Rock Music Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rrms20

“You Don’t Just Stick It Together”: The Beach Boys and

the Beatles in the Mid-1960s

David Brodbeck

To cite this article: David Brodbeck (2021) “You Don’t Just Stick It Together”: The
Beach Boys and the Beatles in the Mid-1960s, Rock Music Studies, 8:3, 244-263, DOI:
10.1080/19401159.2021.1983993

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2021.1983993

Published online: 13 Oct 2021.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 891

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrms20
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES
2021, VOL. 8, NO. 3, 244–263
https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2021.1983993

ARTICLE

“You Don’t Just Stick It Together”: The Beach Boys and the
Beatles in the Mid-1960s
David Brodbeck
Department of Music, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Paul McCartney’s admiration for the work of Brian Wilson is well Allusion; musical borrowing;
known, and the inspiration he took from Wilson’s Pet Sounds (1966) emulation
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.

REPORTER: What’s your favorite group in the U.S.?

JOHN: Favorite one?
REPORTER: Group in the United States?
JOHN: I’ve got a few, you know. Byrds, Spoonful, Mamas and Papas, I suppose . . .
PAUL (interrupting): Beach Boys.
JOHN (continuing): . . . on that side of it,
PAUL (again interrupting): Beach Boys.
JOHN: . . . and the Miracles, etc., on the other side of it.
“‘Revolver’ Press Conference” video, 24 August 1966

On 1 October 1964, eight months to the day after the Beatles topped the U.S. pop charts
for the first time with their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Vee-Jay Records, a small
black-owned independent label from Chicago, released a double album entitled The
Beatles vs. the Four Seasons. The set comprised reissues of the albums Introducing the
Beatles (Vee-Jay’s slightly abridged version of Please Please Me, the band’s first British
LP) and The Golden Hits of the Four Seasons, containing three chart toppers and a
number of other songs that had scored in the Billboard top twenty during the previous
two years. Both groups had played important roles in Vee-Jay’s attempt to break into the
mainstream pop-rock market, and by repackaging their albums in this way the company

CONTACT David Brodbeck [email protected] Department of Music, University of California, Irvine 92697
USA
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 245

sought to capitalize on their popularity for a final time before its rights to each expired
and were taken over by more powerful major labels (Capitol Records and Philips
Records, respectively).1 The album sleeve heralded “The International Battle of the
Century,” promised that both bands would deliver “their greatest vocal punches,” and
encouraged the listener to “be the judge and jury!” By pairing the two groups – one from
Liverpool, England, the other from Newark, New Jersey – Vee-Jay cleverly dramatized
1964’s British Invasion of the U.S. pop charts, which saw not only the Beatles but a host of
other bands from the UK suddenly threaten the traditional dominance of homegrown
musical acts.2
Yet it was not a vocal group from the East Coast but another from the West Coast that
proved to be the Beatles’ strongest and most durable challengers in the United States. The
Beach Boys offered a youthful male vision of a postwar California Dream filled with
surfing, hot rods, and pretty girls in bikinis. Comprising brothers Brian, Carl, and Dennis
Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and Brian’s high school friend Al Jardine, the band
emerged from Southern California in 1962, soon broke out nationally after signing a
record deal with Capitol, and by the end of 1963 could claim several Top 10 hits.3 The
following year brought no letup in the band’s growing success. On 3 February 1964, came
a new single, “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Although released just days before the Beatles’ much-
trumpeted arrival in New York for their first visit to the United States, this high-energy
rocker in the band’s familiar Chuck Berry style received significant radio airplay. During
the week ending on March 21, “Fun, Fun, Fun” rose to number 5 on the Billboard chart.
Yet, significantly, it was prevented from rising any higher because the first three slots
were occupied by the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please
Please Me,” and the fourth by the Four Seasons’ “Dawn.” Two weeks later, the Beatles
held the top five slots on the chart to themselves and another five slots on the rest of the
Billboard Hot 100.
In the face of the Beatles’ spectacular breakthrough in the United States, the Beach
Boys could not be blamed for wondering how long their ride might last. Nevertheless, the
band more than held their own through this first wave of Beatlemania, even if Brian
Wilson, the band’s bass-playing producer, primary songwriter, and undisputed creative
leader, recognized he had met his match. As Brian later remembered: “In 1964 and 1965 I
knew it was up to me to keep the Beach Boys competitive. Each time the Beatles released a
record, it inspired me to try something new” (Wilson, “Forward” 2). Wilson’s response to
the competition suddenly posed by the Beatles was not, as Philip Lambert has observed,
“to absorb aspects of the Liverpool sound into his own work,” but rather to “follow a
trajectory [in his songwriting and production techniques] that had already begun before
the British invasion, now accelerated and more focused” (Lambert, “Brian” 11).
A significant commercial milestone was reached in July 1964. Not only did “I Get
Around” become the Beach Boys’ first number-1 hit at home; it also did well in Britain,
where, after being plugged by the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger in an appearance on the
television program Ready, Steady, Go!, it peaked at number 7 (Badman, 55–56).
Combining a musical setting full of quirky chord changes and rhythmic shifts in support
of the group’s signature Four Freshmen-like vocal harmonies and Brian Wilson's soaring
descant falsetto, this record was bound to attract the notice of the Beatles, particularly
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were always on the lookout for distinctive
material found in American popular music that they could make their own. We know
246 D. BRODBECK

