It’s no secret that The Beatles and The Beach Boys had a friendly rivalry. When The Beatles initially brought Beatlemania to the US, many bands couldn’t keep up with the hype. One of the few who could was The Beach Boys, so a rivalry would always emerge.
The band’s avant-garde material was always pipped against one another, and some comparisons were more justified than others. Often, comparisons were a direct result of the rivalry between the bands and the public’s need to put their work against each other. However, there are other instances where one band’s work directly influences the others. This was the case with two Beatles albums, both of which inspired the sound of Beach Boys records.
The first is one of the most unusual songs from the White Album, which went on to have an impact on the soundtrack for the Beach Boys movie, ‘Love & Mercy’. The movie is a biopic about Brian Wilson, which deals with his love life and mental health. The film is unconventional, only outshone by the unusual soundtrack. It comprises snippets of Beach Boys songs placed over haunting music.
Bill Pohlad, the movie’s director, spoke about working with Wilson. “Part of Brian is the challenges,” he said, “I mean, one of the first things I think [his wife] Melinda said when I first started to get to know them both a little better was this notion that Brian hears these amazing orchestrations and harmonies and arrangements in his head that are so complex, nobody else can understand them until he actually executes them.”
Pohlad turned to the Beatles to make working with Brian and these complexities more straightforward. “I thought of ‘Revolution 9’ on The Beatles White Album,” he said, “I was like, ‘We should do something like that.’” He discussed his idea with the movie composer Atticus Ross, and they used some of Wilson’s original tapes and cut them together to execute the Beatle’s Beatles-inspired idea.
The Beatles also influenced the Beach Boys Smiley Smile. The record has a complicated past, as the band wanted to get more experimental with things after the triumphant Pet Sounds but lost what people identified with in the process. The album was originally going to be called Smile, but Capitol Records took issue with the project, and with Brian Wilson’s undiagnosed schizophrenia also providing a hurdle, the original album was never released, and what we have access to today is a simplified version.
The two significant factors that led to a convoluted album that would never be released were Wilson trying to do something ahead of its time and The Beatles song ‘She’s Leaving Home’. “Unfortunately, Smile was too ahead of its time – by 35 years. I enjoyed the way that Van Dyke Parks wrote the lyrics symbolically, and I never asked him what the words meant.”
‘She’s Leaving Home’ from the album Sgt Pepper was always going to be a big song for Wilson. He heard it before its release one day when Paul McCartney visited his home. Paul played it on the piano, and the track touched a nerve, “we both just cried. It was beautiful.”
The Beatles and The Beach Boys are examples of a healthy rivalry that more bands could do to have. The two egged each other on to create their best work and arguably helped each other go further in their respective careers than they would have otherwise. This is seen in how the Beach Boys were inspired by Revolver and Sgt Pepper, the by-products of which no doubt went on to influence future Beatles songs directly and indirectly.
