OTTAWA - I've seen The Beach Boys in one incarnation or another a half-dozen times, but I never thought I'd see the original Beach Boy Brian Wilson perform live.

After all, the guy who altered the course of American pop music in the 1960s has been called both a genius and a madman, vowed in 1964 to never play a live show again.

Well, last night at Bluesfest, that same troubled, beloved Wilson showed up for his nostalgic gig of Beach Boys classics.

But it was about as far from being a 'live' show as you find.

For more than an hour, Wilson seemed pretty out of it, at least as far as fronting a band at Bluesfest goes. He spent virtually the whole 75-minutes perched on a stool, staring blankly out at the audience and singing occasionally while his enthusiastic band pumped out lively party versions of old favourites, mostly from the Beach Boy songbook of the early '60s -- Dance Dance Dance, Surfer Girl, In My Room, And Then She Kissed Me, When I Grow Up to Be a Man, Do Ya Wanna Dance?, California Girls, I Want to Go Home, God Only Knows, Wouldn't It Be Nice, Help Me Rhonda and Surfin' U.S.A. and a tune from his new album That Lucky Old Sun.

Initially, I found Wilson's brief show horrifying and somewhat humiliating.

I thought he had recovered sufficiently from the paralyzing mental breakdown he suffered 35 years ago enough at least to perform. Instead, an obviously exhausted Wilson looked like he wouldn't be able to finish the show, saying nothing other than monosyllabic hellos.

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, the sound system crashed into dead silence for almost two songs early in the set.

It's a credit to Wilson that the music he wrote 40 years ago still makes old foggies feel like teenagers. Eventually, the show lost some of its macabre polish, or we just got used to seeing him in a comatose state. By then, the fans were well into the music and the memories.

But there was something about the reality of seeing Wilson like this that makes the fantasy of The Beach Boys suddenly hard to take.