Although sometimes, there’s definitely a healthy musical cross-pollination from other people’s posts.

Case in point: Last night, Jeff Shore (aka Platterpuss), an old friend from the New York garage scene, put up a song that fit my current state perfectly: “Tired of Waking Up Tired” by The Diodes (not to be confused with the Hoodoo Gurus song of the same name). I had never heard of them; they were from Toronto, from the early days of striped-shirt pop/punk, 1977-79. And somehow, I had never heard them until last night. So thanks, Jeff.

Anyway, enough. Go listen to tunes and go enjoy your weekend:

Sweet Lover — Aretha Franklin

All I Do Is Think About You — Tammi Terrell

Cowboys in Africa — Bush Tetras

Don’t Say That’s Just for White Boys — Way of the West

Tired of Waking Up Tired — The Diodes

Yesterday morning, I was awake early — I haven’t slept soundly in over a year now, so that, unto itself, is nothing unusual in my never-ever-normal world.

The way I dealt was a little different.

I was set to work on some resumes to send out; a friend had tipped me to a company looking to hire digital journalists in New York, which is one of the places where I’ve been looking for a job.

Normally, I would have dug right in and started tailoring my resume to what this company wanted, set out to writing dazzling cover letters so good that someone would be dumb not to hire me.

And then I thought about it. And I said, “Why the fuck should I even bother? They’re just gonna ignore me, too!”

It’s now been nearly three years since I’ve last had a steady job. I’ve sent well over 300 resumes to places famous and not-so — to websites, newspapers, universities, nonprofits, you name it, both in the Bay Area and back home, back East. And more than 99 percent of them, I haven’t even received a response. I haven’t even gotten the decency of a “you suck.” And the ones who have responded have treated me like shit.

And I still have been diligent about hitting the job websites daily. And in the first two weeks of this year, I sent out five more applications. Top-notch resumes, with all the experience and intangibles they wanted, with dazzling, never-let-’em-see-you-frantically-thrashing cover letters. Again, not even the decency of a single “you suck.”

And now I’m also at the point where the hours of my on-call job at my former employer have been cut to nearly nothing. Nothing personal; they’ve just been doing more budget-slashing.

But again, why the fuck should I bother anymore? I know full well by now what the result will be. Three years of this hatred, this taunting, from the universe — if I were as smart as I think I am, I would’ve bought the clue a long time ago.

Okay, I’ve finally bought it. I get the hint.

I give up. I’m done looking for work. Whatever happens, happens. If I end up out on the streets, I end up out on the streets. If I lose everything, I lose everything. If I die, I die. Big fucking deal. Decrease the surplus population.

*****

The shitstorm of turbulence and doubt and fear and uselessness I’ve lived through in the past year, which I thought was well in my rearview mirror as 2011 wound down — I was working again, I found some reason to believe that everything was on an upswing, and that everything, at last, truly was happening for a reason that I could understand — came storming back just before the new year and won’t leave.

Up ’til the holidays, I was pretty positive. I was constantly sending out positive vibes into the universe: Money will happen. The job will happen. Love will happen. All things that have been denied me for so long — I was truly believing that things were turning around at last. I was finding reasons to be happy. Even though I spent a chunk of my Christmas Day holed up in my room, with my Charlie Brown tree, in a house owned by an angry alcoholic atheist, I was upbeat. My last Christmas in Fresno. No place to go but upward.

But the week leading into the new year, the old mantras came storming back with a vengeance: You’re worthless. You’re useless. People actually hate you, and the ones who don’t, they just tolerate you from a distance. You’ll never get a job again. You’re fat. You’re ugly.

Unhirable, undesirable, unworthy of love, unworthy of making a living.

And on top of that, I’ve apparently worn out my welcome with people who were friends, or who I thought were friends. Three times in the past week, I sent out requests on Facebook and Linkedin asking colleagues and ex-colleagues if they could say something nice in my Linkedin recommendations, as I wanted to update my profile. Out of the hundreds I know, three responded. Whatever support system I thought I had is, for all intents, nonexistent.

Plus, I think I’m overexposed on Facebook. Actually, I know it. Either people who were my friends have gotten sick me me posting regularly, or the novelty of me being there is long past. I’ve driven people away without trying, without even doing anything terrible or malicious. And people don’t usually tell you when they’re tired of you or when they disappear.

Plus the novelty of the new, improved Frannie is so over as well, as naturally it should be. Everyone’s moved on. But I didn’t plan on this: I’ve now become the fat, ugly guy with no self-confidence and no self-esteem all over again, only with a much better fashion sense. It didn’t take long for my second adolescence to turn to shit, too.

So I went back to bed yesterday, curled up, in tears of anger, and lashed out at the God in my head, whatever it is. At least I think it was God.

“I can’t do this anymore!” I said. “I’m not gonna go through 2011 again! If you want me here, fucking do something! If you don’t want me here anymore, fucking do something! Just do something! Please!”

*****

At my best, I think that there’s something big just ahead. That I’ve put all this work into my life, into myself, for some reason that’s gonna pay off in a huge way at some point. If only I knew how to be funny, to have a sense of humor I could turn on and off at will and channel into a one-woman show …

This past fall, I actually led myself to believe it. Going back to work 2 1/2 years after my layoff, even without benefits, was a big step back up the road out of hell. I could show the work world that I actually had a job — and was brought back by the company that let me go in the first place, which I guess says something, too. And it got me another car (my old one, on its last legs for years, was hit and totaled in October), which was another encouraging sign.

But that’s all past now. Though, at my best, I’m thinking my unasked-for time off is the universe telling me to get going on my book. I actually did some work on it this past week, though I’m daunted by the amount of notes on which I have to catch up. Paola, one of the few friends in my life I don’t have to worry about disappearing on me, suggested I just get the first chapter done and send it to a literary agent and see what I get back. She even found me a link with some information about agents. Maybe that’s a sign.