McCartney became a fan of this record. “I Get Around” was one of several songs he
included on a private home recording made at Christmas 1965 in which he pretended to
be a disc jockey working the “St. Paul’s School Dance,” introducing several of his favorite
records of the time (Unterberger, 138; “Listen” video). And we may well hear echoes of its
distinctive beginning (00:00–00:07) in the four-bar a cappella introduction of
McCartney’s “Paperback Writer” (00:00–00:06), recorded on April 13–14, 1966, during
a period in which, as we shall see, Paul was keenly tuned in to the Beach Boys’ music.
Meanwhile, in what was an uncharacteristic, one-off instance, Brian Wilson used the
Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” released as a single in the United States on 19 April 1965, as a
point of departure for “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” recorded a scant eleven days later (Wilson,
“Forward” 2). First released in July 1965 on the album Summer Days (And Summer
Nights!!), and reissued at the end of the year as the B-side of the “Barbara Ann” single,
“Girl Don’t Tell Me” can fairly be described as a direct imitation, in that it more or less
duplicates a number of features immediately recognizable from “Ticket to Ride.” As
Lambert has noted, the six-note repeating melodic figure played on the celeste in “Girl
Don’t Tell Me” (00:00–00:07) is reminiscent of the guitar riff heard first in the intro of
“Ticket to Ride” (00:00–00:07) and then throughout the verses that follow. Both begin on
the tonic, A, and, as they continue, emphasize the notes A, E, B, and C♯. The similarity
between the two recordings is especially clear in the strikingly similar vocal delivery
heard in their choruses on the notes F♯–E–C♯: “She’s got a ticket to ri–i – ide” (0:27–0:30)
and “Girl, don’t tell me you’ll wri–i – ite” (1:05–1:08) (Lambert, Inside 208–09).
From these tentative beginnings grew a friendly rivalry between the two bands, mostly
centered on Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney (who to this day remain friends and
mutual admirers). This rivalry was at its peak in the period from late 1965 through the
middle of 1967, a decisive period in the careers of both bands. From the Beatles came the
albums Rubber Soul (3 December 1965), Revolver (5 August 1966), and Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band (1 June 1967), together with the singles “We Can Work It Out”/
“Day Tripper” (3 December 1965), “Paperback Writer”/“Rain” (10 June 1966), and
“Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever” (17 February 1967). From the Beach Boys
came the single “The Little Girl I Once Knew”/“There’s No Other Like My Baby” (22
November 1965), the album Pet Sounds (16 May 1966), the single “Good Vibrations”/
“Let’s Go Away for Awhile” (10 October 1966), and upwards of thirty tracks recorded in
connection with the album Smile (3 August 1966–18 May 1967), which after several
months of recording Wilson famously abandoned unfinished, and from which at first
only a scaled-down version of the song “Heroes and Villains” was salvaged for release as a
single (24 July 1967).4 The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, described these many
projects as “battles in a war, . . . a curious transatlantic slugging match, a rivalry con­
ducted by means of song writing and recording genius” (49). Unlike Vee-Jay’s contrived
“International Battle of the Century” between the Beatles and the Four Seasons, this
rivalry was quite intentional and grew into a spirited game of stylistic one-upmanship,
resulting in a notable expansion in the range of options available in rock composition.5
What issues were at stake in this war? And to what kinds of compositional derivations
did they give rise? The relationships seem to fall into two broad categories. The first we
might call aspirational, a raising of the stakes, particularly with respect to the album
format; the second has to do with meaningful connections that can be drawn between
individual tracks. With regard to the former, the Beatles took the first step. Whereas most
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 247

albums by pop-rock groups previously had featured one or two hits joined by filler of
lesser quality, Rubber Soul consisted entirely of original songs of the highest quality.6 Not
only that, it was the first pop-rock album conceived more broadly than as a simple
collection of unrelated songs. Allan Kozinn has described it as a kind of song cycle, one
lacking overt musical interconnections, to be sure, but unified by the way in which every
song deals from its own point of view with the theme of love (129–30). That the version
of the album sold in the United States included no cut already released as a single, and,
indeed, that Capitol had deliberately constructed it to emphasize a sensibility that was in
keeping with an emerging market for folk-rock, only enhanced the impression that it was
a unified set.7 In both its versions, Rubber Soul was a landmark, and it hastened the day
when rock musicians chose the album format, previously associated almost exclusively
with such adult genres as Broadway musicals, sophisticated pop songs, jazz, and classical
music, for use in making their artistic mark. In Martin’s words, Rubber Soul presented “a
new, growing Beatles to the world. For the first time, we began to think of albums as art
on their own, as complete entities” (quoted in Lewisohn, Beatles Recording Sessions 69).
This new approach was not lost on Wilson. He had already given up touring as a
pop performer in order to realize his burgeoning ambitions as a pop phonographer à la
Phil Spector by working out his new songs in the studio with the “Wrecking Crew,” the
noted band of session players who also played on Spector’s dates (Curnutt, 10;
Hartman). Both The Beach Boys Today and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)
(March and July 1965, respectively) represented large steps in this direction. As
indicated in its liner notes, the former featured on its A and B sides, respectively, “a
program of big Beach-Boy favorites . . . and some great new Brian Wilson songs”; the
back cover of the latter includes mention, in a note by Carl Wilson, that “we haven’t
wandered too far from our regular vocal sound but we’ve experimented with the
instrumental tracks.” But even these efforts included some degree of filler (e.g. “Bull
Session with ‘Big Daddy’” and “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man,” respectively). By contrast,
Rubber Soul, as Brian enthused, was “a whole album with all good stuff” and a
“complete statement,” to boot (White, 251–52).8 In March 1966, well into the midst
of the Pet Sounds sessions, he reported that he had spent “five months [already]
working on [the] new album,” adding, “I give a lot of credit, a lot of it, for everybody’s
success, to the Beatles. They’ve had a tremendous, universal influence. That Rubber
Soul album was a great new contribution. It helped them reach a new plateau” (Brian
Wilson, quoted in Grevatt, 3, which is quoted in 2001, Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry
Men to Rubber Soul 276).
With Pet Sounds the competitive Wilson was clearly fixed on the idea of achieving
something similar. Most of the songs grew from what he called “feels” – ‘‘musical ideas,
riffs, bridges, fragments of themes, a phrase here or there” – which he conceived at home
and then, working in the studio, developed into larger, multipartite wholes (Lambert,
Inside 222). The melody and words often were conceived only later, back home and in
collaboration with lyricist Tony Asher. Musically, the set is rounded off with carefully
calculated gestures. The opening song, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” begins with broken chords
played by the twelve-string guitar that, when punctuated by a single drumbeat, sets the
cycle going. The final song, the haunting “Caroline, No,” fades out at the end and is
immediately followed by the sound of barking dogs and a passing train. Together Wilson
and Asher created a modern-day song cycle that shows a narrative thread that is lacking
248 D. BRODBECK

