Remembering when the Beach Boys had their own Santa Monica clubhouse

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Today it’s an Italianate apartment building wedged between an Indian restaurant and a Target.But what stood half a century ago at 1454 5th Street in downtown Santa Monica was the Beach Boys’ Brother Studio, a former porn theater turned recording complex where the preeminent American rock band of the 1960s sought to coax its resident genius, Brian Wilson, back into the fold after a long stretch in the wilderness.Nobody would consider the albums the Beach Boys made at Brother in the mid-70s — among them “15 Big Ones,” “The Beach Boys Love You” and the long-shelved “Adult/Child” — the band’s most successful.

(Well, nobody except for Wilson, who frequently cited the synthed-up “Love You” as his fave.) A decade after 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” which so blew the Beatles away that they had to answer with “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the burly, bearded Beach Boys were far from the center of pop music; Wilson, in particular, had largely withdrawn from public life as he struggled with the effects of drugs and his fragile mental health.Yet Brother offered the setting for a creative reflowering — arguably the band’s final moment of unity before the start of years of more serious infighting.

“It was like we all got back together and became Beach Boys again,” says Al Jardine, who founded the group in suburban Hawthorne in 1961 with Wilson, Wilson’s brothers Dennis and Carl and the Wilsons’ cousin Mike Love.Now, eight months after Brian Wilson’s death in June at age 82, a new box set looks back at the era as an expressive outpouring led by the band’s rejuvenated visionary.

Music Wilson, who died Wednesday at 82, was one of music’s true visionaries, if that’s the right word for a guy who dealt in the endless possibility of sound.“We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years” collects 73 tracks from 1976 and ’77, including outta...