Fascinating insights about Brian's motivations and ambivalence. Also, I feel like it's rare for a Baby Boomer to write about other Baby Boomers (the 60s California rock groups) in a critical (or maybe just balanced), rather than nostalgic and reverential, way.
When I talked to him a bit after class about the Beach Boys, he would say how back then people tended to mistake Brian's symptoms of illness as eccentricities, since everyone was at least a bit eccentric. He mentioned how people could be all messed up on drugs and whatnot, and others would just take it as the person "finding themself" or "just doing their thing", instead of something serious and often grave. Goldstein was always good about having a balanced view as opposed to purely nostalgic.