I’ll never forget the first time Brian Wilson made me see God. It was 1973, and I was sitting in the mostly empty balcony of a second-run movie theater finally watching “American Graffiti,” the movie everyone in my high school was talking about. I liked the film okay, but it didn’t make that much of an impression on me. I couldn’t have been less interested in what I derisively thought of, at the time, as “the ’50s.” (To me, songs like “At the Hop” and “That’ll Be the Day” were corny and dull.) But at the end of the movie, as the now-famous what-happened-to-them-after-graduation epilogue came on, a song
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