I'd say Sam Cooke, due to being the least "rock 'n' roll" in the raucous sense.

Well, Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" was certainly inspired by "Surfin' USA". Marvin must have told him about that DeLorean.

1) Perkins contribution to the song helped define it though, but actually you're arguing against yourself, since he also didn't write Matchbox.

2) Well, to list the obvious, the Beach Boys influenced the rise of surf music, or rather surf-themed music, Jan & Dean switched styles after playing with them at an early show, and that, while short-lived (1962-1964) was still a huge national phenomenon. They were the Beatles biggest influence in their most creative period, particularly Paul McCartney, who began utilizing the melodic bass lines that Wilson made famous. Just sticking with fellow HOF'ers - R.E.M., The Ramones, The Who, Elton John, The Bee Gees, The Eagles, and interestingly enough even Metallica and Holland-Dozier-Holland have talked of how he altered the possibilities of arrangements and more complex songwriting.

3) The studio influence can be found in any artist who began constructing songs in the studio, instead of just playing the song live straight-through, Wilson built it in sections, the most obvious example is Good Vibrations. He also wasn't using traditional instrumentation all the time, weird percussive techniques, playing piano strings by hand, like a harp, theremins, etc. It led to greater freedom to experiment when his forays into this were successful. Obviously as studios progressed and more tracks became available, overdubbing and so forth artists were going to experiment, but Wilson was considered by far the most daring of those in the mid-60's, John Cale of the Velvet Underground worshipped him for this reason.

The thing about influence I think that people get wrong, not that this isn't a sign of influence, is trying to spot artists that sound exactly like another, which to me is imitation and very limiting for creative artists in general. All artists do this to a degree, especially at the start of their careers (Beach Boys did with their Chuck Berry meet Four Freshman approach) but it's the little quirks of writing and recording music where the most influence is found. Something just like the unique chord changes in a song like "Let Him Run Wild", where musicians for years have been blow away by that otherwise obscure non-charting B-side, because it doesn't "go" where it should melodically, it takes all these left turns, but still winds up working. Those are the things that turn artists heads and its more likely that you'll find similar experimentations in their work while still allowing the band to sound like themselves, whereas a direct copy has artists sound exactly like the artist they're influenced by, which generally doesn't mean a long period of relevance for the second generation artist. Both are valid ways to influence others, but most influence is more subtle in nature it seems.

Didn't he get that idea from Spector, who was doing that much earlier than Brian?

Fleetwood Mac, too--Lindsay Buckingham's production techniques owe a huge debt to the BBs, to say nothing of their harmonies.

In the late sixties, you can hear a lot of the Beach Boys in The Association and The Zombies--hey, their influence runs from A to Z!

And then there's a ton of power pop/new wave/alternative artists with a strong BBs influence, right into the present. The Raspberries, XTC, Jesus and Mary Chain, Wilco, Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes...not to mention lesser-known bands such as the Velvet Crush or the Wondermints.

In the late sixties, you can hear a lot of the Beach Boys in The Association and The Zombies--hey, their influence runs from A to Z!
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That's the best answer I got, thanks Brett. *That* I can hear. Fleetwood Mac, okay, yeah, well maybe.

I do get the point about composing music in the studio rather than in the woodshed. Probably too subtle for me to fully understand, because it still seems completely counter-intuitive to me to say the Beach Boys were a big influence on the Ramones. Okay, I'll give you the Velvet Underground, I know about Lou Reed's Beach Nuts record and "Who Loves The Sun."

No, actually Spector recorded the entire tracks live, and went to great pains to point this out in a hilarious interview a few years back where he "praises" Brian but then brags about causing his breakdown, which actually isn't true, but funny that it shows how Spector is an insecure nutcase. It's on Youtube, but it's painful to sit through, if for no other reason than you have to look at his ridiculous wig.

Brian was the one who started assembling songs in this fashion and in some sense you can even see that today in hip-hop where samples are cut and pasted in, building the track from the ground floor up. That alone was one of the most influential turning points in rock, the sonic construction that took over the studio process from that point forward leading to the auteur songwriter/producer/performer concept. In fact that's why Diane, looking for similar sounding artists (harmonies, arrangements, instrumentation) probably misses the scope of their influence, because it appears in the blueprint rather than in the decor (to use a bad building analogy) and so artists who sound nothing like the Beach Boys style-wise were still massively influenced by their creative concepts.

Personally though, like anything, I think that can be overused at times, I still like a count off and then playing it live in studio, but then again most weren't as talented as Wilson so their attempts weren't always as interesting. But either way, that was a radical shift in the way artists approached their music and that equals massive influence.

Fleetwood Mac absolutely, positively. Lindsey Buckingham was obsessed with Brian Wilson. Tusk in particular is Lindsey Buckingham trying to be Brian Wilson.



Hey, that's another American band with little, if any, blues influence.

The Ramones did "Do You Wanna Dance" in the same style that the Beach Boys did it.

Naming artists off the top of your head is not equivalent to properly studying rock history.

Also, mentioning an artists' name in an interivew doesn't automatically mean the person was influenced by said artist.

Precisely. In the Google-age it's easy to search an artist and look for the word influence and find a list of names attached to them to credit, but more often than not an artist is really more "inspired" by another when they mention them by name like that. Influencing the direction of music is much different than that and why I always think you have to trace the innovations back to their starting point, because once SOMEBODY does something it then just enters into the common pool of ideas and anyone is free to draw from it, regardless of them each specifically knowing where it began (thus never mentioning them in interviews). But until someone comes up with that innovation in the first place, nobody else can take from it. For example, that's why all those people who credit the Rolling Stones for their musical "influence" are missing the point - everything they did was already in the universal language of rock 'n' roll via Chuck Berry and others, all they did was present it to a new generation of kids. I tried to credit this myself in coming up with two separate ways to look at influence, primary influence, which is the root source of the actual innovation, and which is worth far more because it's where something entirely new begins, and then secondary influence, which is just spreading that earlier innovation further and becoming certain people's reference point for it. There's a lot more secondary influence in music, which is why I don't think it's worth nearly as much as primary.

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I "study rock history" mainly by listening to the music. I've never been interested in the recording process, or in that Les Paul type stuff, how they make instruments, how they make amps, etc. That's all over my head, or maybe I feel like why am I trying to wrap my brain around this when I could be getting lost in the rock & roll and drifting away instead.

BTW I never said anything about mentioning someone's name in an interview. My idea of influence is that you play/sing one of their songs in their style, or you write a new song that sounds like it could have been written by them, or if they're still alive you record a song *with* them, that kind of thing. However, if Smokey Robinson says in an interview that when he was young he *wanted to sound like* Nolan Strong, I'd say that constituted influence.

Innovation, however, is rare. Earl Scruggs, Wellman Braud, and Little Walter each completely changed the way their respective instruments would be played from then on. They were true innovators as well as superb musicians. Hard to match that.

We debunked that last weekend when you played the 2 versions and heard how much faster the Ramones did it.
Here's a better reason to say they were influenced by the Beach Boys. They did a song (my favorite Ramones song, actually) about a beach!