The musician that Jimmy Page and George Martin agreed was modern music’s only “genius”
I have a theory that we use the word ‘genius’ so widely because it helps to sustain the illusion that life is a meritocracy. When it comes to popular music, Jimmy Page certainly thought that was the case. He recognised that a load of lucky four-chord peddlers have perhaps been graced with outsized adulation.
“The only term I won’t accept is ‘genius’,” the Led Zeppelin guitarist explained. “The term ‘genius’ gets used far too loosely in rock and roll. When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock and roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock and roll has to go.”
Interestingly, Leonard Bernstein, a revered classical musician, made it clear that there are a few exceptions to this rule. As the great American composer said of pop during a seminar in the 1960s, “This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language. It relies more on the simple triad, the basic harmony of folk music.”
Adding, “Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary; limited harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extraordinary.”
This, for Bernstein, was typified by the Beach Boys classic, ‘Surf’s Up’. As the composer declared at the time: “There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around.”
He glowingly continued, “It could come only out of the ferment that characterises today’s pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today’s most important musicians, sings his own ‘Surf’s Up’. Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, ‘Surf’s Up’ is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.”
This is something that Jimmy Page and George Martin certainly agreed with. “If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music,” Martin declared. “I would choose Brian Wilson. Without Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper wouldn’t have happened. Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.”
Given who he worked with, that is high praise indeed for The Beach Boys’ mastermind, but it is easy to see why he reveres Wilson so much. Even McCartney added: “I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard Pet Sounds.”
Yet, his answer is surely ratified by the fact that Page, with his wariness of lofty reverence within the pop structure firmly established, also proclaimed, “The man’s a genius!” Maybe this is because the Led Zep rocker realised that, similar to his own ambitions within classic rock, Wilson’s songwriting was actually aligning with the complex vocabulary of classical music.
As he added, “Actually, when you hear other people doing his numbers, it makes you appreciate just how good those original songs are.”
They’re not just good, they’re timeless masterpieces that changed music forever. And fortunately, most musicians that you’ll ever meet seem to agree.
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