Brian Wilson was an exemplary American

Brian Wilson , the main composer and vocal arranger for the Beach Boys, has died at age 82 .

Bob Greene : There is almost nothing original to be said about Wilson , one of the most thought about, gossiped about, fretted over major figures in American music.

Greene: Even when his music or your head is at its glummest, it's hard to not feel something like a root satisfaction with existence with his music in your ears.

There are many tragedies associated with his life, with decades of mental trouble and being alternately helped and overcontrolled by rogue therapist Eugene Landy .

But his life story has its heroic joy too, like his legendary late-1990s comeback from decades of being written off as a drug-addled vegetable.

For a notorious burnout, he sure did a lot of interesting work in his last decades ; his spirit was never snuffed.

Like their country, the whole Beach Boys thing could not have worked as enduringly and gloriously as it has without being formed of the full range of human types and emotions. Brian Wilson's ears and musical mind launched a saga that seemed to contain the whole American experience. And even with him gone, he did his work so well, with such truth and such beauty and such discipline, that that saga will never end..