How Brian Wilson became Elton John’s greatest inspiration: “A true genius”
Every great Elton John song has always come out of years of musical history.
As much as John was proud to make the melodies that no one could resist, it’s impossible to listen to some of those first records and not hear echoes of the pieces that he practised when he first started learning classical music as a kid. But once rock and roll started to come alive a bit more, John would have given anything to sound like some of the heroes that he was listening to whenever the radio came on.
He was already transfixed the minute he laid eyes on Elvis Presley for the first time, and while that was one of the few musicians that he and his mother could agree on, it was only a matter of time before he started working on new music. After all, the 1960s were the age of the British invasion, and The Beatles were bound to leave an imprint on virtually everyone who listened to them when tunes like ‘She Loves You’ came out.
And while John did come to know many of The Beatles as friends as much as heroes, it was more about the adventurousness in their music that drew him in the first time. No one had been taking chances like they did when making Sgt Peppers or The White Album, and even if not every one of them panned out the way they thought they would, the fact that they made it to the top of the charts practically gave John and Bernie Taupin permission to go in whatever direction they wanted to when making their own masterpieces.
But even with the other British staples of rock and roll like The Rolling Stones and even Led Zeppelin later down the line, something more interesting was going on across the pond. There had been artists who served as brilliant answers to the Fab Four, like The Byrds, but whenever The Beach Boys came out with a new song, John was spellbound by anything that Brian Wilson got his hands on.
Despite being known as the endless summer band that sang about driving cars and surfing all day long, John was more focused on the harmonic structure of the tunes. Wilson was a genius before he reached his 30s, and when working on records like Pet Sounds, he showed everyone the joy that music can bring to everyone when making ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’. And for John, this was the kind of education that he had longed for ever since leaving school.
While John was able to hang out with Wilson on a few occasions, he was also the first to say that he was shaking when he first met his hero, saying, “He was the one who influenced me more than anybody else when it came to writing songs on the piano and it was an evening we would never forget, meeting someone who was a true genius — doesn’t happen very often.” But Wilson’s inspiration on John is a little bit more subtle than you would think.
John was never going to throw in those typical Beach Boys harmonies layered on top of each other, but when listening to the way that his songs change key and have a fluid structure to them, it’s like a strange combination of Presley’s brand of rock and roll, Beatles chords, Beethoven levels of sophistication, and the kind of ethereal beauty of ‘Good Vibrations’ all rolled up into one.
And while it’s a shame that we will never again hear his signature harmonies on record, John is one of the many who have the power to carry on what Wilson did for music. Because even if the lyrics don’t age the greatest from one year to the next, no one was ever going to forget how those songs made them feel back in the day.