And there’s a part of me telling myself not to focus on a job — just focus on the money coming in. The money will happen. And love will happen. Perhaps there’s some sort of huge jackpot that entails I never have to work again.

*****

But at my worst — like now — I revert back to the God of retribution, of vengeance. I get all sorts of Old Testament in wondering why I’m 50, still with no steady job after nearly three years, stuck here, a perpetual foreigner in exile in a polluted, godforsaken, ignorant, culturally isolated city in the middle of California, in a toxic (and alcoholic — them, not me) living situation, unable to afford to even get away for the day. And unrelentingly rejected by the work world. And, not having had a girlfriend for seven years, no soulmate. No one who thinks I’m worthy enough to love, even on my best and most dazzling days.

The Old Testament part of me believes I did something terribly wrong along the way, and that every mistake and screwup I’ve made in life has come back to haunt me. There’s no other explanation: I’m a bad person; somewhere, somehow, in a past life or this one, I did something to piss off God in a huge way, and whatever God is, it’s unleashing some sort of payback.

I get it, God. I’m a bad person. You’ve been telling me that since I was a kid, since the taunts of “faggot” and the shunning I encountered in my long-distant past. I just didn’t accept it then. I didn’t want to accept it. And I haven’t wanted to accept it the past three years. And somewhere along the way, I sold some people on the impression that I actually was a good human being.

Apparently not. You win. I accept.

*****

Last Friday evening, I parked myself in my usual corner of my usual coffee shop. Amy the Redhead, a wonderful force of nature who’s been very supportive of me and whom I hadn’t talked to at length in some time, came by to say hi. She asked me how things were, and I told her I was okay. I guess I looked more upset than I wanted to let on, because she said, “Why don’t I believe you?” And that started a long, heavy, tear-streaked (on my part) and needed conversation. When she left, she gave me this bookmark:

Acceptance

is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation — some fact of my life unacceptable to me and I can find no serenity until I can accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at the moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.

I’ve refused to accept, though, that I’m an object to scorn, to reject. I’ve refused to accept being a cautionary tale rather than a shining example. I’ve refused to understand I have no purpose in life. Is that bad?

*****

The bottom line is I’m past frustrated, past angry. But sad? Hell, yeah.

I see people who were out of work as long as I’ve been returning to the work world, with jobs that make them happy, and I say, “When’s it gonna be my turn?” I see people living here who are actually being hired by companies in other parts of the country and say “When’s it gonna be my turn?” I see people who’ve had their hearts smashed into jillions of little pieces fall in love again — and, better yet, find people who treat them like gold — and I say “When the fuck is it my turn?”

It’s not. It won’t be. I’m done hoping. I accept.

I’m just waiting for God, whatever it is, to finish the job. Just get it over with. If you have some positive purpose for me, I really need to know what it is. Like now; yesterday, even. If you have nothing useful planned for me, then just give me the courage to give in — to finally say enough, drift away and die alone somewhere where no one will know, no one will find me.

You’ve won, already. I accept. Now do something!

I’m Lonely — Martha Star

Strawberry Letter 23 — Shuggie Otis

She’s Lost Control – Joy Division

After Closing Time — Hal Frazier

Going Underground — The Jam

Krugman, as one Nobel Prize-winner (economics) about another (peace), wrote of how, were King still alive, he would see a country burdened by economic inequality, a certain degree of which is rooted in racism. (Not all, of course — this economic fiasco has cut across a great ethnic and social cross-section of the 99 percent — but many of us were merely joining the minorities for whom economic opportunities haven’t been as plentiful for some time.)

And, of course, King gave his life for economic equality — traveling to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers — so this would have been near and dear to him.

But what about civil rights? And I’m not just talking about ethnicity and skin color.

Given the climate of some places in America changing for the better, yet some digging in their heels, I wonder where he would have stood on the current battlegrounds: gays and transgenders — people still legally treated as second- and third-class citizens in some parts of the Land of the Free. (I say “battlegrounds,” plural, because while we’re bonded by the same wretched variety of ignorance and violence, sexual identity and gender identity are, indeed, two different things.)

As a Baptist preacher, would King have been open-minded and understanding of our causes? Of course, gay and trans rights weren’t on the general radar when he died; Stonewall was still a year and change away. But would King, who would have been 83 yesterday, have been able to see and understand that, like skin color, sexual and gender identities are formed early on in the womb? Or would he have been so hidebound by religious dogma, and set in his ways by age, that he wouldn’t have been able to accept and embrace these fights?

After all, for example, as a group, transgender citizens suffer the highest rate of hate-crime violence of any group in the country — and trans African-Americans are killed more than any other group.

Black-on-black violence, white-on-black, whatever — people are still being killed for the way they’re born, and there’s still a significant number of people in America — especially in legislatures, such as Tennessee’s — who think gays are just a bunch of perverts, and transpeople are perverts running around in dresses, and that they should be punished.

Of course, the question is hypothetical. And, of course, I’d like to think that King would’ve been accepting and been advocating our causes. It’s probably a question that would have caused some sort of commotion had I brought it up as a talk-radio host. But it is one worth pondering.

The first songs that come to mind are all NRBQ, given the death of Tommy Ardolino a week ago. But we fans and friends have all given Tommy a good rocket-ride musical sendoff to wherever he’s headed. So back to the everyday world, for better and worse. Happy Friday:

Cracking Up — Nick Lowe

I Go to Pieces — Nils Lofgren

Show Me — The Pretenders

Slip Away — David Bowie

I Go to Sleep — The Kinks

The face of a cherub, the beat of a rock'n'roll giant.

Note: I corrected Tommy’s birth year/age from the original post. When I learned of his death last night, I hit Google looking for news. What I got were several news sites that had some future “today’s birthdays” stockpiled into next week, and every one of them said Tommy would be turning 55 on Thursday. However, Hartford Courant music writers present (Eric Danton) and past (Roger Catlin) listed Tommy’s would’ve-been age as 57 on their blogs, and now there’s a photo of him with “Tom Ardolino: 1955-2012″ on the nrbq.com home page.

