The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Song That’s Most Inspired by The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds famously inspired The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The influence is most prominent in one of Sgt. Pepper‘s most chaotic songs. Paul McCartney and John Lennon both gave fans insight into the American artists who inspired Sgt. Pepper.
A song from The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ uses pet sounds like The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds includes … pet sounds. The song “Caroline, No” features barking dogs near the end of the track. The use of animal noises in the album was one of Brian Wilson’s most innovative moves. To this day, it inspires musicians to use unusual noises in their work.
One Sgt. Pepper track, “Good Morning Good Morning,” uses animal noises as well. They seem to represent how the song’s protagonists feel overwhelmed. “Good Morning Good Morning” isn’t one of the more acclaimed songs from Sgt. Pepper but it’s arguably one of the more experimental.
Why Paul McCartney said it was easy for The Beatles to take influence from The Beach Boys
The Beatles partly recorded the album in character. They developed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as characters for the album. The characters allowed The Beatles to become other people in more ways than one.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said those personas made drawing inspiration from The Beach Boys easier for the Fab Four. “With our alter egos we could do a bit of B. B. King, a bit of Stockhausen, a bit of Albert Ayler, a bit of Ravi Shankar, a bit of Pet Sounds, a bit of The Doors; it didn’t matter, there was no pigeon-holing like there had been before,” he opined.
West Coast music inspired ‘Sgt. Pepper’ but John Lennon didn’t mention The Beach Boys
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono includes an interview from 1980. In it, John said the music of America’s West Coast inspired Sgt. Pepper but he didn’t cite The Beach Boys specifically, even though they are one of the West Coast’s most impactful bands. “‘Sgt. Pepper’ is Paul, after a trip to America and the whole West Coast, long-named group thing was coming in,” John said. “You know, when people were no longer The Beatles or The Crickets — they were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes, right? So I think he got influenced by that and came up with this idea for The Beatles.
“As I read the other day, he said in one of his ‘fanzine’ interviews that he was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public — and so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper,” John explained. “Intellectually, that’s the same thing he did by writing ‘He loves you’ instead of ‘I love you.’ That’s just his way of working.”
The Beatles are one of the most acclaimed bands of all time but we shouldn’t forget that The Beach Boys (and others) paved the way for the Fab Four.
