The Beach Boys - Legacy

Legacy

Noted by some as America's greatest rock group and an important catalyst in the shaping of popular music, the Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful bands of all time. Influenced by barbershop music and rhythm and blues, the Beach Boys launched their career in the early 1960s playing 1950s style rock and roll married to five part harmony and later went on to incorporate several different genres into their musical palette, from psychedelia to baroque pop. Due to these factors, the Beach Boys influenced a number of different artists spanning across a mix of genres and decades. Noted artists influenced by the Beach Boys include The Beatles, George Martin, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, The Who, Elton John, Paul McCartney, The Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, Beck, Radiohead, The Flaming Lips, Weezer, MGMT and Animal Collective.

Today! (1965), Smiley Smile (1967), Sunflower (1970), Surf's Up (1971), Holland (1973) and The Smile Sessions (2011) have featured in several "greatest albums of all time" related lists with the group's 1966 releases—Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations"—frequently ranking among the top of critics' lists of the greatest albums and singles of all time. Pet Sounds is on the greatest-albums lists Time, Rolling Stone, New Musical Express, Mojo, and The Times. The record was profoundly influential on the Beach Boys' contemporaries; Paul McCartney named it one of his favorite albums of all time (with "God Only Knows" as his all-time favorite song). McCartney has frequently said that it was the inspiration behind the seminal Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Echoing this sentiment, Beatles producer George Martin is quoted saying, "Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds."

The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, with Mike Love delivering a speech that assailed Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and Diana Ross. Elton John subsequently took the stage and thanked Love for not mentioning him, lightening the mood. The band was chosen for the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2001, the group received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Brian Wilson was inducted into the UK Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2006. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked the Beach Boys No.12 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. During the 2011 Yale Master’s Tea, guest lecturer and music CEO Jeff Pollack described the Beach Boys as being “one of the most influential and underrated bands of all time, with a vocal style and harmonies that were unmatched by any other band, then or now”.

The Wilsons' California house, where the Wilson brothers grew up and the group began, was demolished in 1986 to make way for Interstate 105, the Century Freeway. A Beach Boys Historic Landmark (California Landmark No. 1041 at 3701 West 119th Street), dedicated on May 20, 2005, marks the location.