me, so we put it on the shelf for 35 years."
Staying happy is top of Wilson's priority list these days, as he prepares to shift from solo album tour across the United States to Aussie Pet Sounds extravaganza. "I like to hear Wouldn't It Be Nice, Sloop John B and God Only Knows, but I try not to play the sad songs like Caroline, No," he says.
Despite his perfectionist streak, playing the album live doesn't make him wish he could make tweaks to the original. "I don't want to change it. It's already been recorded, you know?"    
In any case, his 2015 solo album, No Pier Pressure, rumoured to be his last planned recording, was the real inspiration for Noble to bring him to Bluesfest. "I actually like it more than Pet Sounds," Noble says. "Listen to the last track.   Maybe it's not God Only Knows, but it's not far under. A lot of people find their creative juices run out in their 20s. Brian Wilson is not one of those people."
Brian Wilson performs Pet Sounds at the Sydney Opera House on   March 29; at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne, on   April 3, and at Bluesfest.    
NEXT WAVE
Technology may have advanced exponentially, but a new generation of Wilson fans describes how Pet Sounds has influenced their own studio work.
SCOTT HORSCROFT???, PRODUCER: Pet Sounds taught me a lot about space and instrumentation. When we made the album Personality for the Sleepy Jackson, we looked at the Beach Boys' orchestration for the string arrangements. We really loved the dynamics and the shifts, the depth and the space. Singer Luke Steele's love of harmonies comes from Brian.
DAN KELLY, SOLO ARTIST: The middle section of my track, Star of the Sea, is a total nod to Pet Sounds: sleigh bells, car horns, stacked harmonies, the lot. The whole concept of a ghost cruise ship full of private schoolgirls, with their boyfriends forever waiting in a Mornington foreshore car park, seemed to cry out for a Beach Boys bit.
JASON WHALLEY???, FRENZAL RHOMB: It's hard to put sleigh bells, a reverbed woodblock or a three-part harmony on something without acknowledging you stole the idea from this record. My favourite thing ever is to sit in a room layering harmonies. Brian Wilson was the master of this, but on Pet Sounds he takes it to another level with [not only] a beautiful, soaring falsetto, but also some dense, uncomfortable and quite melancholy progressions.
STU MACKENZIE, KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD: Pet Sounds was pretty early in the philosophy of using the studio as an instrument. We take some cues from that. Some people look at the studio as being a way to capture music, but it's also a way to manipulate and make music. It's impressive that Pet Sounds was made on a four-track. I do a lot of recording on an eight-track, and it would be hard to go any lower.
LANCE FERGUSON, THE BAMBOOS: As we evolved from the simple harmonic underpinnings of funk, I wanted to broaden our palette of melodies and harmonies, so I studied Pet Sounds. I began this with our fourth album, but there was a song on our fifth album in particular, called Eliza. Working with producer John Castle, he has his own interpretation of the Wall of Sound for 2015. The reverb gets bigger and it brings an ethereal quality.