In 1966, the Pet Sounds album and "Good Vibrations" single raised the group's prestige as rock innovators; both are now widely considered to be among the greatest and most influential works in popular music history.

[28] Its success propelled the group into a nationwide spotlight, and was vital to launching surf music as a national craze,[29] albeit the Beach Boys' vocal approach to the genre, not the original instrumental style pioneered by Dick Dale.

[57][nb 5] Now a full-time studio artist,[36] Brian wanted to move the Beach Boys beyond their surf aesthetic, believing that their image was antiquated and distracting the public from his talents as a producer and songwriter.

[75] In The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Marshall Heiser writes that Pet Sounds "diverges from previous Beach Boys' efforts in several ways: its sound field has a greater sense of depth and 'warmth;' the songs employ even more inventive use of harmony and chord voicings; the prominent use of percussion is a key feature (as opposed to driving drum backbeats); whilst the orchestrations, at times, echo the quirkiness of 'exotica' bandleader Les Baxter, or the 'cool' of Burt Bacharach, more so than Spector's teen fanfares".

[108] Throughout the first half of 1967, the release date for Smile was repeatedly postponed as Brian continuously tinkered with the recordings, experimenting with different takes and mixes, and appeared unable or unwilling to supply finished versions of songs.

[148] At the end of 1967, Rolling Stone co-founder and editor Jann Wenner printed an influential article that denounced the Beach Boys as "just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up on trying to catch The Beatles.

[188] He also requested the completion of Smile track "Surf's Up" and arranged a guest appearance at a Grateful Dead concert at Bill Graham's Fillmore East in April 1971 to foreground the Beach Boys' transition into the counterculture.

[222] Early in 1975, Brian signed a production deal with California Music, a Los Angeles collective that included Bruce Johnston and Gary Usher, but was drawn away by the Beach Boys' pressing demands for a new album.

Dennis checked into rehab for his chance to get sober, but on December 28, he drowned at the age of 39 in Marina del Rey while diving from a friend's boat trying to recover items that he had previously thrown overboard in a fit of rage.

"[277] Music journalist Erik Davis wrote in 1990: "the Beach Boys are either dead, deranged, or dinosaurs; their records are Eurocentric, square, unsampled; they've made too much money to merit hip revisionism".

After Carl's death, Jardine left the touring line-up and began to perform regularly with his band "Beach Boys: Family & Friends" until he ran into legal issues for using the name without license.

[304][305] In 2006, Brian Wilson, Love, Jardine, Marks, and Johnston participated in a non-performing reunion on the rooftop of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles to celebrate that Sounds of Summer had been certified double-platinum.

[324] On October 9, Wilson and Jardine submitted a written response to the rumors stating: "I was completely blindsided by his press release ... We hadn't even discussed as a band what we were going to do with all the offers that were coming in for more 50th shows.

[346] In February 2020, Wilson and Jardine's official social media pages encouraged fans to boycott the band's music after it was announced that Love's Beach Boys would perform at the Safari Club International Convention in Reno, Nevada on animal rights grounds.

They were so confident of their ability, and of Brian's skill as a producer to enhance it, that they were unafraid of doing sophisticated, a cappella glee-club arrangements containing multiple suspensions, passing formations, complex chords, and both chromatic and enharmonic modulations.

[367] Among the distinct elements of the Beach Boys' style were the nasal quality of their singing voices, their use of a falsetto harmony over a driving, locomotive-like melody, and the sudden chiming in of the whole group on a key line.

[370] Jim Miller commented: "On straight rockers they sang tight harmonies behind Love's lead ... on ballads, Brian played his falsetto off against lush, jazz-tinged voicings, often using (for rock) unorthodox harmonic structures.

"[370] Harrison adds that "even the least distinguished of the Beach Boys' early uptempo rock 'n' roll songs show traces of structural complexity at some level; Brian was simply too curious and experimental to leave convention alone".

[14] Wrecking Crew biographer Kent Hartman supported in his 2012 book about the musicians: "Though [Brian Wilson] had for several months brought in various session players on a sporadic, potluck basis to supplement things, the other Beach Boys generally played on the earliest songs, too.

[410] In Slowinski's view, "One should not sell short Carl's own contributions; the youngest Wilson had developed as a musician sufficiently to play alongside the horde of high-dollar session pros that big brother was now bringing into the studio.

"[429] Cultural historian Kevin Starr explains that the group first connected with young Americans specifically for their lyrical interpretation of a mythologized landscape: "Cars and the beach, surfing, the California Girl, all this fused in the alembic of youth: Here was a way of life, an iconography, already half-released into the chords and multiple tracks of a new sound.

[148] The group's "California sound" grew to national prominence through the success of their 1963 album Surfin' U.S.A.,[442] which helped turn the surfing subculture into a mainstream youth-targeted advertising image widely exploited by the film, television, and food industry.

[433] A 1966 article discussing new trends in rock music writes that the Beach Boys popularized a type of drum beat heard in Jan and Dean's "Surf City", which sounds like "a locomotive getting up speed", in addition to the method of "suddenly stopping in between the chorus and verse".

[447] Between 1964 and 1969, it fueled innovation and transition, inspiring artists to tackle largely unmentioned themes such as sexual freedom, black pride, drugs, oppositional politics, other countercultural motifs, and war.

O'Sullivan also cites the Beach Boys' recording of "Sloop John B" as the origin of yacht rock's preoccupation with the "sailors and beachgoers" aesthetic that was "lifted by everyone, from Christopher Cross to Eric Carmen, from 'Buffalo Springfield' folksters like Jim Messina to 'Philly Sound' rockers like Hall & Oates".

He argues that the advancing technology of multitrack recording and mixing boards were more influential to experimental rock than electronic instruments such as the synthesizer, allowing the Beatles and the Beach Boys to become the first crop of non-classically trained musicians to create extended and complex compositions.

[461] The making of "Good Vibrations", according to Domenic Priore, was "unlike anything previous in the realms of classical, jazz, international, soundtrack, or any other kind of recording",[462] while biographer Peter Ames Carlin wrote that it "sounded like nothing that had ever been played on the radio before".

[470] For the artier branches of post-punk, Wilson's pained vulnerability, his uses of offbeat instruments and his intricate harmonies, not to mention the Smile saga itself, became a touchstone, from Pere Ubu and XTC to REM [sic] and the Pixies to U2 and My Bloody Valentine.

[478][479] Rolling Stone writer Barry Walters wrote in 2000 that albums such as Surf's Up and Love You "are becoming sonic blueprints, akin to what early Velvet Underground LPs meant to the previous indie peer group".

[480] The High Llamas, Eric Matthews and Saint Etienne are among the "alt heroes" who contributed cover versions of "unreleased, overlooked or underappreciated Wilson/Beach Boys obscurities" on the tribute album Caroline Now!