Derek Taylor - The Beatles PR Guru

 Taylor was an English journalist-turned-publicist with a flair for drama. He primed the world for Beatlemania with the tantalizing tagline “The Beatles Are Coming”. By 1966, he was in California, moving in Brian Wilson’s circle, and he saw an opportunity to reinvent the Beach Boys’ image. Wilson, for all his talent, was stuck with a surf-and-sun stereotype he’d outgrown. Taylor intuited that what Brian needed wasn’t just a new sound but a new story; one that cast him not as a squeaky-clean surfer boy but as something far more exalted.

That year, as the Beach Boys prepared to release Pet Sounds, Taylor spearheaded what can only be called a proto-viral marketing campaign. The slogan at its core was simple and audacious: “Brian Wilson is a genius”.  Taylor, the Beatles’ former press officer now working as the Beach Boys’ publicist, dropped that phrase into press releases and conversations with journalists. He genuinely believed it, and he intended to make others believe it too . Using his deep Rolodex of British media contacts and music-biz friends, he set out to legitimize Wilson as a serious artist on par with the likes of Lennon, McCartney and Bob Dylan.

Taylor’s strategy was wonderfully theatrical. In May 1966, he and Beach Boy Bruce Johnston flew to London with acetates of Pet Sounds. They hosted listening parties in hotel suites, playing the new record for an elite gathering of rock journalists and musicians, including Lennon and McCartney. John and Paul nodded in admiration as “God Only Knows” filled the room. The journalists left buzzing, ready to spread the gospel of Brian Wilson’s brilliance. Sure enough, British music papers soon ran headlines like “Brian, Pop Genius!” and gushed about the Beach Boys’ forward-thinking artistry . Eric Clapton even proclaimed in Melody Maker that “Brian Wilson is without doubt a pop genius”. 

This praise was no accident. Taylor orchestrated it masterfully, leveraging credibility from his Beatles years. He made sure Pet Sounds earned acclaim in the UK that had eluded it back home . By year’s end, Brian Wilson was ranked among the world’s top musical personalities, right alongside Lennon and even ahead of Bob Dylan . In essence, Derek Taylor succeeded in making the world see Brian not just as a hitmaker but as an auteur.

Yet every narrative, once set in motion, takes on a life of its own. The “Brian Wilson is a genius” campaign worked, perhaps too well. Wilson later admitted that being pedestalized created intense pressure. “Once you’ve been labeled as a genius, you have to continue it or your name becomes mud,” he reflected, after retreating from the spotlight in the late ’60s . The same storyline that validated his art also became a burden he struggled under. Taylor could craft a narrative, but even he couldn’t control how it ultimately shaped the artist at its center.

Even the laborious process of the making of Good Vibrations became part of the hype. The Beach Boys have mislaid the tapes of the vital music track for "Good Vibrations", their long awaited new single,' Derek Taylor wrote. It took 6o hours to perfect and it's still missing.' In mid-October, he gave an update: 'Beach Boys have a giant, monster, mountainous, world-topping, vast rolling ocean, mixed metaphor of a hit of hits in "Good Vibrations", a record which, before the first copy is even in the stores, is named with total abandon, by disc jockeys, as a certain number one.'

As a former journalist, Taylor knew how to bewitch other jour-nalists. He wasn't just a PR, more a conceptualiser and propagan-dist who used his verbal facility and love of pop music to bring things into the light that might otherwise have been ignored. The result of his input can be seen in an article published in the July edition of Go!: 'In Hollywood there's one special name on everyone's lips these days, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.' The head-line called Wilson 'a genius.' It wasn't all plain sailing. The Beach Boys might have been generous but they were also hard work, Taylor remembered: 'Brian Wilson shared more than just a first name with Epstein; he was just as impossible to please, just as edgy, and, unlike Epstein, he nurtured grudges and didn't write letters of remorse and regret.' As became very clear, Taylor was dealing with a volatile compound: added to layers of family trauma was Wilson's drug consumption and his obsessive desire to beat his competitors, Phil Spector and the Beatles.

Taylor’s gift was spinning grand yet intimate myths around musicians, a talent that made him indispensable in the pre-internet age. Before working with the Beach Boys, he had been hand-picked by Beatles manager Brian Epstein to serve as the Beatles’ press officer during their rise to fame. Taylor wasn’t the sort of PR man who issued dry, canned statements; he traded in whimsy and insight to help the Beatles tell their story on their own terms. He even helped shape Epstein’s autobiography, turning taped recollections into a polished narrative. So trusted was Taylor that John, Paul, George, and Ringo treated him as an insider, dubbing him a “Fifth Beatle”.