in Rubber Soul. In Timothy White‘s view, the set revolves around the theme of “a young
man growing into manhood, falling in love and out again; chasing the wrong partners
and disappointing the right ones; longing for an ideal relationship and forsaking the
worth of the flawed ones, all the while on a forlorn, almost picaresque quest for the
reasons behind his emotional restlessness” (254).
The direction Brian Wilson was now charting for the band made Capitol ner­
vous, and the label only reluctantly released a double A-side single consisting of two
Pet Sounds tracks, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows,” on 18 July 1966.
Before the end of the month, the company had released a Best of the Beach Boys
collection, reinforcing the old “sun, speed, and sex” image and undercutting the
sales potential of the new album. The popular success of Pet Sounds in the United
States, therefore, was comparatively modest; the album peaked at number 10 in the
first week of July 1966.
By contrast, in Britain, where Pet Sounds was championed by rock’s cognoscenti, the
record made an enormous impact. Released there on 27 June 1966, it quickly rose to
number 2 on the Record Retailer chart and proved to be one of the year’s best-selling
albums (Badman, 139). On November 6 “Good Vibrations” hit number 1 on Radio
London’s Fab Forty. That same day the band, traveling without Brian Wilson, who
remained at home in Los Angeles, hard at work in the studio, arrived in London for
their first ever shows in the UK. There they were greeted with an enthusiasm that
recalled the days of Beatlemania in the States, and by the end of the year the band had
famously toppled the Beatles as the most popular group in the world, at least as
measured in a year-end poll by the readers of Britain’s New Musical Express.9 It is
not surprising, therefore, that Pet Sounds was very much on the Beatles’ minds as they
worked on Sgt. Pepper in sessions running from November 1966 through April 1967.
Indeed, as George Martin has written, “[w]ithout Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have
happened. Revolver was the beginning of the whole thing. But Pepper was an attempt to
equal Pet Sounds” (Making of Pet Sounds 120).
During the same long period that yielded Sgt. Pepper, Wilson was engaged in impor­
tant, if ill-fated, new work of his own: a “teenage symphony to God” originally entitled
Dumb Angel but eventually renamed Smile.10 The recording sessions for this project
began in August 1966, shortly after the release of the Beatles’ Revolver, an album whose
“blend of musical variety and stunningly effective use of studio wizardry impelled Brian
to go all out” (Rodriguez, 185). As Wilson later recalled the moment: “Each Beatles album
sounded different. The way I saw it, we were in a race, a production race” (“Music Is
God’s Voice”).
Lennon and McCartney saw things in the same way. Van Dyke Parks, Wilson’s lyricist
for Smile, remembers that in August 1966 the two Beatles visited him and Wilson in the
studio as they worked on their ambitious new project. (This visit must have taken place
during the band’s three-day stay in Los Angeles on August 26–28 as their final North
American tour was coming to a close.) “What Lennon and McCartney heard,” as Parks
later recalled, “were the Smile master tapes unmixed”; he goes on to claim that Sgt. Pepper
came about as a “direct result” of what Lennon and McCartney had listened to that day
(Zolten, 30–31). This is something of an overstatement, to be sure. Work on Smile had
not yet proceeded very far; the only music related to the project by the time of this studio
visit was the first versions of “Wind Chimes” and “Wonderful” (recorded on August 3
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 249

and August 25, respectively) and an edit of “Good Vibrations” that Wilson had prepared
on August 24, using bits and pieces recorded in numerous sessions over several months
beginning on February 18 (Beach Boys Smile Sessions). Still, the impact on the two British
rivals of what they heard during this encounter, whatever it may have been, must have
been enormous, and all parties now knew that the stakes had increased even beyond what
had been already wagered in Pet Sounds and Revolver. Indeed, taken together Pepper and
Smile bring to mind the Space Race in which the United States and the Soviet Union were
engaged during the same years, with the goal being, not to be first to land a man on the
moon (and so to demonstrate to the world whose political and economic system was
superior), but to be the first to release the “grand psychedelic statement,” to demonstrate
definitively that “rock ‘n’ roll was now Rock with a capital R, to be taken [as] seriously as
Art with a capital A” (MacLeod, 30).11
In May 1967, Wilson finally gave up on his magnum opus altogether, worn down after
several months of intense studio work by internal resistance from within the band and his
own mental illness. He was probably also discouraged by the news, conveyed firsthand by
McCartney during a second studio visit, in April of that year, to observe him at work on
the Smile track “Vega-Tables,” that the Beatles had just completed recording all the tracks
for Sgt. Pepper and thus had already won the race (Howlett; Badman, 180–81). “However
good Smile might turn out to be,” Jules Siegel would write in a profile of Brian at work on
his “teenage symphony” published in October 1967, “it seemed somehow that once more
the Beatles had outdistanced the Beach Boys” (97).
But there are other ways to look at the matter. At the beginning of his piece Siegel
describes the recording session for the Smile track “Fire,” which took place in the Gold
Star Studios in Hollywood on 28 November 1966 (Badman, 163). Brian, in a character­
istically hip creative gesture, ordered fireman’s hats for all the musicians and everyone
else in the studio to wear as a means of setting the proper mood for the chaotic aural
conflagration he intended to create that evening. Playing a central role here are the
wailing string glissandi performed by the two violinists, two violists, and two cellists hired
for the session; these gestures, evidently borrowed from the musical avant-garde, produce
a sonic world that is about as far removed from that of pop-rock music of the mid-1960s
as can be imagined.
The events that took place in Abbey Road’s large Studio One two and a half months
later, on 10 February 1967, suggest that word of this strange recording date might
already have reached the Beatles in London. Producer George Martin and the forty
orchestral musicians booked that evening to record the two massive crescendo passages
for “A Day in the Life” were asked to attend in formal dress; many, upon arrival, were
given comic novelties such as a red clown’s nose, a gorilla paw, and other costume
items to wear while they worked on the track (Lewisohn, Beatles Recording Sessions 98–
99; Howlett).12 In place of the seemingly random up and down glissandi heard in
“Fire,” we have here instead an inexorable aural sweep upward, in which all the
musicians move gradually and independently from their lowest to their highest E
note. But in light of the parallels between the two sessions in both costume dress and
musical experimentation, Brian may be credited with being out in front in this
particularly psychedelic leg of the race.13
250 D. BRODBECK