I have this weird psychic bond/sixth sense about death sometimes — not nearly the great disturbance in the Force that Obi-Wan felt when Alderaan was death-starred, but a sense, nonetheless. I just know it.

I first noticed it that March morning in 1975 when I woke up with a start at 8 a.m. for no apparent reason — two seconds before the phone rang to tell us my grandmother had died.

It also happened three times in the course of a week in February 2006 when my childhood friend Rick was dying of lung cancer. (Ran triathlons, never smoked,was an architect to the stars, had a great family. Life is not fair.) We had drifted apart quite a while back — last time I saw him was at our 20th high school reunion in 1999 — but he came in loud and strong three distinct times in the week leading into his death, the last time the day before.

Sometimes I just know without anyone telling me.

Well, I was hardly an acquaintance with Tommy Ardolino, NRBQ’s longtime drummer; we met a couple times after shows and I interviewed him once, as I did all the other band members, during my time at the New Haven Register. I knew he had been in poor health for a while, and the news came out that he went into the hospital the week before Christmas for what was to be a long stay.

It wasn’t so long.

I was just getting ready to jump in the shower late yesterday afternoon when a random thought hit me out of nowhere, and kind of in the form of a news flash: “NRBQ drummer Tommy Ardolino died today.” I just shrugged it off as an overactive imagination at work.

Last night, sitting at the coffee shop, a musician friend posted the news. He got it from one of the guys in the current NRBQ.

Sure enough, there was indeed a disturbance in my Force. Tommy, one of the best rock’n'roll drummers to ever sit at a kit, an eternal cherub-boy who never quite grew up, and who got to live a fan’s wildest dream for three decades, was gone. He would have been 57 on Thursday (Jan. 12).

*****

If you live outside of the Northeast, the Bay Area or Japan, you might not have even heard of NRBQ, and you might wonder why I’m devoting so much space to an unknown musician in an unknown band.

Well, that they were unknown to so many music fans is one of the most egregious mortal sins in the history of popular music.

NRBQ with their "guiding light" of the early '80s, Captain Lou Albano. From left: Terry Adams, Joey Spampinato, Al Anderson and Tommy Ardolino.

NRBQ was one of the great “musicians’ musicians” bands. They got some mileage in the late ’80s out of an Elvis Costello quote; he called them “the greatest band in America” and added, “I’d much rather any day go see NRBQ playing than any of our illustrious punk bands in England.”

Growing up in Connecticut, the home state of longtime guitarist Al Anderson (from Windsor, a town just north of Hartford), you couldn’t turn on an FM station in the pre-sterilization days and not hear NRBQ, who were always playing a gig at Toad’s Place in New Haven or the Shaboo Inn in Willimantic. Whether it be their minor hit from the Arab oil embargo days, “Get That Gasoline,” or “RC Cola and a Moon Pie,” or most especially their most eternal gem of a tune, from the summer of 1977, Big Al’s “Ridin’ in My Car.”

What was started in 1967 as the New Rhythm & Blues Quintet by a pair of transplanted Kentuckians, keyboardist Terry Adams and guitarist Steve Ferguson, had gelled into a quartet by the mid-’70s. And they all brought an encyclopedia of influences with them.

The mercurial Terry, free-form yet rigidly single-minded, brought an avant-jazz background with him — the group did a version of Sun Ra’s “Rocket #9″ on its 1969 debut album, and later had two members of the Arkestra on horns — and would play from time to time with Carla Bley. Plus, he could bang a rock’n'roll piano with the best.

Bassist Joey Spampinato, who in the ’80s and ’90s was married to country legend Skeeter Davis, was extremely respected in the music community. A George Harrison semi-lookalike save for the Italian nose, Keith Richards recruited Joey to play in Chuck Berry’s backing band in the film “Hail, Hail, Rock N’Roll,” alongside Keith, Eric Clapton, Johnnie Johnson and others, and it was rumored that the Stones wanted Joey as Bill Wyman’s replacement.

As a teenager, with The Wildweeds, Big Al, who replaced Ferguson in 1971, sang some of the best blue-eyed soul ever recorded (“No Good to Cry”). After leaving the Q in late 1993, he became a renowned country songwriter.

And then there was the drummer. Who just happened to live the rock’n'roll fanboy’s dream.

It’s the stuff of legend. Tommy, who grew up deep in Q country, in Springfield, Mass., was a huge fan from the first time he heard them in 1970, and learned to play the slophouse rhythms laid down by the band’s original drummer, Tom Staley. And so the legend goes, one night in 1972, Staley got sick and Terry brought Tommy up to play the encore. Al didn’t even notice until he turned around. Two years later, when Staley left, Tommy became a full-time member.

For the next two decades, this was the lineup we heard — the “classic” lineup. Four distinct personalities. Three of them were headstrong. Al was a massive presence sonically as well as physically, and he took up the entire stage right, even after he sobered up and slimmed down in the early ’90s. Joey, a rock on bass was firm in purpose and focus.Terry, as mentioned, was mercurial and freewheeling; you never knew what was gonna come next.

And then there was Tommy — always with a look of bliss on his face; always in some sort of zone; in sync with the others, yet seemingly oblivious to them at the same time.

More than the other three, this was his life. He started with them as a teenager; this was the only band he played in and all he ever wanted to do. Even when he grew a beard in the early ’80s, Tommy had the face and body of a cherub; with his long strands of ringlets, and his wide, eternally childlike brown eyes, he probably would’ve been in someone’s painting were he around during the Renaissance.

And he laid down a deceptively powerful slophouse beat — this huge, roundhouse, lazy-yet-mighty syncopated backbeat. I’d look at him sometimes, the loose way he held the sticks, maybe using two or three fingers and his wrists, coming down from up high with a crash, and wonder how the hell the sticks didn’t go flying. Or how he kept such a busy tempo when it seemed as if he was winding into most of his beats. Or how he would come up with machine-gun snare bursts, such as the one us used to help kick off “Wild Weekend,” while starting his delivery so high up.

