Who came first: The Beatles or The Beach Boys?
The Beatles and The Beach Boys are two bands that defined pop and rock music in the 1960s perhaps more than anyone else. Fans of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Aretha Franklin, and others might object to that statement with good reason, but none of these acts produced a body of work that spanned the entire decade and transformed quite so dramatically with the times.
Yes, Dylan plugged his instruments in from 1965 and hopped from genre to genre throughout the second half of the ‘60s. But he was very much ploughing his own furrow while the Fab Four and California’s most famous rock and roll family moved with the cultural zeitgeist, very often leading from the front. In their early years, they competed for chart success on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time as spearheading the British invasion and the rise of surf music. Subsequently, they developed an artistic rivalry that revolutionised popular music, advancing the nascent genres of psychedelic and folk rock and giving rise to a litany of other phenomena, from symphonic pop and concept albums to prog and hard rock.
Members of the two bands have openly admitted their influence on each other over the years. At least two Beatles albums served as direct inspiration for Beach Boys records, and The Beach Boys’ music likewise had a big impact on Beatles songwriter Paul McCartney in particular. “It’s a mutual admiration thing,” Beach Boys singer Mike Love told The Dan Patrick Show in 2017. “We loved their music and they loved ours. We were competitive.”
The Beatles’ sixth studio album, Rubber Soul, famously inspired Brian Wilson to make his masterpiece Pet Sounds, which in turn pushed The Beatles to create Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wilson later claimed that it was first hearing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on the radio that caused him to give up on his SMiLE project.
For around eight years, the careers of the two groups ran in parallel, with each releasing roughly the same number of albums and singles during that period. The Beatles’ break-up in 1970 then closed the book on the creative rivalry.
The Beatles had actually been around for longer at that point, having begun touring as a band in the summer of 1960. The Beach Boys weren’t recognised as a fully functioning band until the following year. However, the timeline of both bands’ formation is somewhat murky.
So, which band entered the charts first?
The Beach Boys had actually been rehearsing in the garage of the Wilson family’s home with their final lineup since that same summer, immediately after Brian’s graduation from high school. They were even playing their own original songs. By the same token, though, we could say that The Beatles began in 1958 when George Harrison joined John Lennon and Paul McCartney in Lennon’s high school band, The Quarrymen.
One clear-cut measure of who came first is looking at the release date of each band’s first record to enter the charts. By this measure, there can only be one winner.
Whereas The Beatles spent two years touring Britain alongside residencies in Hamburg, Germany, before signing their first record deal in 1962, The Beach Boys didn’t perform live until long after their first record was released. ‘Surfin’’, a joint composition by Wilson and Love, was put out by Candix Records in November 1961. It became a major hit locally after receiving considerable radio play in California and even reached number 75 in the US singles chart in early 1962.
The band’s follow-up single ‘Surfin’ Safari’ became their first national success in June 1962. The song features in the George Lucas film American Graffiti, which was the director’s love letter to his own teenage years in pre-Beatles California. This reference to the arrival of The Beach Boys on the eve of Beatlemania is an indication that the American group preceded their British rivals at least in terms of entering public consciousness in the early ‘60s.
Although it’s true that Beatlemania didn’t reach the shores of North America until 18 months after the release of their first single in the UK, ‘Love Me Do’, that record still came out three months after ‘Surfin’ Safari’. The Beatles might have been a band before The Beach Boys, but The Beach Boys were a recording artist before The Beatles. In any case, both of them threw down the gauntlet for everyone else who came after them as the ‘60s unfolded.
