A Day in the Life is like a precursor to the Medley on Abbey Road, which in turn is a precursor to what Prog did, piece together small pieces of music into one long song.

The main problem about Please Please Me for George Martin was that it was "rather dreary" it was slow pace like a Roy Obison song, and they sped up the tempo.

PLEASE ~ Bing Crosby 1932

Smile did it first...

Also, hey, hold up. I never said Pet Sounds was overrated. It just isn't very cohesive. It has a unified, coherent sound, it just doesn't move incredibly well. Any album where every single song fades out will probably suffer this.

That's my problem with Pet Sounds, the songs become a bit too similar when grouped together. I tend to prefer albums with a more diverse selection.

Oh, and let's not credit The Beatles with absolutely everything, though. Prog took a big cue from them, sure, but there are other influences as well, like classical music and non-Beatles 60s bands. :)

I could see that. With the similar flaw of a lack of cohesion (at least IMO), Revolver still has a very eclectic sound which keeps it interesting. On Pet Sounds, the sounds are definitely similar but I think the compositional exquisiteness as well as subtle tweaks to the song structures (tempo, dynamic, tone, etc.) are enough to keep the album from being wayyy too boring. Wild Honey sounds extremely similar, and while that's not a problem for me because it's a lot of fun, I could definitely see that wearing on someone else.

So Prog was influence by an album released 40 years into the future? Good night nurse.

Well, Paul MacCartney's idea itself could probably be traced back to an album he had fairly intimate knowledge of. You know, Brian Wilson, a heavy influence on him, had the idea to bring heavy classical/national ideas into his music, and McCartney follows suit; Wilson then decides he'll make an album long suite of music, and ________. Even if it didn't come out, the idea was still out there from one of his innovators/peers.

Drive your car down to the sea ...
 

Hello everyone, new to the board. I stumbled across this thread while posting on the Smiley Smile board (the biggest Beach Boys board) and decided to chime in on the discussion.

If you had asked me a year ago which was the better band, the Beatles or the Beach Boys, I would have responded, "Duh! The Beatles!" I had been a Beatles fan since I was a teen in the late 70's-early 80's, and had been a HUGE Beatles fan since I really got into them somewhere in the mid-late 80's. Since then, Rubber Soul has been my favorite album and "Girl" my all time favorite song.

About 10 years ago I read online that the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds had been written in response to Rubber Soul, and that McCartney had high praise for it. To be honest, before that I don't think I had ever heard of the album - growing up almost NO ONE I knew listened to the Beach Boys (my older sister had Endless Summer for a while I recall, but it's not like a major thing she listened to). All I knew about the BB's was their hit fun-and-sun songs and maybe a few others. So, curious, I went out and bought Pet Sounds.

Over the next several years I would listen to it occasionally. It was nice - I liked Wouldn't It Be Nice, Sloop John B and God Only Knows (which did make me cry on occasion, like it did to Macca). A few other songs sounded decent but didn't really jump out at me.

About 4-5 years ago I bought a 'Best of the Beach Boys' album, mostly when I was in a "summer-y" mood driving my car. After a while I did start to get into Good Vibrations, and a few other songs. Sometime last spring - I think it was March or April - I happened to read online that GV was originally supposed to be on an abandoned project called Smile, which had become "the world's most famous unreleased album" in the intervening years. And, several months beforehand, they had *finally* released something that was kinda-sorta what the album might have been like, using the session tapes. The fact it had been dubbed "the world's most famous unreleased album" intrigued me enough to go out and buy it.

That changed everything.

OK, so when you first listen to the thing it seems like this jumble of mashed-together parts that often don't seem to fit well together ... but some of those individual parts were simply fantastic. In fact they were good-enough to inspire me to keep listening to the album. And the more I listened to it, the better it got. Parts of songs that didn't seem to fit together at first, gradually made sense next to each other. What were, at first, jarring interruptions gradually became more like the ying and yang of a song - unrelated but necessary parts of a whole. And so on. Even now, almost a year after buying the album and being on probably my 30th listen, I have only recently "got" some parts of some songs. Patience has proven fruitful.

Anyway, to make what is already a long story as short as possible, soon after I started "getting" Smile I began re-listening to Pet Sounds, and started noticing and appreciating things I didn't before. After having considered Pet Sounds good, but not great, for several years, I now see why it's considered by many to be one of the greatest pop albums ever. I also started buying more and more Beach Boys CD's, exploring their music. Let's just say there are masterpieces I had never heard before, and even a lot of those fun-and-sun songs, and the teeny-bopper songs, suddenly were a lot better written and more sophisticated than I had ever noticed before.

So now, almost a year later, if you ask me, which is the better band, the Beatles or the Beach Boys ... I'm not sure I could answer the question. Clearly Brian Wilson was a better songwriter than any of the Beatles. The only question is, is a band with one songwriter rated 10 on a 1-10 scale better than a band with two songwriters rated 9 on that same scale? That's a tough question to answer.

What I would like to do, for all the folks here who, like me a year ago, don't really understand how the Beach Boys (gasp!) could possibly be better than the Beatles, is do my 2 cents to demonstrate how this can be possible. I will later be doing a bunch of comparisons of what I call "reasonably comparable songs" which, I hope, will show that the Beach Boys were really, truly keeping artistic pace with the Beatles. I hope the Beach Boys skeptics will be patient and listen to these comparisons. While some of you may not like the Beach Boys musical style, or some other aspect of them, I hope you can see the art in their songs, which was every bit as good as the Beatles.

Cheers.

Alright, here's my first "contest."

I've no doubt many of these songs have been shown/linked elsewhere in this thread, but for the sake of convenience I'll show them side-by-side in each post. Apologies for any duplication.

The point is to listen to each song, and decide, if you can, which is the better song ... or at least, if the two are artistically comparable, even if you have a strong preference for one of the two songs.

There are a lot of songs by each band which don't really have "reasonably comparable" songs by the other band. And in some cases I will pair up songs which are only kinda-sorta comparable. But remember, the style of the two bands was quite different, which makes comparing them a complicated task. There are going to be some arbitrary decisions in which songs I pair up with which.

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Contest #1: Battle of the Very Early, Teeny-Bopper Hits - "Surfin' USA" vs "Please Please Me"

"Surfin' USA" - recorded January 1963


"Please Please Me" - recorded November 1962


My verdict: Surfin' USA is a fun song, but also taking into account it was based heavily on a Chuck Berry song and thus isn't a pure BB composition, Please Please Me is the hands-down winner.

More ...

Contest #2: Battle of the 1964 Fast Song Good Times Megahits - "I Get Around" vs "A Hard Day's Night"

"I Get Around" - recorded April 1964

An alternative song could be "Fun, Fun, Fun," but I'll use "I Get Around" since it was recorded the same month as Hard Day's Night. :D

"A Hard Day's Night" - also recorded April 1964


My verdict: This is a lot closer than the first one, but a slight edge to Hard Day's Night.

I'll have more tomorrow. Will post one every day or two, depending on the discussion. I'll go roughly in chronological order. It gets interesting starting in 1965-ish.

You make a good argument, but your final analysis is still just a personal opinion.

Out of the songs you presented for comparison, I prefer the Beach Boys over the Beatles. Mainly because I like the raw R&B/rock & roll sound and style over the polish.

The same way I like the blues/R&B rock style of the Rolling Stones over the Beatles.

Thanks for your input DriveYourCarDownToTheSea. :) Please feel free to continue.