No less remarkable in this regard is a short bipartite Smile cut recorded on 29

November 1966, the day after the “Fire” session. Here an instrumental take on Tony
Bennett’s mellow, jazz-styled “I Wanna Be Around” quickly gives way to a section
entitled “Workshop,” whose “instruments” include an electric power drill, hammer,
and handsaw. Wilson supposedly envisioned “Workshop” as a depiction of the
building reconstruction required following the previous night’s “fire” (Badman,
163–65). However that may be, it seems plausible that he came upon the idea by
remembering something he had seen in the third of the three promotional films the
Beatles had made for “Day Tripper” on 23 November 1965 (Lewisohn, Complete
Beatles Chronicle 206–08).14 In this film, Ringo Starr is shown in the verses shaking
a tambourine (not always on cue) or using his drumsticks to perform on an
imaginary drum kit. This is comical but projects some semblance at least of musical
verisimilitude. Not so what we see during the bridge and outro, when Ringo takes
hold of a handsaw and proceeds to cut into the stage set. In the Beatles’ mimed
performance, of course, the tool is merely a prop. In the Smile cut, by contrast,
Wilson takes the visual cue Ringo provides and runs with it by featuring a host of
workshop noises in his recording. If this is not exactly outdistancing Lennon and
McCartney (whose track in question, after all, has nothing to do with the sounds
made by hand tools), it at least suggests how Wilson’s attentiveness to everything
the Beatles produced, including even in the promo films, produce in his hands
remarkable and unpredictable results.
These last two examples lead us to the second of our two categories of competition
between the bands, the one having to do with the origin of especially notable musical
ideas in individual tracks. Here it becomes apparent that the Beatles borrowed more
liberally from Wilson than the other way around. Indeed, when McCartney acknowl­
edged that Pet Sounds was “the single biggest influence on Sgt. Pepper,” adding, “I think
Brian Wilson was a great genius,” he was referring, not to the idea of realizing an album
with “all good stuff,” to recall Wilson’s own admiring comment about Rubber Soul, but to
substantive, in-the-song musical ideas (Making of Sgt. Pepper video at 30:58–31:08;
Beatles, Beatles Anthology 253).
We begin, however, not with Pet Sounds, but with the Beach Boys’ single “The Little
Girl I Once Knew,” recorded in the fall of 1965 at the outset of the sessions that led to the
new album. This striking record, an experimental track that already shows signs of things
to come, was notably less popular in the United States than in Britain. It peaked at
number 20 at home, but on Radio London’s Fab Forty chart it held the number-2 slot for
the first week of January 1966, two slots higher than the Beatles’ double-A side single “We
Can Work It Out”/“Day Tripper,” whose peak at number 1 had occurred a few weeks
earlier. The record clearly also made a big impression on Lennon and McCartney. Here,
for example, is Lennon’s reaction to it, as reported in the British musical weekly Melody
Maker on 11 December 1965:

This is the greatest! . . . . It’s fantastic . . . . It’s all Brian Wilson. He just uses the voices as
instruments. He never tours or does anything. He just sits at home thinking up fantastic
arrangements out of his head. Doesn’t even read music. You keep waiting for the fabulous
breaks. Great arrangement. It goes on and on with all different things. (John Lennon, quoted
in 2001, Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul 276)
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 251

When Lennon speaks of how the song goes “on and on with all different things,” he is
making a general observation about what is, in fact, a complex musical form. Example 1
provides a transcription of the first fifty seconds or so. This shows the tonally ambiguous
introduction, followed by the first of two rotations through the verse (evidently in F♯
minor and then C♯ minor) and chorus (in strongly articulated B major and then D
major). Following the second rotation of the verse and chorus, not shown in the example,
we hear the bridge and then two reworkings of the chorus sandwiched around a
repetition of the second half of the introduction.15
“The Little Girl I Once Knew” also left its mark on McCartney. This is seen most
clearly in McCartney’s take on what is surely the record’s most memorable feature, the
intentional use, in the passage inserted between verse and chorus, of what in broadcast
jargon is called “dead air.” These unusual passages may explain why the record did not do
as well on the U.S. charts as otherwise might have been expected for a new Beach Boys
track: Radio DJs were skittish about playing it. Here we have an interjection of spoken
text (“Look out, babe,” at the end of the first verse, seen in Example 1; and “Split, man,” at
the end of the second, not shown in the example) followed by an accented F♯ in the
vibraphone that quickly decays, leaving in its wake a grand pause of two bars. As Daniel
Harrison notes, these sections do not have the effect of a typical pre-chorus, of a short
section designed to generate momentum into the chorus that follows. On the contrary,
they recede in energy, bringing momentum to a halt. And only with the entrance of the
chorus, in what can finally be identified as the tonic B major, can we retrospectively
confirm in our ear F♯ as the song’s dominant (49–51).
A few months later McCartney considered using something very much like these
arresting instances of dead air in “Got to Get You Into My Life.” To be sure, there is no
way to suspect this from the driving, straight-ahead cut heard on Revolver, whose basic
track was recorded on 8 April 1966, near the beginning of the Revolver sessions. Four bars
of introduction on a tonic pedal lead to the 16-bar verse, the first eight bars of which are
set over the same tonic pedal (0:00–0:35). Work on the track continued sporadically over
the next few months. Added later, on May 18, were the closely miked trumpets and
saxophones that, from the very first bar, give this track its characteristic Motown-flavored
sound and feel. The final touch – Harrison’s lead guitar solo, played through a Leslie
speaker – was overdubbed on June 17, on the final day of recording for Revolver (1999,
The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver Through the Anthology 38–39).
But consider the opening twenty bars as heard in Paul’s original conception of the
song (The Beatles Anthology [CDs], volume, 2, disc 1 [0:00–0:38]). This rather minimalist
setting was recorded on April 7 and includes parts for organ, drum kit, bass, and acoustic
guitar. Particularly striking about this laid-back version of the track are the long stretches
in which the tonic pitch, G, played by the organ, is performed in a state of naked
exposure. This is first heard in the four-bar intro, which fades in from silence over the
first two bars and then, beginning in bar 3, incorporates Ringo’s hi-hat to establish a beat.
This G continues unabated through the first eight bars of the verse as a pedal point and
then returns alone for two bars at the end of the verse.
Now let us jump ahead to the six-bar chorus heard following the second verse. The
released version of the song is straightforward (1:03–1:14). We hear the words “got to get
you into my life” in the first two bars (over I–IV harmony), the brass continues without
Paul’s singing in the next two bars (moving IV to V), and the passage concludes by
252 D. BRODBECK

