The two bands Brian Wilson called “the greatest music guys”
It’s impossible to overstate the kind of influence that Brian Wilson has had on the world every single time he made a record.
The Beach Boys weren’t known to be the coolest band in the world, and there were more than a few times where they looked like preppy kids compared to their contemporaries, but Wilson was the one who kept everything rooted in some of the finest harmonies anyone had ever sung. But he felt that he could only get that inspiration from going after the same kinds of melodies that some of his heroes were going after when they were kids.
After all, some of the greatest tunes that Wilson ever wrote were already facsimiles of what other rock and roll stars were doing. ‘Surfin’ USA’ was just a Chuck Berry song with different lyrics and Four Freshmen vocals over the top of it, but that could certainly get the job done well enough at the time. Wilson was looking to give people the California experience, no matter where they were in the world, but there was something a lot different happening on the other side of the pond.
When compared to The Beach Boys, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were making rock and roll sound interesting again. If you listen to the age before the British invasion properly started, a lot of the biggest names in rock, alongside Wilson, were people like Fabian, but when everyone got their first look at what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were doing on The Ed Sullivan Show, there wasn’t a single member of the audience who didn’t fall in love with everything they heard.
These bands were on the rise, and Wilson was more than a little bit pissed. He knew that there had to be someone else out there who could write as well as he did, but once The Beatles came out with Rubber Soul, he wanted to do anything he could to try and top it. Pet Sounds did kick everyone’s ass when they heard Wilson’s new tunes, but even if The Beatles and the Stones lasted longer, a lot of that resentment started to fade over time.
For one thing, Wilson could admit that The Beatles had taken rock and roll further than he ever could on a song like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and while the Stones had a nastier edge to them, he always came back to songs like ‘Connection’ because of how memorable they were. And despite having his own issues with his original compositions, he could admit that both bands had the best songwriters that the charts had ever seen.
There were bound to be new artists like Elton John that wowed him every now and again, but a special place in Wilson’s heart was carved out for his British counterparts, saying, “I love that R&B influence [they had]. Oh, my God, yeah. I think John and Paul, and Mick and Keith, too, are probably among the greatest music guys of all time. And Mick and Keith wrote great singles.”
It’s a lot easier to see the R&B influence in the Stones since they were already a blues band, but there was a bit more nuance to how the Fab Four borrowed from the world of soul. They weren’t going to be able to sing like Ray Charles or anything, but when it came to their arrangements, songs like ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ and ‘You Won’t See Me’ were the kind of tunes that could have come directly out of Motown.
And despite Wilson definitely belonging in the same category as artists like that, he never wanted to compare his music to what they did. He was only put on this earth to make people smile with his music, and he was going to celebrate anyone who could write songs that could get him as emotional as his own songs did.
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