The 1966 album Paul McCartney wanted to live forever: “The classic of this century”
Paul McCartney probably didn’t envision his music lasting for centuries to come when he first put together The Beatles.
It was insane to think that a pop group would have been able to keep a career going for more than a few months at the time, never mind a few years, so he and John Lennon were simply making the most of their moment in the sun when they first started. But when looking at some of the people that they have gone on to inspire, it’s not like their influence is going away any time soon.
The synergy that Lennon and McCartney had together was unbeatable in many ways, and the fact that they were able to flesh out each other’s songs until they were perfect is the kind of craftsmanship everyone yearns for. But The Beatles were far from the only band that made waves of that magnitude back in the 1960s. They had started the ball rolling, and it was to everyone else to rise to the challenge whenever they made their own records.
And it’s not like the band didn’t set the bar unbelievably high when they first started experimenting. They had already cornered the market on the teenybopper songs whenever they made a new pop record, but when looking at Sgt Pepper’s, every single piece of that album was supposed to be a new creative endeavour for them. They wanted to make new extensions upon what they had been doing, and that wouldn’t have been possible without Brian Wilson showing them the way forward.
Wilson was already one of the biggest surf rockers when The Beach Boys started, but he understood that there needed to be something more to his music. His life wasn’t meant to revolve around songs about cars and girls, and while ‘California Girls’ did end up being the start of his experimentation, he wanted the chance to work on new material by the time that he reached Pet Sounds.
The rest of the world didn’t know what they had on their hands yet, but Macca was knocked out the moment that he heard. Anything that they made afterwards was going to need to be half as good as what Wilson had done when working on that record, and you could really hear that influence as far back as when they were working on those block harmonies on ‘Here There and Everywhere’ from Revolver.
And while McCartney thought Sgt Pepper equalled Pet Sounds in many regards, he felt that no other album was going to come close to the size and scope that Wilson set for the rest of the world, saying, “It really is… I don’t know, it may be going overboard to say it’s the classic of this century, but to me, it certainly is a total classic record that is unbeatable in many ways. It more than holds up. It’s better than ever. I can’t see anything as modern as that around at the moment. I think [the songs are] very exciting, even though they’re really recorded quite primitively compared to now.”
What’s even crazier is thinking that Wilson managed to sculpt the whole thing so effortlessly. He was willing to put in the work to make the best songs that he could, and when looking at the kind of muse he was in tune with, every single one of those songs was meticulously crafted to get the sounds that he heard in his head exactly right, even if it didn’t make the most sense to everyone else.
Because that’s what great music is meant to do at the best of times. Some of the most classic records of all time aren’t normally going to be understood when they first came out, but the more that you listen to them later down the road, the more you start to realise how much innovation went on in one place.
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