Two-and-a-half score and a million records ago, two very different American songwriters released two very different albums that would go on to shape the future of popular music.

On May 16, 1966, the Beach Boys—but Brian Wilson, really—released Pet Sounds and Bob Dylan put out Blonde on Blonde. By this point in their careers, both Dylan and Wilson could count commendable achievements in recording and performance under their belts. Wilson and the Beach Boys continued to ride the wave of Surfin' U.S.A.'s success on the strength of its title track and the signature cachet of their Southern California cool, churning out ten albums after their 1962 debut, Surfin' Safari, at a breakneck pace before Wilson stepped back from touring and distanced himself from the sunny, dune-bound melodies that had become his tropically-printed calling card. "Barbara Ann," "Help Me Rhonda," "California Girls," and a slew of hits featuring the falsetto harmonies and tightly-wound instrumentation of the Beach Boys had long since been worked into the rotation of radio stations stretching from the Pacific Coast Highway to the Eastern seaboard.

Brian Wilson in the studio recording Michael Ochs Archives Getty Images

Wilson had played a heavy hand in the production of his releases from the start, gravitating towards the blank canvas of the studio while shying away from the bright lights and deafening screams of the stage. With the soundboard, microphones and instruments serving as his beakers, scalpels, and scales, Wilson was a mad scientist driven by a hypothesis he couldn't yet articulate as he dabbled with new song structures and techniques that bewildered his label, Capitol Records. He dedicated himself to the pursuit of experimentation instead of the commercial viability of beach-party pop. Men who arrived in California on the premise of discovery, self-realization, and manifest destiny tilled the arid soil on which his studio was built. In the '60s, Wilson—with his dissonant chord clashes and unhindering pursuit of the perfect sound to suit his movement—was the musical descendant of that.

If Wilson was the boisterous ram at the head of a nimble-footed flock, Dylan was the scraggly coyote dodging both traffic and eye contact at his own pace.

Dylan, meanwhile, had also established himself as a songwriting force with a penchant for confusing—and enraging—the ever-living fuck out of those close to him and the listening public at large. He, too, had made his debut in 1962, but instead of extending an invitation for fans to surf or twist or get in on any sort of fun, Dylan's first album was a lesson in lonerism. If Wilson was the boisterous ram at the head of a nimble-footed flock, Dylan was the scraggly coyote dodging both traffic and eye contact at his own pace. From the name (simple and self-titled) to the instrumentation (just a guitar and a harmonica) to the material (American standards, like "Man of Constant Sorrow," along with voiced letters, like "Song to Woody"), Dylan's first full-length was an autonomous one that brought his unmistakable, nasal tenor out of the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early '60s and into the traditional American canon. From there, Dylan came into his own as a writer, moving further away from well-worn standards and into the dexterous sinews and potent pops of his lyrical language. 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin' and Another Side of Bob Dylan produced devastating ballads and profound protest songs in spades—"Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "It Ain't Me, Babe" among them—which elevated him to modern folk icon status and yielded an invitation to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Bob Dylan in 1966. Cummings Archives Getty Images

Before he went to Newport, he released Bringing It All Back Home, his first foray into the harder strains of amplified rock 'n 'roll, the album that sped up Dylan's rhythmic proclivities to a rambunctious trot with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Maggie's Farm." The latter would drum up the Newport Folk crowd to a fever pitch when Dylan opted to favor electric instrumentation and the backing of a full band at the festival, a brief set that's since become an event of mythic stature in popular music for the outrage it instilled and the stylistic shift it inspired. Highway 61 Revisited followed, ushered in by "Like a Rolling Stone," the single Dylan released just days before Pete Seeger nearly cut the cables of his Newport Folk set himself. He played Queens' Forest Hills Stadium a month after Newport with bassist Harvey Brooks, organist and keys impresario Al Kooper, and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm—who would eventually rise into their own notorious rock ranks as founding members of The Band—as the guitarist and drummer recruited for Dylan's electric shows.

