How The Beach Boys and the Beatles Pushed Each Other to Greatness

The Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson was once asked if he had any thoughts about other 1960s musicians. Wilson responded in his usual concise manner: “Actually Phil Spector and the Beatles are about it for me.” As it turns out, the Fab Four admired Wilson’s 1960s output just as much. In 2000, Paul McCartney praised the emotional power of Wilson’s music while inducting the musician into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Throughout the 1960s, the mutual musical respect between the Beatles and The Beach Boys fueled creative competition that led to some of the most forward-looking—and influential—music of all time.

In the 1960s, social and political upheaval fueled youthful rebellion that led to groundbreaking music movements. Debuting early in the decade, The Beach Boys—led by brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine—imagined a breezy, sun-soaked image of 1960s California youth culture.

With lyrics referencing convertibles, beach parties and teenage romance, songs like “Surfin' U.S.A.” turned the west coast into a national fantasy, exporting the myth of eternal summer to a generation in flux. Not long after, the Beatles—Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr—displayed dapper style and charming personalities as they ushered in the British Invasion that reshaped American pop culture.

As both bands grew more experimental, they became emblematic of the decade’s cultural transformations and shifting consciousness—validating youth culture with serious artistic innovation, and tackling heavier themes such as loneliness and drug use. Given their respective commercial successes, both bands naturally pushed each other to greater creative heights.

“This competition was very well-natured,” says Dr. Jadey O’Regan, a senior lecturer in contemporary music practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. “They were both striving for success. But it was like, game recognizes game."

As a producer, Brian Wilson started experimenting quite early on in The Beach Boys’ career; for example, incorporating strings and contributions from session players, The Wrecking Crew, on 1963’s Surfer Girl album.

That ambition was certainly evident on Pet Sounds. Released in May 1966, it was an LP with complex arrangements and depth that moved beyond surf songs and sunny beach fantasies. This shift was part of a broader cultural change within music. That year especially, new and established artists challenged mainstream conventions and experimented with different instrumentation (such as the sitar) and genres, such as psychedelic rock.

O’Regan, who wrote her doctoral thesis on the Beach Boys’ sound between 1962 and 1966, also notes Wilson’s music started nodding to the Beatles even before Pet Sounds. As an example, she cites the Beach Boys’ 1965 track “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” which boasts melodic echoes of the Beatle's “Ticket to Ride,” particularly on the chorus.

But O’Regan sees the road to Pet Sounds starting with the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul. This LP was indicative of another shift in the evolution of 1960s pop music: a focus on albums over singles. Full-length albums became cohesive, ambitious artistic statements rather than just compilations of existing material. Rubber Soul especially solidified the Beatles’ role at the forefront of a rapidly transforming musical landscape.

"Brian Wilson cited Rubber Soul as his first idea of a concept album,” O’Regan says. “It was songs that were meant to be together, to tell a story or [capture] a mood or a feeling. And so he was like, ‘How do I beat this?’” O’Regan stresses that Wilson’s sense of competition wasn’t cutthroat. “It was definitely with love,” she adds. “We see Brian as a kind of fragile figure. But in the 1960s, he was formidable.”

Paul McCartney fell in love with Pet Sounds, praising the greatness of the LP’s “God Only Knows” and noting in a 1990 interview, “I’ve often played Pet Sounds and cried. It's that kind of an album for me.”

The Beatles next album in 1966, Revolver, also showed a marked sonic progression, with nods to psychedelic rock and baroque pop. Whether Pet Sounds influenced Revolver is a subject of debate. In May 1966, as the Beatles were in the midst of recording the album, Beach Boys member Bruce Johnston went to England to promote Pet Sounds. On the last night of his trip, McCartney and John Lennon came to his hotel suite, interested in hearing the buzzed-about album. “We played it over and over all night,” Johnston once recalled.

Though Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack is skeptical that the band's listening session had a significant influence on Revolver, as most of it was already completed, he suggests an even more impactful meeting occurred later in 1966, when Brian Wilson played Paul McCartney and George Harrison a later version of the single "Good Vibrations." To Womack, this moment was seismic in the Beatles’ musical progression. “You can draw a line from [‘Good Vibrations’] to the work the Beatles will do at the end of the year, I think, with ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’” he says. “They're multi-part songs. They are using a wide range of instruments. They're just wonderful baroque pop. It's all right there.”

“Good Vibrations” also pushed the Beatles to think about themselves differently, Womack says, noting “the power [the song] had to challenge them as they contemplated what they were going to do after they quit touring." O’Regan also hears Wilson’s influence in the Beatles’ ongoing sonic expansion in this era and beyond, particularly in the band’s “growing ability to piece together interesting harmonies” and their “interest in quirkier chords," she says.

Conventional wisdom has said that the Beatles’ 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was also a reaction to Pet Sounds. In 1990, McCartney all but said that himself: “I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence. If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed Pepper. And my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album.”

"Rubber Soul inspired Pet Sounds, which inspired Sgt. Pepper’s and that inspired me to make Smile,” Brian Wilson recalled in 2015. However, Wilson's ambitious attempt to further evolve music with Smile as his next album faced setbacks and remained unreleased for a long period. By the time the Beatles officially broke up in 1970, Brian Wilson's role with The Beach Boys had already diminished. Still, the mutual influence between the two bands endures.

Upon Wilson’s death in 2025, Paul McCartney posted a heartfelt remembrance on Instagram, writing, “Brian had that mysterious sense of musical genius that made his songs so achingly special. The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time.”

To this day, the Beatles and The Beach Boys stand as emblems of a transformative musical era—two distinct but complementary pop visionaries who were responding to (and influencing) a rapidly changing world just as audiences expected more from their favorite artists.