The rock revolution Brian Wilson despised and tried to ignore: “I never went for that’
In the 1960s, Brian Wilson joined the rock ‘n’ roll revolution with a sun-soaked sound apt to champion the Californian surf-rock scene. Though the band’s approach would later inspire garage rock and the rise of punk via Iggy Pop and The Stooges, The Beach Boys stood firmly on the softer side of rock music.
After emerging in 1962 with their debut album, Surfin’ Safari, The Beach Boys drew up against The Beatles in a friendly transatlantic rivalry. The bonafide hitmakers became particularly competitive between 1965 and 1967 as early proponents of the psychedelic rock wave. After being inspired by Rubber Soul, Wilson dropped the Fab Four’s jaws with Pet Sounds, which, in turn, influenced The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpieces.
Though the bands admired each other intensely, The Beach Boys and The Beatles had different musical approaches. The former mainly stuck to bright soft-rock deliveries and quaint ballads, while the latter cast a wider emotional net, thanks to John Lennon’s dark satire and abstract lyricism. Thus, the competition between the two bands was mostly rooted in progressive compositional and production methods.
With this in mind, it comes as no surprise to hear that Wilson was never particularly enthusiastic about the punk wave. White speaking to The Guardian in 2015, Wilson seemed totally oblivious to the existence of punk. “I don’t know what that is,” he claimed. “Punk rock? Punk? What is that?”
At the time, Wilson was 72. This claim could be chalked up to a senile blip, but more likely, he was showing his disdain through denial. After being reminded of the loud, unrefined genre that took hold in the mid-1970s thanks to bands like Ramones and Sex Pistols, Wilson added: “Oh yeah. I never went for that. I never went for the fast kind of music. I go for the more medium tempo,” he affirmed. “Spencer Davis, I liked that.”
At the time, Wilson was promoting his tenth solo studio album, No Pier Pressure. While discussing the music, he hesitated to use the rock ‘n’ roll descriptor. “We wanted a pleasant sound. Pleasant and mellow. Soft rock, not rock,” he mused. “My album is not rock ‘n’ roll.” The songwriter later suggested that, with regards to rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry was about as heavy as he’d care to go.
As a meticulous composer and skilled producer, Wilson clearly couldn’t get on board with punk’s intentional simplicity. Before the post-punk era, the genre was known for snarling, anarchistic lead vocals, heavy chord progressions and a lack of sonic texture. With such a sound, the punk rockers stood in defiance of the contemporary prog-rock wave, which The Beatles and The Beach Boys had helped to inspire in the late 1960s.
Unlike Wilson, John Lennon saw the value of punk and felt that bands like Sex Pistols reminded him of The Beatles during their pre-fame gigs. “I’ve only heard whatever they’ve done a video of. I thought, ‘Yeah, great,’” he said of the Pistols. “To me, seeing the impact of all that, I thought, ‘That’s how we used to behave at the Cavern before Brian [Epstein told us] to stop throwing up and drinking onstage and swearing.”
