“You Don’t Just Stick It Together”: The Beach Boys and the Beatles in the Mid-1960s

ABSTRACT

Paul McCartney’s admiration for the work of Brian Wilson is well known, and the inspiration he took from Wilson’s Pet Sounds (1966) during the period of Sgt Pepper(1966–67) has been often noted. What has hitherto gone unremarked is that some of the most striking features of McCartney’s work already on Revolver (1966) can likewise be traced to Wilson’s mid-decade project of musical experimentation, beginning with the single “The Little Girl I Once Knew” (1965). In four case studies, this article explores how McCartney “nicked” ideas from Wilson and made them his own.

KEYWORDS:

• Allusion
• musical borrowing
• emulation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As the North American subsidiary of EMI, on whose Parlophone label the Beatles recorded, Capitol had the right of first refusal to release the band’s records in the United States. Having little confidence that a British band could be successful with American audiences, Capitol originally chose not to exercise its option, thus leaving the field open to Vee-Jay. Only later, with Beatlemania at full throttle in Britain and showing no signs of slowing down, did the company rethink this position and assert its rights. Thereafter and until May 1966 for singles and June 1967 for albums, Capitol packaged and repackaged the Beatles’ original EMI recordings so as to maximize the number of different products it could release into the marketplace (see “Beatles Discography, 1962–1970”).

2. The Beatles were soon joined, of course, by many other British groups, including the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. During 1964–1965 British acts occupied the number-1 position in the United States for no fewer that 52 weeks (MacDonald, 101 n).

3. The Wilsons’ neighborhood friend David Marks also performed with the group for a short time before dropping out in 1963. In 1965 Bruce Johnston joined the group, initially to fill in for Brian Wilson in concert performances after the latter stepped back from touring in order to focus on composing and studio production.

4. Release dates given here for the Beatles’ and the Beach Boys’ recordings are for the British and North American markets, respectively.

5. Well before their intercontinental rivalry with the Beatles began, the Beach Boys had been engaged in a cross-continental rivalry of still another sort with the Four Seasons. Thus “Surfers Rule,” from the 1963 LP Surfer Girl, which ostensibly deals with Southern Californian turf wars between surfers and greasers, closes with a lyric that throws down the gantlet to the band’s East Coast rivals – ”Four Seasons, you better believe it, Surfers rule” – as Brian Wilson’s voice soars upward in an allusion to the vocal hook of “Walk Like a Man,” a number-1 hit for the Four Seasons earlier in the year. The emergence of the Beatles in the U.S. market in 1964 would, of course, remake the terms of engagement for all.

6. All but one of five albums the Beatles released before Rubber Soul, but none released thereafter, included cover songs.

7. All the earlier Capitol releases of the band’s albums had included one song also released separately as a single (a “double-dipping” practice that the Beatles typically eschewed). For a still useful study of the American version of Rubber Soul, which implicitly argues that the album is unified through its frequent departure from many of the conventions of the rock-and-roll tradition and through its many flavorings derived from folk and country music, see O’Grady.

8. It seems likely that Wilson was reacting to Capitol’s version, but his response to the British version would have been no different.

9. The parallels to the Beatles’ first visit to New York are uncanny. Both bands arrived on the opposite side of the pond with the wind of their first number-1 single there at their backs and were greeted at the airport by a horde of adoring fans. And both were the subjects of short films documenting their visits – the Maysles Brothers’ What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA and Peter Whitehead’s The Beach Boys in London.

10. The literature on Smile is substantial. Among important recent studies are Priore; Lambert, Inside 253–87; Flory 2016.

11. For a recent relevant discussion of some of the issues discussed here, see Harvey.

12. A promotional film to accompany “A Day in the Life,” produced from footage shot at this orchestral session, is available in the Beatles’ CD/Blu-ray set 1 + .

13. In making this suggestion, I intend to supplement, not to replace, our well-grounded understanding of the aleatory passages in the track under consideration as a reflection of McCartney’s interest in London’s avant-garde musical scene.

