It’s well documented that Brian Wilson, the late Beach Boys mastermind, was an enormous Beatles fan—back in the 1960s, he even entered into a kind of symbiotic creative synergy with the band, as they inspired each other through mutual admiration. So it makes total sense that Wilson would have the highest respect for Sir George Martin, the late producer widely nicknamed “the fifth Beatle” due to his shepherding of the group’s pioneering studio work.
Back in 1997, as part of the Martin-hosted BBC documentary series The Rhythm of Life, these two musical geniuses—arguably the two most influential producers in pop history—met up in Wilson’s neck of the woods to talk shop. “Los Angeles then as well as now was the center of the entertainment business—not just the film business but music too,” Martin narrates in the clip, cruising the streets in a vintage Cadillac. “And everybody gravitated here. If you wanted to make records, generally speaking, Los Angeles was the place to come to. And to my mind, no one ever made better records here than the local Southern Californian group The Beach Boys.”
We then cut to Wilson playing an intimate solo snippet of “Good Vibrations” at the piano. But Martin is on hand to dissect a different Beach Boys song: “God Only Knows,” the centerpiece of the band’s 1966 classic, Pet Sounds, and “one of his favorite[s].” (This footage saw a wider release as part of that album’s 40th-anniversary reissue.) “Most people think of The Beach Boys as a great harmony group, and as of course they were,” Martin says. “But even better than their harmonies were their wonderful melodies.”
The honorary Beatle says he sought to “strip” down “God Only Knows” and “look at its components”—allowing him to “hear the raw material of the melody.” So they assembled in a recording studio and dug out the song’s master tapes, resulting in a surreal and profound moment for both of these icons. “What Brian had done is to write a beautiful song full of unusual changes and then devise a tapestry of sounds to enhance it,” Martin narrates. “For me, it was fascinating: being a musical detective, looking at the song structure, back in the sort of studio in which I’d spent most of my working life.”
It was also fascinating for Wilson, who sits behind the board with a large bottle of Schweppes, watching in quiet reverence as Martin’s hands move the faders up and down—isolating Carl Wilson’s vocal and balancing the instruments in real time. The Beach Boys leader is blown away: “You know what? That’s a better mix than I had for the master. You’re making a better mix of this than I did in the master! You did it! I don’t know—it’s something about the way you put the balance down makes better music. George, I can’t believe this is happening!” (A modest Martin brushes aside the high compliment, replying, “Never!”)
Wilson had another profound, in-studio Beatles encounter centered around “God Only Knows”—this time back in the ’60s, when Paul McCartney told him it was one of his favorite songs. The two stayed in touch, and McCartney even came over to the Beach Boy’s house to play him a new Beatles ballad, “She’s Leaving Home.” “Listening to Paul play a new song let me see my own songs more clearly,” Wilson wrote in his 2016 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson. “It was hard for me to think about the effect that my music had on other people, but it was easy to see when it was another songwriter.”