A look at the cultural climate of the time backs up the notion that Dylan and Wilson were preternaturally tuned into the chaos unfolding around them.

That brings us to the point where these two men, defiant pioneers and psychic brothers cut from distinct musical cloths, found themselves shirking the reigns of their triumphs and cutting risky paths that would forge both Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde. A look at the cultural climate of the time backs up the notion that Dylan and Wilson were preternaturally tuned into the chaos unfolding around them. That year saw the birth of Mao's cultural revolution, Lyndon Johnson's commitment to the presence of American forces in Vietnam, and the rising tensions of the Civil Rights Movement; it also delivered the first of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, a handful of Oscars for The Sound of Music and notable releases from Simon & Garfunkel (Sounds of Silence), the Rolling Stones (Aftermath), the Mamas and the Papas (If You Can Believe Your Eyes & Ears, which boasted "California Dreamin'" as its single) and the major label debut of Waylon Jennings (Folk-Country). David Jones became David Bowie in 1966; John Lennon told London's Evening Standard that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" in 1966.

And here, smack in the middle of this tempest on every level—international, domestic, creative, social, political—Dylan and Wilson, one unbeknownst to the other, burrowed into new music and embraced elements absent from their prior work. Wilson's compositions and arrangements on Pet Sounds were very much so the product of an independent endeavor, whereas Dylan kept the band from Forest Hills intact for the New York sessions that would lay the shaky groundwork for Blonde on Blonde, ditching the solitude of his early days and standing confidently as a leader with a veritable outfit behind him to round out his vision. Dylan recorded and recorded and recorded over several sessions, both in New York and Nashville, swapping players in and out of the studio lineup until the final products were worth mastering for what would eventually take shape as the songs of Blonde on Blonde. Wilson did the same with the Pet Sounds sessions, keeping "Good Vibrations" off Pet Sounds because the countless takes recorded didn't measure up to his expectations.

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Truth is stranger than fiction, and it's easy to see why this period has proven to be fertile for the presentation of both artists on the silver screen. Wilson's frustration provides the charged undercurrent of one of the most notable scenes from Love & Mercy, the 2015 biopic recounting the rise of his star and the painful descent into mental illness that plagued him for decades. In it, Wilson is portrayed as an exacting, unflinching perfectionist, halting the recording process for the slightest deviation of a cello line, starting and re-starting as his band members grow increasingly agitated in the unfolding hours. When it all comes together, he's euphoric and entranced as he takes in the playback.

We don't have a similar look into Dylan's process in I'm Not There, the 2007 film that uses the music of Dylan and the characters he's created—both onstage and in his lyrics—as loose prompts for its surreal plot. What we do have is a portrait of Dylan as a headstrong, confident, and sure-stepping poet whose moves are calculating and self-possessed, which are played out to a degree just as faithful and unsettling as the studio scenes from Love & Mercy.

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Dylan could have been perfecting the arcs of "Visions of Johanna" at the same time that Wilson was zeroing in on the robust blasts of "I Know There's An Answer," two songs that would never consider the other bedfellows, and yet the intense, determined spirit behind them both is very much the same.

As they both continue to contribute to their already iconic legacies, Dylan and Wilson are two meteors whose paths crossed at one cosmic point and then continued to diverge. Wilson's music is firmly tethered to California and the sun and sand that paint its postcards; Dylan is the forever-wandering troubadour who appears in a flourish and leaves before you notice with little more than a hat-tip and no home to return to. The majority of Wilson's catalog is the stuff of singing surfers, while Dylan's greatest hits conjure images of smoky basement bars and bustling protests. Wilson found strength in sing-alongs and numerous voices early on, while Dylan walked alone. But now that we're half a century away from that crossing—that moment in time, when Dylan and Wilson were both furiously writing and recording their way through their seminal releases—we can mark it as a singular event that united two of the best musicians this country's ever produced in one perfect, incendiary blaze.

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