What Brian Wilson Said About the Beach Boys and Beatles Rivalry

The Beatles loved the Beach Boys.

And the feeling was mutual — even if Mike Love challenged “the Mop Tops” to a battle of the bands during his notorious speech when both groups were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during the January ceremony in New York City.

Nobody threw fists that night, or any other time, but the late Brian Wilson — who passed away Wednesday at the age of 82 — once acknowledged that the two acts definitely engaged in a bit of one-upmanship during the 60s.

“There was that rivalry with the Beatles and the Beach Boys — a little bit, yeah, but not much. Not enough to scare anybody,” Wilson said in 2000, after Paul McCartney inducted him into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, fondly saluting his “great genius to be able to do that with a bunch of words and a bunch of notes.”

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Wilson admitted that he was “jealous” of the Beatles and the mania the group caused circa 1962-63 at home in Great Britain and especially during its 1964 “invasion” of America. Though the Beach Boys were no strangers to screaming teenagers, Wilson explained that the Beatles “just seemed to take over, all of a sudden. They were everywhere. I thought their songs were really good.”

The Beatles, of course, felt the same way about Wilson and the Beach Boys; as McCartney continued in that Songwriters Hall speech, “(Wilson) wrote some music that, when I played it, it made me cry. I don’t quite know why. It wasn’t necessarily the words and the music. There’s just something so deep in it that there’s only certain pieces of music can do this to me, just reach right down in me.”

Wilson said that his professional and personal fondness for McCartney was “based on the incredible, famous person that he is and, of course, the big, great Beatles…I was crying. I had a wonderful time that night. I’ll never forget it.” He and McCartney did talk about someday writing together, but at the time Wilson said, with a laugh, that, “I just think I’d be chicken. I think we’re all chicken, really.”

The mutual admiration society pushed both bands to greater heights, of course. Wilson cited the Beatles’ Rubber Soul as inspiration for his band’s landmark Pet Sounds — “I wanted to make the greatest album ever,” he noted — which in turn exerted an influence on the Fabs’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which pushed Wilson to perhaps unattainable ambitions with the initially aborted SMiLE. “We paid attention to each other,” Love explained. “Brian was always listening to (the Beatles). He always wanted to know what they were up to and he was measuring himself in comparison to them.

“But we were friendly, too,” added Love, who accompanied the Beatles to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi during 1968 in Rishikesh, India. “We liked each other. And we enjoyed each other’s music.”

As of this writing, McCartney had not made a public reaction to Wilson’s death. Ringo Starr and his wife Barbara weighed in quickly with “God bless Brian, peace and love to all the family, peace and love.”