Paul Simon is his generation’s Cole Porter, and Eleanor Rigby is a mountain of suckitude, and I say that as a huge Beatles fan.
Paul Simon is brilliant and Eleanor Rigby is as fine a song as anybody has written in the last 50 years. (Not the “best.” As fine as. Big difference.)
These contests get really silly really fast.
. . . which is why it’s fun to throw out absolutist opinions about things. 
This I agree with.
Also, if you don’t like “Eleanor Rigby”, substitute “For No One” as an example of a good lyric by Paul.
Also agree with Ximenean - The Beatles had a much broader range, musically, than S&G (who, I’ll repeat, I’m a fan of). Even if you discount Revolver and everything after, which was their most adventurous period, Simon & Garfunkel were incapable of rocking like the Beatles on “Twist and Shout” or “Long Tall Sally” or “It Won’t Be Long”, etc. On the other hand, the Beatles had already proven themselves masters of writing pretty/folky/mellow stuff almost from the beginning.
Agreed. Eleanor Rigby is about as perfect a two-minute pop song as anyone can ever hope to write. It boggles my mind to hear it referred to as a “mountain of suckitude” (from a Beatles fan, no less) or as a “very dull song.” I guess mileage varies and all but, really? It’s one of the most covered songs in the Beatles catalog–musicians from all sorts of genres have mined this tune for inspiration.
The Beachboys? Bubblegum, kid ,surfer music. If they were playing in my backyard, I wouldn’t lift the blinds or open the windows.
You’ve never listened to Pet Sounds, have you? In my opinion, better than any Beatles album. (And this is said as a solid Beatles fan.) In fact, it’s my number one or two rock album. (My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless being the other album I hold in such esteem.)
I don’t know how much that really means. Apparently “Yesterday” is the most covered song of all time - and it’s terrible.
I saw S&G a few times back in the 60s, but never saw the Beatles live (but did see them on Ed Sullivan).
This is a tough choice, but I’ve gotta go with the Beatles.
Don’t remember “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Going Baby” do you? “A Simple Desultory Philipic” sucks pretty badly also.
And “Octopus’s Garden” is a kid’s song. The Beatles, as it has been rightly said, have tremendous range - from pure rock to experimental to ballads to music hall to kids’ songs. If we’re talking lullaby’s, I’ll take “Cry Baby Cry” over “Saint Judy’s Comet” any day.
BTW. if you’re considering them as folk artists, compare their version of “Pretty Peggy O” from their first album to Dylan’s on his first album. Dylan blows them away, massively.
shrug Not my favorite Beatles tune, but not “terrible” by any means. Obviously, there’s no objective way to prove this, but it is apparently the most-covered song of all time, tops listeners polls as the best song of the 20th century, Rolling Stone ranked it 13th on the 500 greatest songs of all time, etc. I mean, there must be something to the song if musicians, listeners, and critics seem to enjoy it.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not particularly fond of this song. But it’s undeniably a good song.
As much as I like S&G there is no comparison. The Beatles changed music and they influenced western culture. S&G did neither.
In a way, though, it is kind of hard to compare the two; it’s like apples and oranges, isn’t it?
Simon and Garfunkel were more of a folk duo than anything else in the beginning. They did Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. for Columbia and it went nowhere even though there was still a fairly large folkboom (or the remnants of it) out there. Simon goes to England alone and enjoys a small degree of success as a folksinger, even releasing an album there, The Paul Simon Songbook, which includes early versions of many songs that would later become S&G standards. Meanwhile, back at home, some bright boy at Columbia gets the idea to take one of the album tracks, “The Sound of Silence” and overdub electric guitar, bass and drums on it. It gets released and eventually makes it to number one. Thus S&G, hastily reunited, re-enter things as a folk rock duo instead of just a folk duo.
A more appropriate comparison to S&G would likely be Bob Dylan, since both wrote topical folk numbers at around the same time. Simon’s A Church is Burning is not much different than any early Dylan, say Only a Pawn in Their Game, so I think that this comparison would have been even more valid – and Simon would have lost, even here.
The Beatles, on the other hand, stayed well within the realms of rock and pop music, which is a whole other animal. Maybe the only valid comparison would have been with The Beach Boys. or maybe with The Stones, but only after they had given up singing Blues. Suffice to say, after Lennon-McCartney, lyrics in this area of music got much better also.
I would actually say the Kinks would be the most direct comparison.
I saw Paul McCartney live last night, and I just wanted to report to this thread that he’s still pretty fucking awesome. Best concert I ever experienced (and I’ve been to some pretty good ones).