echoing the ending of the verse with two bars of tonic harmony. The chorus in the
original take sounds very different (01:08–01:27). Its first two bars are like those in the
released version, albeit with a jazzy rather than a Motown feel. But the third bar includes
some tossed-off text (“somehow, some way”) not retained in the end. Then, in the fourth
bar, following the downbeat arrival on V, the music suddenly goes silent.
All this rehearses the succession of elements in those two odd passages wedged
between the verse and chorus of “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” with its spoken warnings
(first “look out, babe” and then “split, man”), each followed by a single struck F♯ in the
vibraphone (the fifth scale-degree in the key of B major to come) that gives way to a grand
pause (0:30–0:35 and 01:04–01:11, respectively). Yet, unlike Wilson’s track, wherein the
chorus soon emerges in full driving force, McCartney holds all momentum in check. The
organ enters on its familiar tonic pitch G, but for a full eleven seconds that is all we hear,
with the exception, at the end, of the familiar tempo-defining hi-hat to reestablish the
beat. Those eleven seconds give us, in effect, the last two bars of the chorus and a
repetition of the four bars of the introduction. What McCartney has done here, to
borrow an idea from Leonard B. Meyer, is to “stretch” Wilson’s example of using dead
air for an expressive purpose by increasing the length of the grand pause to previously
unapproached dimensions (Meyer, 259). One can almost imagine McCartney thinking,
“So, Brian, you think you can work dead air into the artistic fabric; well, check out my
take on this!”
We can only speculate about McCartney’s decision to abandon his original concep­
tion of “Got to Get You Into My Life” and with that the strikingly long stretches of
silence. He may have judged it a step too far in the radical direction Wilson had
broached with his more modest use of dead air in “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”
Perhaps more likely, the change stemmed more from his ongoing rivalry with Lennon
than it did from his rivalry with Wilson. Compare the beginning of the original version
of “Got to Get You Into My Life” (0:00–0:25) with that of Lennon’s psychedelic
masterpiece “Tomorrow Never Knows,” whose basic track was recorded one day
earlier, on 6 April 1966, the first day of recording for Revolver (0:00–0:26). Both tracks
set out with a quiet drone (played on the organ and tambura, respectively) and
maintain a tonic pedal point as the harmony slides momentarily and somewhat
languidly down a whole step to flat-VII before sliding back to I. With its greatly
heightened level of activity, the final version of “Got to Get You Into My Life”
(0:00–0:21) maintains the basic connection with “Tomorrow Never Knows” while
distancing itself from the feel of Lennon’s trippy track. Given that both cuts were
intended for the same album, it stands to reason that McCartney would seek some
clear differentiation, even at the price of setting aside one of his most experimental
ideas to date.16
The same competitive urge is evident in McCartney’s response to Pet Sounds. Here,
again, the emphasis is on musical details – and on McCartney’s desire to surpass what
Wilson had already achieved. As he explains:

If you approach [Pet Sounds] from a writer’s point of view, it’s very cleverly written. The
harmonic structures are very, very clever. If you approach it from an arranger’s point of
view, the kind of instruments he’s got on there–a sort of an oscillator, a harpsichord–you
know he’s got some crazy stuff on there . . . . Because of the work they’d done, it didn’t seem
too much of a stretch for us to get further out than they’d gone.
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 253

Paul continues with a boyhood memory:

We always loved the Morton Fraser Harmonic Gang when we were kids. It was a TV thing.
A bloke would come on, and they would push him out of the way. But it was those giant big
bass harmonicas. [Paul imitates the honking sound of the instrument.] John used to play
harmonica, and so we always liked that. But when I heard them on Pet Sounds—there’s a lot
of harmonica, bass harmonica, he uses that. It’s the instruments he uses and the way he
places them against each other. It’s very cleverly done. It’s a really clever album. So, we were
inspired by [it], you know, and nicked a few ideas. (Making of Sgt. Pepper film at 31:36–33:20
passim)

McCartney’s abiding interest in Pet Sounds was sparked, for one thing, then, precisely by
the album’s many arresting sounds. McCartney specifies Wilson’s use of the Electro-
Theremin (he calls it an oscillator), harpsichord, and bass harmonica, but he might also
have included the English horn, French horn, bass flute, accordion, mandolin, banjo,
ukulele, temple blocks, and timpani, not to speak of bicycle horn, bicycle bell, and a large
plastic water jug. Moreover, as a bass guitarist McCartney was particularly attentive to
that dimension of the recording. Consider these remarks taken from an interview given
in 1990:

[One] thing that really made me sit up and take notice was the bass lines in Pet Sounds. If
you were in the key of C, you would normally use—the root note would be, like, a C on the
bass . . . . And you just get a completely different effect if you play a G when the band is
playing C. There's a kind of tension ... something special happens. And I noticed that
throughout . . . Brian would be using notes that weren’t the obvious note to use. As I say,
“the G if you’re in C”—that kind of thing. And also putting melodies in the bass line. That
was probably the big influence that set me thinking when we recorded Pepper. (Making of
Pet Sounds 123–24.)

In fact, as McCartney would have noticed, the same approach to writing for the bass can
be heard already in “The Little Girl I Once Knew.” As seen in Example 1, the eight-bar
introduction of this cut opens with a second-inversion chord (B/F♯), precisely the kind of
voicing that struck Paul as something of a revelation. The chorus, too, includes two
iterations of this second-inversion harmony, and it concludes with a combination of the
subdominant chord, E, set over F♯ in the bass, creating, in effect, a fat dominant (an
eleventh chord) of B.
There was something else about both “The Little Girl I Once Knew” and Pet Sounds
that set McCartney thinking, and he aimed to emulate it in “Penny Lane” (recorded in
late December 1966 and January 1967). This cut provides a psychedelic take on everyday
life along a suburban road lying south of central Liverpool. Paul remembers saying to
George Martin while working on it, “‘I want a clean recording.’ I was into clean sounds –
maybe a Beach Boys influence at that point” (Beatles, Beatles Anthology 237). Several of
Wilson’s stylistic attributes already noted – the bass lines that emphasize notes other than
chord roots, the clever harmonic changes these bass lines facilitate, the use of unusual or
unexpected instruments, and what might be described as “clean sounding,” four-to-the-
bar repeated chords – are evident in Pet Sounds’ “God Only Knows” as well as in other
recent Beach Boys tracks such as “Let Him Run Wild” from Summer Days! (And Summer
Nights!!), “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” and “Good Vibrations.” And we can hear many
of the same attributes not only in McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” rushed out as a single in
254 D. BRODBECK

