Sound Of The Sixteen
“I believe that without Brian Wilson’s inspiration, Sgt Pepper might have been less of the phenomenon that it became,” Beatles producer George Martin is quoted as saying in Charles L Granata’s book Brian Wilson And The Making Of Pet Sounds. “Brian is a living genius of pop music. Like The Beatles, he pushed forward the frontiers of popular music.”
Martin and the Fab Four weren’t the only ones whose minds were blown in summer of 1966 by the Beach Boys’ great leap forward with Bruce Johnston – who the band had brought in to replace Brian Wilson for gigs, after the latter’s nervous breakdown in 1964 and subsequent retreat into the recording studio – remembers being the emissary on ’ release. He took an acetate of the album to London on a trip designed to spread the word among rock’s hiperati, and in a hotel suite played it to, among others, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Moon, and Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, all of whom were awestruck by what they heard. Soon the cream of British