Re: The Beach Boys, it’s super common/popular these days to go on and on about how great they were and how they were so much more than what people give them credit for and so much better than the Beatles. I have to say that’s a pile of bullshit and revisionist history. It feels like the Beach Boys were always trying to catch up with the Beatles, and when they succeeded the fab four would easily top their best efforts. Everybody loves Pet Sounds, but Sgt. Peppers is superior. For that matter, I love Back in the USSR so much because it was Paul writing a better Beach Boys song than the Beach Boys could ever do themselves.
You can make an argument for Sgt. Peppers (although I don’t think it’s the Beatles best album–not sure it would even make my top three), but it’s a stretch to say the Fab Four would “easily” top the Beach Boys’ best efforts. The point is debatable, and, personally, even though I think the Beatles are by far the better band of the two, Pet Sounds is (IMHO, of course) the best album either group has produced.
Sure, and even Brian Wilson realized this. Trying to top the Beatles is one of those things that finally drove him over the top.
The Beach Boys were my first concert (in 1967, with Tommy James and the Shondells ad The Buckinghams) and my favorite American band, so I’m going to try to defend them.
You can’t say they “were always trying to catch up with the Beatles.” They were first. Before the Beatles broke on Ed Sullivan, the Beach Boys had already put out on singles “Surfin’ USA,” “Little Deuce Coup,” “In My Room,” “Be True to Your School,” and “Surfer Girl,” along with the best rock Christmas single of them all, “Little Saint Nick.” That’s a better career than most 60s’ groups that are fondly remembered have.
The following tunes appeared on singles in 1964 alone, as A- or B-sides: “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” “Don’t Worry, Baby,” “Little Honda,” “Wendy,” “Dance, Dance, Dance,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” and their other great Christmas single “The Man with All the Toys.” Again, a good career for almost anybody else, all in one year.
1965 showed a growth in complexity with songs like “California Girls.” That may be my favorite of all their songs. In 1966 came “Caroline No,” a rival to “Eleanor Rigby” for haunting loveliness. And “Good Vibrations” is also a 1966 song. That’s right, it came out before Sergeant Pepper, even before “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever”. John and most especially Paul were responding to his lead. (And all that leaves out three top 3 hits: “Barbara Ann,” Sloop John B," and “Help Me, Rhonda.”)
Pet Sounds came out a full year before Sergeant Pepper’s. It appeared, in fact, before Revolver. Revolver, not Rubber Soul, is the album in which the Beatles truly showed the complexity their were capable of, though I love Rubber Soul.
So how do they stack up overall? Brian Wilson was a hits machine. The early albums are fun but they were stuck in the thought of the day, in which you put a couple of singles into a mix of throwaway songs. Same was true for the early Beatles albums, too, of course. They both moved into full albums at about the same time, Beach Boys with Beach Boys Today in 1965 and the Beatles with their movie albums, A Hard Day’s Night and Help, in 1964 and 1965. 1966, as mentioned before, was a wash until the release of “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever”. That’s the greatest dual a-side single of them all, and that ends the head-to-head fight.
Starting in 1967, Brian began to break down while The Beatles just kept going on. I can take or leave The White Album and Let It Be, though. Abbey Road is the one late classic. (The less said about Mystery Tour the better.)
Brian didn’t have much range, either, while the magic of the Beatles was that they absorbed every type of music that existed in their world: rock, pop, country, Broadway, standards, folk, blues, classical. They not only tried everything, they combined it into new forms that didn’t sound like the old. That’s what makes them so untouchable. But it took several years for them to understand their gifts. I remember 1965. It wasn’t all that obvious then that nobody else could match them.
The Beatles win. But The Beach Boys made it interesting in the early rounds.
Okay, I’ll give you “Groovy.” But I kinda liked “Simple.” It’s cute and catchy and certainly not even close to the best song ever written, but then, neither is “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
If you just look at the period up through Pet Sounds, this is not accurate, as Exapno Mapcase so aptly argued. Post-Pet Sounds, the Beatles were clearly superior, but it’s interesting to speculate what would have been, if the Beach Boys’ creative trajectory had continued. It’s a fair guess they would have at least been contenders if Brian hadn’t gone on the DL.
I can see where you’re coming from. In some ways, the Kinks were indeed the closest analog of all the Beatles’ contemporaries, playing a similar game with similar levels of artistic success. But (from my understanding; this was before my time) the Kinks, as influential and creative and good as they were, didn’t have anywhere near the impact on the world at large as did the Beatles, or Dylan, or even the Beach Boys in their prime.