I’ll be celebrating Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) for the third time today at a 6 pm screening at Manhattan’s Dolby 88. My first viewing was at the Toronto Film Festival (here’s my 9.8.14 review) and the second time was in late April at L.A.’s Wilshire Screening Room.

Anyway today I read a superbly written review by Los Angeles magazine’s Steve Erickson, and I was struck by two sentences in particular. One in which Erickson describes Brian Wilson‘s post-Pet Sounds, Smile-era comedown in which “the celestial sounds in his head turned on him, and became the screams of angels falling from heaven.” The second alludes to Wilson’s music-creating process: “Great artists create in circles, not lines, in the ever-bending curl of the wave rather than in its rush to the shore’s conclusion.”

vs. “Screams of Angels Falling From Heaven”

Los Angeles magazine illustration by Andre Carrilho.

Here’s that piece I posted nine months ago about my 1974 encounter with Wilson during my lost period in Santa Monica (i.e., a year before I began trying my hand at movie journalism).