But he did it. And he had to in order to hold his own and anchor the three forces of nature up front.

*****

The album first I ever reviewed, for my high school paper as a junior in the spring of 1978 — the fourth album I ever bought — was “NRBQ at Yankee Stadium” (which, back then, included “Ridin’ in My Car” as the last track; taken off subsequent re-releases). The first band I ever saw at a club was NRBQ, at Toad’s Place in New Haven, two weeks after my 18th birthday in June 1979.

I lost count of how many times I saw them over the next 14 years.I just know that I was spoiled, as was everyone who was a fan of the band. There were a couple of real clunker shows in there somewhere, but for the most part, there was magic at some point. Maybe it was the huge climax of “Ridin in My Car.” Or maybe it was just some of the inspired goofiness.

They never worked off a set list, and even they never knew what would transpire. It could be the “Magic Box,” where fans would place song titles in the box, one of them would draw one and they’d play it. Or the night they sang “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” a cappella at Toad’s. Or blowing up Cabbage Patch Kids onstage. Or the Moon Pie fests — or the later incarnation, Big Al’s Big Thing — the Easter-weekend shows where, of course, copious dozens of Moon Pies were tossed into the audience when it came time to sing “RC Cola and a Moon Pie.”

In the early ’80s, before he became Cyndi Lauper’s dad, the band even hired wrestling legend Captain Lou Albano to manage them. Well, “manage” was a term to be used loosely with them. Their eclecticism and stubbornness of purpose were their blessing/curse — it’s what endeared them to fans but made them poison to record companies.

And on top of that goofiness, Tommy had another passion away from the group: song poems. Those ads in magazines in the ’60s and ’70s where aspiring songwriters sent their poetry to a studio in Los Angeles, MSR Records, where the house musicians would turn it into song. Tommy collected these recordings, and the end result was a couple volumes, “Beat of the Traps” and “The Makers of Smooth Music.” One such gem, Rodd Keith’s “Little Rug Bug,” was actually remade by the Q on their 2004 album “Dummy.” Which would be the end of an era.

*****

Who ever expects the ride to end when you’re having so much fun?

Well, for some, it ended when Al left and Joey’s kid brother, Johnny, came on board. Johnny, who also still plays with Cape Cod legends The Incredible Casuals, is of a totally different style than Al, and it was unfair to compare the two. But the difference in presence was felt on stage — Johnny’s softer, slighter, more laid-back style a marked contrast  from Al’s huge frame and loud, muscular tones.

Still, the band persevered for another decade, then splintered. Terry had stage-4 throat cancer, but recovered, while Joey, Johnny and Tommy soldiered on briefly as Baby Macaroni. Terry toured with Staley and Japanese rockabilly group The Hot Shots, then did an album with Ferguson, who died of cancer in 2008 (“Louisville Sluggers”). All four of the Q members, plus Big Al, recorded separately on the star-studded SpongeBob SquarePants album “The Best Day Ever.”

And the final nail: Terry formed The Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet in 2007. Last spring, Terry posted an open letter announcing, controversially, that he was going to rechristen his band … as NRBQ. Meanwhile, Joey and Johnny formed The Spampinato Brothers. Clearly, there was a rift of some sorts. And by that time, Tommy’s health was in decline.

I mean, we all know things have to end. These guys gave us more than a 35-year run, depending on your math — especially the nearly 20 years of Terry, Joey, Al and Tommy. As I said, we were spoiled. And lucky.

And lucky to have Tommy Ardolino on drums. I always contended that rock’n'roll is the ultimate youth serum. On one hand, we have Iggy still running around with his shirt off at 64. On the other, at least until yesterday, we had Tommy banging and crashing in time, with that look of a wide-eyed, 5-year-old innocent. Peter Pan with a beard.

And it sucks not to have him still with us. Though, after seeing some of the videos and playing a lot of their music, I’m not crying; I’m smiling broadly. A celebration of life,.

*****

Anyway, I picked 10 songs (and then added a couple more because two weren’t up on YouTube) where Tommy played a prominent role. Not all of them were NRBQ’s best, but most of them were. Check them out — watch him attacking the drums — and see what I mean. Enjoy:

I Got a Rocket in My Pocket

Wild Weekend

That’s Neat, That’s Nice

It Comes to Me Naturally

I Want You Bad

Captain Lou

Get Rhythm

Here Comes Terry

Rain at the Drive-In

A Girl Like That

Want You to Feel Good, Too

Music Goes Round and Around

Me and the Boys

Not.

Back to not working (at least much), feeling I’ve somehow alienated some people near and dear to me, realizing I’ve been wearing out my welcome with everyone. Anger, sadness, confusion, an overwhelming sense of darkness. Feels like 2011 all over again. And I can’t do this again.

Oh well … Here’s this week’s Five Songs, for better and worse. At least the sun always comes out in Fresno, even if the sky’s polluted:

I Need You — The Beatles

A Hazy Shade of Winter — Simon & Garfunkel

Paint It, Black — The Rolling Stones

I’ve Got to Dance to Keep From Crying — The Miracles

Failure — Swans

"Quiet, numbskull! We're making a masterpiece!" Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks are busy working on writing "SMiLE" in 1966 while the rest of The Beach Boys are out having fun fun fun.

Note, Jan. 2, 2012: I didn’t intend for this to be a long childbirth. I never do. I started this two months ago yesterday, the day the box set was released (which was the day it arrived at the front door). Things happen — having to scramble to buy a car, having to run around getting said car fixed, working pretty much a full schedule leading into Christmas, doing a couple of holiday things here and there. Besides, this long-awaited collection was my Christmas gift to myself, anyway, so I guess it was appropriate to wait ’til after Christmas to run this. And on the good side, this didn’t become an albatross that took 45 years to come out.

Nov. 1, 2011

All Saints’ Day. All Smiles’ Day.

