The Beach Boys song that Brian Jones said was “shocking”
The Rolling Stones established themselves in the budding British blues scene of the early 1960s. Early in their development, the Stones were musically directed by multi-instrumentalist and blues fanatic Brian Jones, who named the group after Muddy Waters’ 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His vision for the band was to take his beloved American blues music to the top of the UK charts, and in countless ways, their success exceeded his early expectations.
The Stones’ first stable line-up consisted of frontman Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, guitarist Keith Richards, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts. In the early years, the songwriting talent of the Jagger-Richards partnership was still gestating, so for the time being, the band mainly opted for blues covers, much to Jones’ satisfaction.
By the end of 1964, Jones had already achieved his goal of bringing the blues to Britain with the Stones’ reimagination of Willie Dixon’s effort ‘Little Red Rooster’. This single became the first traditional blues track to reach the top of the UK chart, and it remains the only one to this day.
With this milestone, Jones had accomplished a feat beyond his wildest dreams, and the band’s subsequent conformity to a Beatles-pop sound began to grate on him. As Jagger and Richards became more competent as songwriters, Jones became less potent within the band. Compounding his withdrawal was a spiralling addiction struggle, eventually seeing him ejected from the band.
In March 1965, just as The Rolling Stones were getting ready to unleash their early original hit singles ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘Get Off of My Cloud’, Brian Jones was invited to review some of the month’s singles for a Blind Date feature with Melody Maker.
The first single the Stone heard was The Beach Boys’ ‘All Summer Long’, which previously appeared on their 1964 album of the same name. Surprisingly, Jones, who was averse to most pop music, revealed that he liked the band and their hit single of the previous year, ‘I Get Around’. However, he regretfully only had bad things to say for ‘All Sumer Long’.
“This brings back memories of California,” Jones started. “It sounds like Beach Boys, but it could be the Trade Winds… It’s probably the Beach Boys; it sounds like a Brian Wilson production. They usually sing better than this. Actually, it’s terrible. I’m sorry because Brian Wilson is a pretty good producer. ‘I Get Around’ was beautiful, but this is corny.”
Jones continued, referencing The Rolling Stones’ famous manager and his apparent favouritism. “I’m not doing an Andrew Oldham and saying everybody in the world is a bad producer except Phil Spector, but that is pretty shocking, especially for someone so big in America. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was a British group trying to get a surf sound.”
