The Beatles liked The Beach Boys and absolutely admired Brian Wilson, a genius who other geniuses adored.
Wilson was a musical factotum: composer, producer, performer, instrumentalist, engineer. You could almost say that going out to play live was the least important of his duties, despite being the most visible. They say that there was rivalry between the Beach Boys and those from Liverpool. There was, but not as much as some would have us believe.
The Beatles liked the Beach Boys and absolutely admired Brian Wilson, a genius who was adored by other geniuses, as Smokey Robinson, leader of The Miracles, described the "Fab Four" himself. John Lennon was fascinated by Wilson's way of composing, so much so that he wrote an article in Melody Maker magazine about his ways as another fan.
Specifically, he referred to the song The Little Girl I Once Knew, prior to the bombing of the beach boys and their Pet Sounds: «It's the best song I've ever heard. It's fantastic. It's all Brian Wilson. Just use the voices as instruments. He just sits at home thinking about fantastic arrangements in his head. He doesn't even read music (...). I hope it's a success so I can listen to it all the time.
For his part, Paul MacCartney believed that God Only Knows was the best song ever written. However, the admiration was mutual. Wilson loved the Rubber Soul album and put it this way: “Rubber Soul blew me away. I liked the way it all fit together, the way it was all one thing. It was a challenge for me to do something similar. "That made me want to do Pet Sounds, I didn't want to do the same type of music, but at the same level."
Source: eldebate
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