This is the one luxury I’m allowing myself as I slowly climb back into the realm of the employed and the solvent. Today is my Christmas. And I can’t believe my gift to myself came early on the appointed day.

Sitting in the foyer this morning was a package containing the deluxe version of The Beach Boys’ “The SMiLE Sessions,” the final, long, looooooooooooong-awaited, shattered — then painstakingly restored and reassembled — jigsaw pieces of one of the most beautiful, saddening, maddening episodes in the history of popular music.

The deluxe five-CD version in a box with 3-D cover art, along with a two-LP version of the album with some extras, two 45s, a fancy hardcover booklet and a poster. There's also a much less expensive, less comprehensive two-CD version.

An album that was begun before I even started kindergarten, when Brian Wilson started working on “Good Vibrations,” finally, officially arrived in a completed form today.

Diehard Brian fans have heard many of the pieces in one form or another in countless bootleg versions through the years, versions of the album as compiled by fans; many shards were included on Capitol’s “Good Vibrations” Beach Boys box set in 1993 and, of course, there’s the fine 2004 studio version Brian recorded with his current band. (I was so scared to hear it that I didn’t buy it for three months, then finally gave in and listened and was stunned.)

But this is different. The 2004 “SMiLE’ was sung by a 62-year-old Brian, with plenty of help from his band, not the 26-year-old Brian at his creative and vocal peaks; it was a bargain I willfully accepted — and it was a brilliant piece of work — but it wasn’t The Beach Boys.

This is The Beach Boys — Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al, Bruce — as they would never be again. Granted, the album in this here box set was put together and sequenced by a 69-year-old Brian (along with his “SMiLE” lyricist, Van Dyke Parks, and his co-producers, Mark Linnett and Alan Boyd). But hey, it was his creation in the first place. This was, and is, his vision. And this is as close to what he might have been thinking at the time as we’ll ever hear.

My work schedule precludes me listening to the five CDs right now,  but I sat there at my desk today, I felt a strange emotion hit me as I was listening to “Do You Like Worms? (Roll Plymouth Rock).” Maybe, as a tune that taps into American history and the exploration of the West, it was a direct connection to “Rio Grande” and the absolute joy I felt when I first listened to Brian’s solo album in the summer of 1988. Except out of nowhere, I felt myself choke up. It was momentary, but its suddenness startled me.

And eight songs later, it was “Surf’s Up.” I thought it was beautiful the first time I heard it as a teenager — one of the most beautiful songs I had ever heard — with its melancholy piano, abstract lyrics (“Columnnated ruins domino/Canvas the town and brush the backdrop/Are you sleeping/Brother John?”) and Brian’s soaring, angelic falsetto. But sitting here today listening to it — remastered and cleaned-up, in the context of an officially sanctioned “SMiLE” masterminded by Brian? I started shaking. And then it became sobs.

My God, my God …

In my 50 years, I had never experienced the dichotomy of tears of joy until this point. The joy of both Brian and myself having stuck around long enough to see and hear this happen — and knowing what he had gone through emotionally to get to this point. Plus the sadness that comes with knowing this is the end of something.

I don’t believe in the concept of “closure” — to me, it’s a senseless word tossed around carelessly by outsiders — but if something comes close, I guess this is it. It’s the glorious end of a glorious chapter of music, of a story that’s full of what sells books: joy, pain, angst, sadness, loss, mystery, redemption, paradise lost and found. The conclusion of a book that’s been written in fits and starts most of my life. And as a fan, when you carry a book around for three decades, even just spiritually and emotionally, if not physically, it’s hard to let go.

And I thought back to the spring of 1990, when Garry Trudeau ran that incredible week of Pulitzer-winning Doonesbury strips — Joanie’s lawyer friend, Andy Lippincott, getting to hear the remastered “Pet Sounds” on CD (which, along with Capitol’s first CD remastering of the entire Beach Boys catalog, was a huge deal at the time) as he lay on his deathbed from AIDS. I’m not ready to die (well, I certainly hope not), but now I can die knowing I’ve heard an official, honest-to-goodness version of “SMiLE,” the great lost album.

*****

Nov. 6, 2011 and beyond

After I’ve listened to the discs at least a couple time through …

*****

An older friend explained to me the other day that he wasn’t a Beach Boys fan because when he grew up, there were the jocks and the freaks, and he was a freak, and the jocks listened to The Beach Boys.

I replied that being a Beach Boys fan falls along two similar camps: the Brian Beach Boys and the Mike Love Beach Boys. Mike and Bruce Johnston continue to slog along, nearing 70, exhorting the whole fun fun fun-and-sun and “Little Deuce Coupe” thing for the jock crowd. Brian is the for the geeks, of course, the sensitive ones like me. Brian wrote all those jock hits, of course, but he also wrote the intricate, sensitive tunes that spurred Lennon and McCartney into creating “Sgt. Pepper.” (Note: It was announced in mid-December that all the surviving ’60s Beach Boys except Glen Campbell — Brian, Mike, Bruce, Al Jardine and Dave Marks — will go out together for a 2012 50th-anniversary tour.)

The Beach Boys were my favorite group in high school, in the midst of the “Endless Summer”/“Spirit of America”/“15 Big Ones” revival of the mid-’70s — reluctantly, at first, because of the seemingly effeminate harmonies, then enthusiastically after I heard “409″ one late summer night on the radio, sleeping on the floor in my folks’ newly finished cellar to avoid the heat. Then I got it.

But my in to the whole Brian camp — my first grown-up pop music education — was in early 1980, winter of my freshman year at college. A dormmate named Scott Bergmann was sitting security in the lobby one night, and we

If you look closely, you can hear Mike Love (left) mouthing, "Brian, what the hell do these words mean?" Just kidding. We think. Clockwise around Brian: Love, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston.

got to talking. He knew I was a Beach Boys fan, and he said, “I’ve got a book you ought to read.” It was David Leaf’s 1978 biography “The Beach Boys and the California Myth.”

