Tributes have been pouring in this past week for Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys co-founder and pop music maestro, following his death aged 82.  But there have been possibly none so personal as the memories of writer David Leaf,

Brian Wilson, the prodigious visionary engine behind the Beach Boys, composer of “teenage symphonies to God,” the big, gentle, sweet-voiced soul whose music touched generations, has died at 82.

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.