“Wonderful”: George Martin on the most influential album on The Beatles
Nothing was off the table whenever The Beatles went into Abbey Road Studios during the 1960s. They had earned their living by becoming the world’s greatest pop band, but their fearlessness in the studio in the latter half of their career is what made them one of the first innovators of what rock and roll could be in the 1960s. Although George Martin managed to be their musical translator half the time from behind the production desk, he knew that the Fab Four were onto something great when they started using this album as their reference point.
Before the group started cutting their teeth in the studio, there wasn’t much creative ingenuity that came with playing rock and roll. There were people tangential to the scene, like Bob Dylan and Ray Charles paving the way for folk and R&B, but it wasn’t exactly rocket science trying to learn any of Chuck Berry’s greatest hits or figure out what Elvis Presley was “playing” whenever he donned a guitar onstage.
But the one thing The Beatles had going for them was their inability to say no. Although many artists would have stuck with one sound throughout their careers, each of them were interested to see where their muse would take them on every song, which normally meant toying around with the production style or throwing in something weird like the odd country song or hard rock gem on a record.
If The Beatles were on the cusp of creative brilliance, though, Brian Wilson had reached genius levels a few years before. Although The Beach Boys could have been considered the best competition for the Fabs, Pet Sounds was the moment that Wilson’s writing reached new levels of perfection, like using inverted chords on ‘God Only Knows’ or creating an entire choir’s worth of vocal harmonies on ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’.
Regardless of the high bar The Beatles set for themselves, Martin thought Wilson created something that inspired them more than anyone else, saying, “I think Pet Sounds was one of the most influential albums we’d heard. It was a wonderful album, and we admired everything about it. Everything that the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson did seemed to be thoughtless. They wanted to be able to write music as good as that or better than that. It was their yardstick.”
However, whereas Wilson could turn his traditional surf songs into the best pop music ever written, The Beatles went beyond rock altogether when making their next albums. No matter how much time Wilson spent trying to get Smile off the ground, his British counterparts kept the creative hot streak going on Sgt Peppers, which birthed both the Summer of Love and art-rock all in one go.
Even if Wilson couldn’t recapture that magic again, the real winners were the fans. Because with the release of everything from Pet Sounds to Sgt Peppers to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, artists were slowly breaking down the doors for what was allowed in rock and roll going forward.
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