February 1967 rather than being held back for release on Sgt. Pepper, but also in “Getting
Better” and perhaps also “Fixing a Hole,” two of McCartney’s contributions to the Sgt.
Pepper album itself.
Lennon, no less than McCartney, kept Pet Sounds in mind as he worked on his own
Pepper tracks. Hearing the bass harmonica on Wilson’s “I Know There’s An Answer,” for
example, seems likely to have influenced Lennon’s decision to use the same instrument in
“Being for the Benefit Of Mr. Kite.” Even more striking is the succession of animal noises
that conclude “Good Morning Good Morning,” which seem to take off from the barking
dogs heard at the conclusion of the Pet Sounds track “Caroline, No.” Finally, we can raise
the possibility that the inspiration for the Beatles’ decision – it is unclear who made it – to
include the 15-kHz sound of a dog whistle in the runout groove of Sgt. Pepper was
knowledge that Wilson’s relentless demands in the vocal sessions of the Beach Boys’ new
album had caused Mike Love to refer to him as Dog Ears (about which more below).
Can we also detect the influence of Pet Sounds on Revolver? Although Capitol did
not release the Beach Boys’ revolutionary album in Britain until 27 June 1966, nearly a
week after work on Revolver was completed, that is not to say that its music was
unknown there until that date. Indeed, as we shall see, Lennon and McCartney had
been given a preview hearing of it several weeks earlier, on May 17. It is theoretically
possible, therefore, that any of the Revolver tracks recorded from that point on might
show such influence. The most frequently named candidate – this supposition seems to
have originated with the colorful Los Angeles producer, singer, songwriter, and music
publicist Kim Fowley, who was based in London at the time – is McCartney’s “Here,
There and Everywhere,” recorded in fourteen takes on 14 June 2016, and 17 (Badman,
135). It is not at all obvious, however, which track on Revolver Fowley may have had in
mind. Robert Rodriguez claims that “Paul has stated many times through the years that
Pet Sounds’ “God Only Knows” influenced him when composing and arranging “Here,
There and Everywhere”“ (78). But this claim is neither supported with hard evidence
nor, to my ear, particularly convincing.17 Equally unpersuasive, in my view, is the
vague suggestion made by Bruce Johnston that “the vibe” of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” had
somehow “crept” into Paul’s composition (Pet Sounds Preview video). Asked about the
supposed connection in an interview with David Leaf in 1990, McCartney acknowl­
edged that the vocal introduction of “Here, There and Everywhere” was influenced by
the style of the Beach Boys’ vocal harmonization, but he made no mention in this
connection of Pet Sounds or any other Beach Boys record (Making of Pet Sounds 124).
However this all may be, it is worth recalling here that the a cappella introduction to
McCartney’s “Paperback Writer,” recorded in the early stages of the Revolver sessions
for release as a single, may itself be influenced by “I Get Around” from two years before
Pet Sounds.
The most compelling candidate for a Pet Sounds-influenced Revolver track is
McCartney’s haunting “For No One.” This may seem unlikely at first in that work on
this track was nearly finished before Paul could have heard the putative source. The
unusual form of the song comprises three rotations through a thirteen-bar, AAB pattern,
with no intro or outro to distract from the lyrics’ unsentimental take on a love affair gone
wrong. The two A phrases are four bars in length and end on the tonic; phrase B runs for
five bars and ends with a poignant 4–3 suspension and half cadence. The basic track of
piano and drums, with overdubbed clavichord and percussion, was recorded on May 9.
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 255

In take 10, Paul sings a guide vocal throughout with the exception of the second A phrase
in the second rotation. That he left those four bars empty of any words when over­
dubbing his vocal line for the final version on May 16 suggests he was planning to fill
them later with an instrumental solo of some kind (“For No One Recording Session
1966” video).
As its happened, on the day Paul added his vocal, Bruce Johnston arrived in London
for a five-day visit. He carried with him an acetate copy of Pet Sounds with an eye to
publicizing the new record and to building support for the band’s November concert
dates there. On the next day, May 17, a number of rock luminaries dropped by Johnston’s
London hotel suite to hear it. Among those present late that night were Lennon and
McCartney (Badman, 135). “We played it over and over again,” Johnston recalled. “[John
and Paul] were speechless. They absolutely had the good sense to sit there and listen. It
was just a portable record player, and they were listening to it in mono. But they weren’t
judging the fidelity of it; they were listening to the music of it” (Making of Pet Sounds
134–35).18
Of all the tracks on Pet Sounds, “God Only Knows” is the one that impressed Paul the
most. To this day, he speaks of it with the greatest respect, as is evident in this conversa­
tion from 2012 with guitarist Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones on The Ronnie Wood
Show:

WOOD: We’re going through the chronology [of Paul’s favorite songs] a little bit now,
coming a little bit more up to date with a choice from the Beach Boys from Paul. [“God
Only Knows” begins to be heard in the background.]
McCARTNEY: Yeah, Brian Wilson sort of proved himself to be a really amazing
composer. And I was into chords and harmonies and stuff at that time. And we ended
up, it was kind of like a rivalry. We’d put a song out and Brian would hear it and do one.
It was nice. It was like me and John. You’d kind of try to top each other all the time. But
he eventually came out with his “God Only Knows.”
WOOD: That was Pet Sounds, wasn’t it?
McCARTNEY: On Pet Sounds, yeah. I just think it’s a great song. Melody, harmonies,
words. You know . . . .
WOOD: He had a wonderful feeling. Very bluesy, I think. You know, a lot of soul.
McCARTNEY: It’s a great song. I love it. You know, it’s one of my . . . it’s my favorite
Beach Boys song. [Intermittently sings along with the recording.]I like these words [sing­
ing]: “Life would still go on, believe me. The world could show nothing to me. So, what
good would living do me?” That’s great, man.
WOOD: See, the power of love in our lives. [Recording reaches the beginning of the fade-
out, ending on the repeated words “God Only Knows” in imitative polyphony, beginning at
1:59] What a driving force, Paul, hey.
McCARTNEY: Nothing wrong with that, man.
WOOD: Nothing wrong with that, my boy.
256 D. BRODBECK

McCARTNEY: It makes the world go round. And this now [polyphonic fade-out ending
continuing, around 2:13],where they stack all the harmonies. I got to sing it with Brian
once. We did a benefit together. And I was okay on the actual performance. I held it
together. But at the sound check I almost lost it. Cause it’s very emotional, this song, I
find it. And I’m thinking, “Oh, my God. I’m singing it with Brian.” It just got me. I
couldn’t do it.