You know how image and perception of public figures are frequently at odds with reality. Until I read that book — long out of print, worth a fortune now, still one of the landmark musical biographies, the book that totally steered the dialogue about Brian and the band and their legacy from that point on — I never would’ve guessed that beneath the placid, smiling images of the five bearded, good-looking guys was so much dysfunction, all well-documented, first by David and then by others over the next three decades.

It was the first I had heard of “Pet Sounds,” the landmark 1966 album whose hits — “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” “Caroline, No” — were quite familiar to me. But David’s book I went out to the campus record store and found a copy on cassette (a ’70s Warner Bros. release paired with the infamous “Carl and the Passions/So Tough”). I listened to it on the cheap cassette player that passed for my stereo for most of my school years. Essentially, it was in mono, as Brian heard and recorded it, and through a cheap speaker — I was having a 1966 experience in 1979.

Okay, it started with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which I had heard often enough by that point; no big deal. I braced for the next song. A plucked piano C-note and the “WHoooo-OOOOOOO-ooo-ooo-ooo-oooooooo …” that began “You Still Believe in Me,” a fragile tune that incorporated sounds as diverse as a tympani, a bicycle bell and a bicycle horn in ways I never could have imagined. And I choked up as I took in the beauty. And I heard “God Only Knows” in a new way.

And as I ventured deeper, I heard songs that spoke to me, coming out of a troubled adolescence that increasingly included roller-coaster rides of depression. “I Know There’s an Answer.” And especially “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” (Sometimes I still don’t). And as the train pulled away at the end of “Caroline, No,” I sat there stunned … and changed. Someone whose music I admired greatly had written a most wonderful album about my adolescence a decade before I even got there.

Of course, I’ve heard and loved a great many sounds since, but none like “Pet Sounds.”

And then I read the chapter about “SMiLE.”

“Good Vibrations,” of course, was already a well-proclaimed — and well-worn — classic by then, the peak of Brian’s artistic ability, something a pop composer has never been able to touch (though Todd Rundgren took a credible stab at a note-for-note remake a decade later on his “faithful” album). But as I read the Leaf book, I realized how much more I’d been missing.

Never had a clue growing up (and keep in mind that I was in kindergarten then) that there was this album that was meant as a follow-up to “Pet Sounds,” meant in Brian’s mind to compete with what The Beatles were doing. Its whereabouts were shrouded in some sort of ominous mystery that Leaf never totally articulated in the book, the type Robert Stack would narrate had he had the chance. Never knew that Brian was facing resistance from band members and his record label, or that “Pet Sounds,” at the time, was not a huge seller.

Or that the combination of external pressures  and drug use would culminate in a breakdown — and that after The Beatles released their answer to “Pet Sounds,” “Sgt. Pepper,” Brian would shelve a project that he seemed tantalizingly close to completing. Where some of the tapes went was a mystery, too; so the story went, he was so freaked by the “Fire” element he recorded for the album — there was a rash of fires in the area around that time, and he thought he was responsible — that he destroyed the tapes. Of course, that wasn’t true, but these were the stories about an album that became myth much more than product.

Some of the songs trickled out. “Good Vibrations,” a significantly shortened “Heroes and Villains,” and inferior versions of “Vegetables” and “Wind Chimes” wound up on the substitute album “Smiley Smile,” which Carl Wilson famously referred to at the time as “a bunt instead of a grand slam.” “Our Prayer” and “Cabin Essence” came out on “20/20″ in 1969. Two years later, “Surf’s Up” became the title cut of an otherwise inferior album. The rest lay in bits and pieces in vaults, presumably never to be heard again. Or, as I read in Leaf’s book, possibly destroyed.

As a fan, I felt teased, cheated — even if he shelved it about the time I was going into first grade.

*****

Anyway, fast-forward …

By the mid-’90s, thanks to books such as Leaf’s, and Timothy White’s “The Nearest Faraway Place”; Capitol’s 1990 CD reissue of the catalog; the inclusion of more than a half-hour of “SMiLE”-era outtakes in 1993 on the “Good Vibrations” box; and Don Was’ 1995 documentary “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” — plus the tributes of generations of musicians, from Paul McCartney to The Smithereens to Sonic Youth to Vince Gill — the world at large was more aware of, and receptive of, Brian’s landmark work. And there was always a faction of hardcores holding out hope for something resembling a complete “SMiLE”

And as fate would have it, Brian overcame enough of his myriad emotional baggage by the late ’90s and tentatively started touring again — and finally started to realize how many people loved and were influenced by his ’60s pocket masterpieces. And he finally got to the point in the early 2000s that when someone suggested he revisit “SMiLE,” up to that point an off-limits topic, he pondered and agreed.

Brian teamed with Parks and bandmate Darian Sahanaja to start putting together the pieces — both songs and sequence, with Parks filling in some of the long-abandoned lyrical gaps — and his band performed the album for the first time at London’s Royal Festival Hall in February 2004 to a rousing five-minute ovation. With that ringing endorsement, Brian and crew recorded his own version of “SMiLE,“ which also drew raves when released that September.

The 2004 album, with its firmed-up sequence, and its extended and reworked versions of “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” gave the producers a template from which to work in reassembling studio fragments for this collection.

*****

Because we’ve heard the hits so often, we doesn’t realize just how radical the “Pet Sounds” and “SMiLE” albums were for their time. Remember that The Beach Boys were a surf/pop/rock’n'roll band in the prime of the three-minute pop hit. Bands went in, laid down a few tracks and bingo! The next hit single. And that’s what the suits at Capitol kept demanding from Brian, Never mind that the pressure had already pushed him to one breakdown.

Brian, whose love of music ranged from Gershwin to the ’50s white-boy harmonies of The Hi-Lo’s, wanted to stretch out in the studio. “Pet Sounds” was just the start: Bicycle bell and bike horn, french horn — certainly not surf or car songs. And while the boys were out touring, he was working with The Wrecking Crew, the best studio musicians in Los Angeles — many of the same folks who backed his idol/rival, Phil Spector, and an entire cross-section of ’60s American music — and with classical musicians.