14. These promo films are included in 1 + .

15. We may surmise that “The Little Girl I Once Knew” was a part of the discussion when, evidently at the NEMS Enterprises Christmas Party in December 1965, John enthused to Tony Rivers of the Castaways about “how great” the Beach Boys were (Badman, 135). NEMS (for North End Music Stores) was Brian Epstein’s management agency, which handled both the Beatles’ and Rivers’s business affairs. The envy Lennon expresses here of Wilson’s decision to cease performing on the road and to concentrate his efforts on songwriting and studio production must speak to Lennon’s own growing dissatisfaction with touring and be a sign of where he and his bandmates were heading. The Beatles undertook their final tour of Britain in December 1965, and after a difficult summer of concerts in Hamburg, Munich, Tokyo, Manila, and North America in 1966 they did, of course, quit touring altogether.

16. For more on the similarities between “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Got to Get You Into My Life,” see 1999, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver Through the Anthology 38–39.

17. Taking a position that differs from mine, Christopher Reynolds (private communication) has argued that there are, in fact, several subtle connections to be drawn between the two songs’ harmonic structures.

18. Johnston’s London schedule is reproduced in Leaf, 87. No indication of any party to be held in Johnston’s suite is given there, but it is certain to have taken place. This document, after all, may be reasonably taken as no more than a rough guide to what unfolded during the whirlwind and undoubtedly chaotic visit. It was probably on this occasion that Johnston told Lennon and McCartney that Mike Love had taken to calling Brian by the nickname Dog Ears.

19. This interview was accessed and transcribed on 30 March 2019. The passage presented here in italics is not presently available online. The opening and closing passages remain accessible on YouTube at “Paul McCartney’s Favourite Beach Boys Song” and “Paul McCartney on Performing with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson”.

20. As Christopher Reynolds has noted (private communication), the vocal canon in the outro of Lennon’s Revolver cut “She Said She Said” (recorded on 21 June 1966) may well also derive from the same source.

21. This same broadcast famously introduced the world to Wilson’s “Surf’s Up,” intended for Smile, played by the composer at the piano in his home in Los Angeles.

22. McCartney may be confusing this session with the final recording session for “Penny Lane,” whose compositional process was concluded in January 1967 following Paul’s similarly late decision, made after viewing a televised performance of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number 2, to overdub a piccolo trumpet solo. In this instance, there seems to be no question that McCartney dictated ideas for the solo to Martin, who put them into musical notation for the soloist, David Mason, to use in working them out in the studio (Lewisohn, Beatles Recording Sessions 93).

23. If there remains some question about who created the melody Civil played in his solo on “For No One,” that is not the case with “God Only Knows,” which was definitely composed by Wilson himself. Alan Robinson, the session player who performed it, recalls: “I remember the session. The reason I was on the date is that I was one of the few French horn players who could play without notes … . Brian came up to me and sang me the line. He seems to come up with it on the spot; whatever came into his brain was great. Absolutely a wonderful line, and I played it. Then, he suggested that I play it glissando. Otherwise, I could have made a clean slur. You can do a sweep on the French Horn, and get all the harmonic notes in between, maybe eight or nine tones between the five notes. I wish there was more of me on it” (Making of Pet Sounds 98).

24. Mike Love has frequently claimed credit for giving McCartney the idea of basing his bridge on the lyrical conceit of “California Girls” during the period when they were fellow meditation students of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh, India, in early 1968.

25. For Lydon's recollection of this interview, almost fifty years later, see his “How the Beatles Got to Me and How I Got to the Beatles.”

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck is Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. His research is focused on Central European music and musical culture of the long nineteenth century and Anglophone popular music of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Recent publications include “Politics and Religion,” in Brahms in Context (Cambridge, 2019); “Heimat is Where the Heart Is; or, How Hungarian Was Goldmark” (Austrian History Yearbook, 2017), and Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (Oxford, 2014), winner of the ASCAP Foundation’s Virgil Thomson Award for the Outstanding Book in the Field of Music Criticism. He is currently working on a book concerned with Brahms and German national sentiment.