WOOD: Nice to be moved like that. There are very few people around who can do that.
McCARTNEY: And all it is, it’s little vibrations reaching your heart.19
What Paul calls “stacked harmonies” in the long fade-out ending of “God Only
Knows” might better be described, as suggested, as components in a passage of
imitative polyphony. And this passage, in turn, may well be understood as the
progenitor of what Alan W. Pollack has called the “series of cascading echoes”
that characterizes the extraordinary fade-out ending of Paul’s “Good Day Sunshine”
(beginning at 1:58), recorded June 8–9, 1966, as the Revolver sessions were coming
to an end.20 Once more Meyer’s idea of stretching seems apt: What in Wilson’s
conception is a beautiful series of metrically regular, overlapping vocal entries
becomes now an irregular, metrically unpredictable succession. As Leonard
Bernstein put it in his discussion of McCartney’s track on the television special
Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, broadcast in April 1967: “What a way to fade out,
in a new key, a shifting meter, a sudden new counterpoint.”21
But these stacked vocals were not the only thing Paul seemed to hold in mind from his
audition of Pet Sounds on 17 May 1966. On the day before, as we have seen, “For No
One” had been left with four bars presumably to be completed later with an instrumental
solo of some kind. When, on May 19, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road to complete
work on this track, they were joined in the studio by Alan Civil, principal hornist in the
Philharmonia Orchestra, and it was he who now performed the missing solo (Lewisohn,
Beatles Recordings Sessions 78–79). Civil later recalled that “McCartney sang nothing.
Nobody seemed to know what they wanted at all, even George Martin. And you think
they’d have written something down, but, no, they didn’t.” In fact, Civil claims that he
“was entirely responsible for inventing the motive” (1999, The Beatles as Musicians:
Revolver Through the Anthology 54). McCartney remembers things differently, claiming
to have sung the solo to Martin, who then transcribed it for Civil (Beatles, Beatles
Anthology 207).22 Walter Everett, who conducted the interview with Civil quoted
above, assumes that it was George Martin who had suggested using the French horn in
the passage. Yet it seems rather more likely that it was Paul who had hit upon the idea of
putting out a call for a horn player to play on the session. Only a few days earlier, after all,
he had been astonished by what Wilson had done with the instrument in “God Only
Knows.”23
The rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles cooled down considerably
after the spring of 1967, which saw the bands’ critical reputations suddenly veer in
opposite directions. With the shelving of Smile came Brian Wilson’s withdrawal
from his once-unquestioned role as the Beach Boys’ creative leader. Scheduled to
perform at the Monterey International Pop Festival in mid-June, the group, in
disarray and effectively dysfunctional, failed to turn up, citing pressure to
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 257

complete the long-awaited “Heroes and Villains” single, the sole survivor at first
from the Smile sessions. “Heroes and Villains” was finally released in July, but it
failed to crack the top ten in the charts, falling well short of expectations given all
the hype surrounding the band since the release of “Good Vibrations.” Even
greater questions were raised in September by the release of the album Smiley
Smile, a lo-fi, minimally produced effort recorded in Brian Wilson’s home studio
and released on 18 September 1967. (“A bunt instead of a home run,” as Carl
Wilson famously described it.) Meanwhile the Beatles had come to be seen as the
very personification of the Summer of Love. Sgt. Pepper seemed ubiquitous, and
the band’s new single, “All You Need Is Love,” was first heard on June 25 by the
hundreds of millions who tuned in to Our World, the first-ever live, international,
satellite television broadcast.
Nevertheless, the Beach Boys retained their popularity in the UK for some time
to come. Smiley Smile topped out at number 41 on the Billboard 200 but did much
better in Britain, peaking at number 9. More important, the Beach Boys’ music
continued to draw creative responses from McCartney. Indeed, McCartney’s most
direct (and often remarked) allusion to the band’s music would not come until the
release of The Beatles in November 1968. Known as the White Album, this double
LP set opens with “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” whose bridge comprises a loving parody of
the Beach Boys’ earlier “fun in the sun” style by way of a clear textual allusion to
“California Girls,” a hit from the summer of 1965.24 At the same time, “Back in the
U.S.S.R.” plays off the title and lyrical conceit of Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.”
(1959), perhaps signaling McCartney’s recognition that the musical substance of the
Beach Boys’ first major hit, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (1963), was derived from another Berry
tune, “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958). And can it be merely coincidental that “Back in
the U.S.S.R.” (and thus the White Album itself) emerges against the sonic backdrop
of an arriving jet aircraft, thereby reversing the closing imagery of “Caroline, No”
(and thus of Pet Sounds), with its runout built on the sonic backdrop of a passing
train? Or that, just as Brian Wilson’s pet dogs, Banana and Louie, can be heard in
that runout, so does Martha, McCartney’s English sheepdog, figure as the subject of
the opening cut on the White Album’s side 2 (“Martha My Dear”)?
To close, we might allow ourselves a few additional speculations along similar lines. By
eschewing the complexities of Pet Sounds, “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains,” and
the various tracks intended for Smile in favor of straight-ahead rhythm and blues, the
Beach Boys’ Wild Honey album (December 1967) may be seen to anticipate the Beatles’
decision to simplify their style in the White Album by stripping away the psychedelia that
had characterized their recent work. Notably, “Wild Honey Pie,” the title of McCartney’s
throwaway solo effort on side 1 of the White Album, not only parodies side 4’s “Honey
Pie,” in which McCartney assumes the guise of a Hollywood crooner, but also brings to
mind precisely “Wild Honey,” first released as a single in October 1967 and then as the
title track of the band’s end-of-the-year album. Nor does the Beatles’ final recorded
album, Abbey Road (September 1969), escape fruitful comparison with the Beach Boys.
The brilliant suite that occupies much of side 2 is not altogether different from the larger
integrated structures that, as McCartney knew, Wilson had hoped to realize in Smile. And
what are we to make, finally, of the resonance between “The smile that you send out
returns to you,” the putative proverb quoted on the jacket of Smiley Smile, and the
258 D. BRODBECK

beautiful sentiment with which the Abbey Road suite concludes: “And in the end, the love
you take is equal to the love you make”? Maybe nothing. Still, the sense of mutual give-
and-take implicit in Paul’s couplet seems to provide a more fitting understanding of the
nature of the myriad relationships explored in this essay than the notion of a production
race or a transatlantic slugging match.
Indeed, in an interview with rock journalist Michael Lydon given in London in March
1966 shortly before the Beatles began work on Revolver, McCartney suggested as much in
a revealing remark about the band’s working habits:
There’s nothing wrong with pinching ideas from other people. Everybody does it—
Handel did it—but most people aren’t as honest as Handel or us. It’s the same thing as
abstract art. Anybody can throw paint on canvas just like anybody can pinch bits from
other songs, but not everybody can get the same result. You don’t just stick it together.
We go into the studio with a song, play it over, and talk about what other groups it
sounds like. Then we see how we want to do it, and we end up with our interpretation
of their style. (Lydon, “1966” 10)25

Although McCartney identifies no particular group in this connection, the Beach Boys
were surely front and center in his mind. After all, in the Beatles’ Los Angeles press
conference of a few months later, quoted as my epigraph, he would leave no uncertainty
about which band was his favorite.