It’s astounding that an album that included hits such as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Caroline, No” and the record company-demanded “hit single,” “Sloop John B” wasn’t a commercial success at the time. But in his way, Brian outSpectored Spector — who, ironically, was also encountering a first-ever commercial flop at the time with his most artistic single, Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High.” Spector never recovered from his peak, either.

But Brian kept driving himself, propelled by his imaginary competitions with both Spector and The Beatles, who were rumored to be responding the gauntlet laid down by “Pet Sounds.” He plunged into “SMiLE” in the spring of ’66. And the story of how “Good Vibrations” took six months and an astronomical-at-the-time $40,000 to record is legendary. Working with Van Dyke Parks, a a young transplanted Southerner with a head full of abstract, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, Brian set to creating what he called his “teenage symphony to God.” (Which became the title of one of the best albums of the ’90s.)

But when you have a pampered-yet-fragile ego, which had already been through one nervous breakdown a year and a half previous, combine that with the relentless record-label pressure to crank out product, then face resistance from your bandmates, lay down hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle-piece instrumental and vocal tracks and do drugs while attempting all this … well, it was too much for Brian to bear. Another breakdown. And when “Sgt. Pepper” came out in June of 1967 and stopped the musical world in its tracks, Brian just let it be. No “SMiLE” — just a lot of fragments and shards and playing in the sandbox and laying in bed playing “Be My Baby” over and over and … well, it’s all been well-chronicled.

And through the aborted comebacks over the years — capped, of course, by the triumphant return for good in the late ’90s — one albatross kept circling over Brian’s head. And the more comfortable he became, and the more he realized how many people truly loved his music, the more his confidence grew … to the point where he could tackle “SMiLE.” First, his version with his current band, and now, the original.

*****

Realize that the 2004 “SMiLE” and the 1967/2011 version are two different things. For one, the ’04 version was sung by a then-62-year-old Brian, with a lot of vocal help from his bandmates, who approximate The Beach Boys very well. The original was sung by a 25, 26-year-old Brian with the real Beach Boys, and, as mentioned, backed by The Wrecking Crew and other bigtime studio hands.

For another, the song list, and order, and, in a couple cases, the songs themselves, are slightly different — namely because a couple of the songs that appeared as finished pieces in 2004 were never completed in 1967. Brian and Parks fleshed out “I Love to Say Dada” into “In Blue Hawaii” for the ’04 version — but used the new/old “Dada,” an instrumental with harmony drizzles, on the ’67/’11 version. In addition, the ’04 “SMiLE” incorporates the three snippets “I’m in Great Shape”/”I Wanna Be Around”/”Workshop” into one track; on this version, the goofy 27-second “I’m in Great Shape” is broken off and moved up the song list.

In both versions of the album, alternate takes of the two most familiar tunes were used, versions familiar to hardcore fans from bootlegs through the years. In 2004, Brian added the slow, rollicking “cantina” piano verse to “Heroes and Villains,” while on “Good Vibrations,” he went with an earlier version of the lyrics, plus the “nom-me-nom” vocal part in the harmonies before the final refrain. The 2011 version includes the “cantina” verse on “Heroes” and the “nom-me-nom” on “Good Vibrations,” but with the familiar lyrics.

So no matter how you slice it, you’re not getting Brian’s 1967 vision in either case. But you’re getting a pretty good idea of where he was going and what he was thinking.

*****

“SMiLE” doesn’t hit with the emotional visceral force of “Pet Sounds.” That album, with lyrics by Brian and Gary Usher, struck at a young-adult version of teen angst and self-doubt: “You Still Believe in Me.” “God Only Knows.” “I Know There’s an Answer.” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.”

“SMiLE,” a much lighter album at its core, was a combination of two things: Parks’ lyrical whimsy and Brian exploration of America, from Plymouth rock to the then-present. (It was a theme he would return to on his 1988 album, spurred by Warner Bros. executive Lenny Waronker to write an epic that incorporated America in the same way; hence, “Rio Grande.”)

The album does begin with a teenage symphony to God in the form of “Our Prayer” — with them sucking all the air out of the room with their dizzying vocal harmony — incorporating a snippet from the Church of Vocal Harmony, them singing the signature harmony from The Crows’ 1953 R&B hit, “Gee.”

Brian takes us along a travelog of sorts. The Western movie of “Heroes and Villains.” “To the Church of the American Indian” on “Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock),” an assortment of tympani beats and quasi-tribal harmonic chants accompanied by chimey keyboards and trippy steel guitar, among other instruments. The incorporation of the American Songbook chestnut “You Are My Sunshine” with “The Old Master Painter,” straight into the banjo-infused Americana folksiness and home-on-the-range scenery of “Cabin Essence.”

He also takes us, famously, into the Elements suite. The goofy, bounce-in-place “Vega-Tables,” with various people chomping on veggies (including Paul McCartney on celery stalk), represents, naturally, the Earth element. “Holidays,” a jaunty nautical sojourn, represents water, “Wind Chimes,” still beautiful in its muted simplicity of instrumentation (the xylophone approximating wooden chime pieces) and vocal sweetness, is self-explanatory.

And then, the most infamous of the four, “Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow).” It’s easy to see how, with the violin section replicating both eerily soaring fire and fire sirens, anchored by an ominous, steadily marching beat, someone tripping out of his gourd might very well be freaked by all this. It still has a disturbing quality all these years later. (Also a humorous one: The master of vocal harmony won his first and only Grammy in 2005 — doubly ironically not only for best instrumental, but for the 2004 “SMiLE” version of the very piece that initially frightened him so. Gotta love those Grammy people …)

But the pinnacle of the album, as alluded to two months and a few thousand words ago, is “Surf’s Up.” Back to the American saga. Trail’s end — the Pacific. Manifest destiny fulfilled. An era of richly appointed opulence. And then the columnated ruins domino. All is lost for now. A toast to auld lang syne. Grief. Unbelief. A broken man too tough to cry. But in the end, there’s the surf. Always the surf. The ocean is eternal. Surf’s up.

The very song that Leonard Bernstein chose when he included Brian in a famous CBS special in 1966 on contemporary music. Brian’s piano provides a steady drumbeat, a constant through the falsetto arches, the soaring heights and the crash, and then the calm and the acceptance of what was lost and what remains.

I’m a rock’n'roller through and through, and almost always fall on the side of adrenaline in my musical tastes. But that said, there are two masterpieces that, to me, stand above everything else written under the rock’n'roll umbrella. One is “Eleanor Rigby” — McCartney telling a rich, and richly orchestrated, tale that fully fleshes out two characters and their tales of unrequited sadness and loneliness, all in 2 minutes, 8 seconds. “Surf’s Up” is the other.

And while the rest of the album doesn’t hit me the way “Pet Sounds” did as the troubled and conflicted 18-year-old I was when I first heard it, “SMiLE” contains Brian’s two artistic pinnacles: “Good Vibrations” and “Surf’s Up.” Arguing over which of the two was his best Beach Boys album is like arguing best apple vs. best orange. Though, from an emotional standpoint, I’ll take the best apple of “Pet Sounds.”

*****

The rest of the first CD includes “You’re Welcome,” the B-side of the “Heroes and Villains” single, as well as odds and ends: the stereo mix of “Heroes” (which had been recorded in mono), 7-plus minutes of “Heroes” snippets, a minute-plus song fragment called “He Gives Speeches,” an 8-minute montage of vocal harmonies, the beautiful solo demo version of “Surf’s Up,” a goofball segment of Brian “falling into” his piano; and a Capitol Records in-house promo spot for the album.

The other four discs of the deluxe set are for the hardcore fans only. They consist of outtakes galore — many of the shards from which Brian pieced together the album in the first place. He pieced it together much in the way a film director edits a movie, and in the pre-digital age, he left a lot of footage on the cutting-room floor. And there’s also the “Our Prayer” session that licks off the second disc where Brian asked brother Dennis, “Denny, do you have any hash joints left? I know you do.”

Disc 2 is mostly “Heroes and Villains” outtakes; at one point early on, the song was reported to have been about 12 minutes long. Another point of interest is on Disc 4 — “Three Blind Mice,” not to be confused at all with The Three Stooges’ theme song; it’s an October 1965 instrumental track whose experimental nature presaged what was to come by a year. There’s also a “Vega-Tables” segment on that disc where director Brian tried some Method-acting direction on session drummer extraordinaire Hal Blaine, who acted extremely annoyed. Disc 5 is totally “Good Vibrations,” starting with 7 1/2-minutes of takes from the beginning, in February 1966, where the foundation of organ, drum and theremin took shape.

And after all this …

Well, after hearing the 2004 “SMiLE,” and having seen Brian run through “Pet Sounds” twice — his spectacular three-set show at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut in July 2000, where “Good Vibrations” was the encore of the middle “Pet Sounds” set; and the final American performance, at the Oakland Paramount in February 2007, where the guests included Al and ’70s Beach Boys drummer Rikki Fataar — I said that whatever Brian does the rest of his life is fine with me, that he doesn’t owe us anything.

I never expected this one last tremendous gift from him. In a way, it’s kind of anticlimactic — after all, how could anything match the Holy Grail buildup to this? — but we have it a complete “SMiLE,” whether some real diehards agree with that or not, and it’s been a wonderful experience following the story from seeming tragedy to triumph. A triumph of not only artistry, but love. Brian, in essence, gave back to the fans who have shown him so many decades of, well, love and mercy. Love begets love.

But there is a little sadness here, too. We now have an official “SMiLE” that comes straight from Brian. The quest we never thought would end is over. Done. Land’s end. Surf’s up, ooh-oooooooooh …

Anyway, I leave 2011 behind with a free-association of things related to this week. Zooey Desachanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt reunited to break out a YouTube of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” What I’m doing, unless I get called into work, is seeing my pal Blake Jones and Nate Butler and their Beatles band, The Beetles, at the Starline in Fresno. And Monday and Tuesday of this week, some of my friends at home were lucky-dog enough to see a two-night reunion of arguably the greatest blue-eyed soul group of all, Connecticut’s Wildweeds, fronted by Al Anderson, at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass.

So anyway, here’s to hoping you find better things, as Ray Davies so sweetly and wonderfully put it. And as I say at the stroke of midnight every Jan. 1 — and will scream unequivocally and not so eloquently, at the top of my fucking lungs, this time around — ONWARD!

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? — Zooey Deschanel & Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Any Time at All – The Beatles

No Good to Cry (Iron Horse, Northampton, Mass., 12/27/11) — The Wildweeds

A Celebration — U2

Auld Lang Syne — The Reducers

They were married back in September; an hour before the ceremony, I stopped at a Walgreens I don’t usually frequent (Blackstone and Clinton, Fresno) to buy a card. And since the boy in me always trolls for Hot Wheels, in the faint hope of finding an elusive Treasure Hunt car, I did just that. And, to my shock, I saw a card on the pegs with a green stripe down the right edge. It was a Treasure Hunt, all right. A gold ’62 Studebaker Avanti. Little pleasures.

And, on this third-to-last night of a weird and trying 2011, I found myself getting together with the two of them for the first time since the wedding, for a long-threatened trip to the Chinese/sushi buffet at Tang Dynasty.

We were oblivious to the Baylor-Washington bowl game on multiple screens and oblivious to everything else, too, save for the food. Two hours of conversation. Much fun.

And, once again stemming from them, good fortune. Literally.

As I’m looking forward to a much better 2012 than ’11, this is what came out when I cracked open my fortune cookie:

“Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.”

God, I’m hoping that means something positive. After all, “suitably rewarded” is a term with a lot of wiggle room — just like “interesting times.” I’ll assume it’s a good thing until the universe tells me otherwise. I need 2012 to start wonderfully and not let up.