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.
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 259

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.
260 D. BRODBECK

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 remem­
ber 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.”

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

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

Notes on contributor
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.

References
Badman, Keith. The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band–On Stage and in
the Studio. Backbeat Books, 2004.
Beatles, The. The Beatles Anthology. Chronicle Books, 2000.
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 261

Curnutt, Kirk. Brian Wilson. Equinox, 2012.

Everett, Walter. The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology. Oxford UP, 1999.
Everett, Walter. The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul. Oxford UP,
2001.
Flory, Andrew. “Fandom and Ontology in Smile.” Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach
Boys in Critical Perspective, edited by Philip Lambert, Uof Michigan P, 2016, pp. 215–41.
Grevatt, Ron. “Beach Boys’ Blast.” Melody Maker, 19 Mar. (1966): 3.
Harrison, Daniel. “Pet Sound Effects.” Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in
Critical Perspective, edited by Philip Lambert, U of Michigan P, 2016, pp. 31–62.
Hartman, Kent. The Wrecking Crew: The inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret. St.
Martin’s, 2012.
Harvey, Mark. “Politics and Power in the Record Industry: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the
Album as Art Form.” Musicology Australia 38.2 (2016): 153–71. doi:10.1080/
08145857.2016.1244876.
Howlett, Kevin. Songs and Recording Details. Liner Notes Booklet for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band: 50th Anniversary Edition (Sound Recording by the Beatles) (Cd-dvd-blu-ray
Package). Calderstone Productions/Apple Records, 2017.
Kozinn, Allan. The Beatles. 1995. Phaidon P, 2010.
Lambert, Philip. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach
Boys’ Founding Genius. Continuum, 2007.
Lambert, Philip. “Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds.” Twentieth-Century Music 5.1 (2008): 109–33.
doi:10.1017/S1478572208000625.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys. Courage Books, 1985.
Lennon, John. “Blind Date.” Melody Maker, 11 Dec. (1965): 10.
Lewisohn, Mark. The Beatles Recording Sessions. Harmony Books, 1988.
Lewisohn, Mark. The Complete Beatles Chronicle. Harmony Books, 1992.
Lydon, Michael. “1966: Lennon and McCartney, Songwriters in London.” Flashbacks: Eyewitness
Accounts of the Rock Revolution, 1964–1974, Routledge, 2003, pp. 7–19.
MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. 3rd ed. 2005.
Chicago Review P, 2007.
MacLeod, Dewar. Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California. U of
Oklahoma P, 2010.
Martin, George with William Pearson. With A Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt.
Pepper. Little, Brown, 1994.
Meyer, Leonard B. Style in Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.
O’Grady, Terrence. “Rubber Soul and the Social Dance Tradition.” Ethnomusicology 23 (1979): 89–94.
Pollack, Alan W. “Notes on ‘Good Day Sunshine’ (GDS.1).” 1989, revised 2000. Alan W. Pollack’s
‘Notes On’ Series. Web, 12 Jul. 2021. https://www.recmusicbeatles.com/public/files/awp/gds-1.
html
Priore, Dominic. Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece. Sanctuary, 2005.
Rodriguez, Robert. Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘N’ Roll. Backbeat Books, 2012.
Siegel, Jules. “Goodbye Surfing Hello God! the Religious Conversion of Brian Wilson.” Cheetah,
Oct. 1967, pp. 26–31, 83–87. Reprinted in The Rock History Reader, edited by Theo Cateforis.
Routledge, 2007, pp. 87–98.
Starr, Larry. “A Listener’s Smile.” Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical
Perspective, edited by Philip Lambert, U of Michigan P, 2016, pp. 242–62.
The Beach Boys Smile Sessions. Unpaginated Book. Liner Notes for the Smile Sessions(Sound
Recording by the Beach Boys). Capitol Records, 2011.
The Making of Pet Sounds. Booklet. Liner Notes for the Pet Sounds Sessions (Sound Recording by
the Beach Boys). Capitol Records, 1996.
Unterberger, Richie. The Unreleased Beatles: Music & Film. Backbay, 2006.
White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern
California Experience. Henry Holt, 1994.
262 D. BRODBECK

Wilson, Brian. “Forward.” The Beatles: Ten Years that Shook the World, edited by Paul Taylor. DK
Books, 2004, p. 2.
Wilson, Brian. “Music Is God’s Voice.” The Beach Boys Smile Sessions, 2011.
“Beatles Discography, 1962–1970.” The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, edited by Kenneth
Womack. Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 286–93.
Zolten, Jerry. “Sgt. Pepper—With a Little Outside Help—Taught the Band to Play.” The Beatles,
Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love, edited by Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox.
Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 17–41.

Video and Film

The Beach Boys in London. Film. UK. 1967. Directed by Peter Whitehead.
“For No One Recording Session 1966.” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc7bQr4tk40.
Accessed 28 September 2020.
Inside Pop–The Rock Revolution. TV special. USA. CBS. 26 April 1967. Hosted by Leonard
Bernstein. Directed by David Oppenheim. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=
afU76JJcquI&t=422s. Accessed 28 September 2020.
1+. Blu-ray and compact disc package including numerous sound recordings by the Beatles and
numerous promotional films to accompany the sound recordings. UK. Apple Records, 2015.
“Listen to Paul McCartney’s Extremely Rare 1965 Christmas Record.” Ultimate Classic Rock,
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/paul-mccartney-1965-christmas-record/. Accessed 12 July
2021.
The Making of Sgt. Pepper. Episode of The South Bank Show TV series. UK. 14 June 1992. Directed
by Alan Benson. Included in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: 50th Anniversary Edition
CD-DVD-Blu-ray package. Calderstone Productions /Apple Records, 2017.
Our World. TV special. UK. BBC. 25 June 1967.
“Paul McCartney on Performing with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.” YouTube, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=0F7AlIHyeCk. Accessed 12 July 2021.
“Paul McCartney’s Favourite Beach Boys Song.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
dcbLOEl8r6g. Accessed 12 July 2021.
Pet Sounds Preview: John and Paul Hear the Record. Video. UK. 2010. Included as a bonus in Brian
Wilson: Songwriter 1962–1969: Exploring Brian’s Music During a Decade of Dreams. DVD. UK.
Sexy Intellectual, 2010.
“‘Revolver’ Press Conference Incomplete Los Angeles, CA, 24 August 1966.” YouTube, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Ob6sEFyfEn8. Accessed 28 September 2020.
What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA. Film. USA. 1964. Directed by Albert Maysles and
David Maysles.
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 263