After burnishing the Beatles’ image, Taylor sailed west to ride a new cultural wave. In California he promoted the Byrds as America’s answer to the Beatles and embraced the psychedelic bloom of the late 60s . He was a driving force behind the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, the event that ushered in the Summer of Love. Taylor served as its publicist and spokesman. When The Beatles launched Apple Corps, their own creative venture, they lured Taylor back to London in 1968 to mastermind its publicity. He presided over Apple’s press office with his trademark extravagance and creativity.

During 1966, Wilson showed distinct signs of the pressure. Tony Asher remembered his "fits of uncontrollable anger`. He showed distinct signs of paranoia, obsessing about the Beatles and his former inspiration, Phil Spector. 'Brian was forever staring into the mirror to see who was fairest,' Taylor recalled. 'As he said, finally, driving around and round the gooo Building in a maroon Rolls he'd bought from John [Lennon], "It'll always be the Beatles for you, won't it?" "Yes," I said, "it always will" . . . He laughed frighteningly and stared through me.

Through all these exploits, Taylor understood the power of narrative in a way today’s strategists might envy. He operated in an era of typewriters and rotary phones, yet he managed to ignite global buzz. He knew that people crave stories about geniuses, about revolutions, about larger-than-life characters who are ultimately human, with a little help from a savvy publicist. Derek Taylor passed away in 1997, still at work helping the Beatles tell their story through The Beatles Anthology. But his influence endures. Every time we call Brian Wilson a genius or speak of the Beatles as cultural touchstones, we’re echoing narratives that Taylor helped shape decades ago.

Here Taylor interviews The Beatles talking about how they side-step a tricky question:  ''Three years this month since first talked at length to George Harrison. We twice before met at press conferences. The first as a dressing room scramble when, with a handful of other rough-cut national press men I had tried to in-Beatles to the duce agree they were betraying their young fans by appearing on the adult Royal Variety Show. Their canny side-stepping of this sort of nonsense was, even then extraordinarily adroit. They didn't use the "no comment" to route safety. John said "Eppy decides.' Ringo said: "I would love to play drums for the  Queen mother.'' And Paul & George asked what the weather was like and who else was on the show.

Reflecting on Brian Wilson’s life and that overused word “genius,” I keep coming back to Derek Taylor’s old-school alchemy. Long before tweets and TikToks could spread an idea like wildfire, Taylor understood how to make an idea contagious using the tools of his time (and, I would argue, these are still the tools of “our” time): words, relationships, and a bit of showmanship. Before virality, there was Derek Taylor, quietly turning talent into legend. It’s a story that reminds me why I fell in love with marketing in the first place. Because, when done right, it’s really about shining a light on greatness so that everyone else can see it too.

The Beach Boys began employing Taylor as their publicist in March 1966, two months before the release of their album Pet Sounds, with the group paying him a salary of $750 a month (equivalent to $7,270 in 2024). According to Carl Wilson, although the band were aware that trends and the music industry were shifting, "Capitol had a very set picture of us", and the band were unhappy with the way the label promoted them circa Pet Sounds. According to Taylor, the "genius" promotion came from Brian discussing how "he thought he was better than most other people believed him to be". Taylor recalled one conversation with Brian and Dennis Wilson in which the brothers denied ever writing "surf music or songs about cars or that the Beach Boys had been involved in any way with the surf and drag fads ... they would not concede." In Taylor's view, the Beach Boys' clean-cut "all-American" image, instigated by former manager and the Wilsons' father Murry, had "done them a hell of a lot of damage. Brian, in particular, suffered." He said that the prevailing attitude was that "Brian Wilson was not supposed to be strange", even though that quality was seen as normal for Hollywood people.

Absolutely, Brian Wilson is certainly a genius. It was something I felt had to be established. ... despite his strangeness, how could you deny him when he was creating [songs like] "Surf's Up"?

—Derek Taylor on Brian Wilson, 1974

After becoming aware of how highly regarded Wilson was to musician friends such as Parks and singer Danny Hutton, Taylor wondered why it was not the mainstream consensus, and began "putting it around, making almost a campaign out of it".[20] To update the band's image with firsthand accounts of Wilson's latest activities, Taylor's prestige was crucial in offering a credible perspective to those outside Wilson's inner circle. He became intent on promoting Wilson as an exceptional "genius" among pop artists, a belief that he genuinely held.

One of the earliest instances of Taylor announcing that Wilson was a genius was in his 1966 article titled "Brian Wilson: Whizzkid Behind the Beach Boys". More references to the "genius" rhetoric appeared in Melody Maker and New Musical Express, specifically the articles "Brian, Pop Genius!" by Don Traynor (May 21, 1966), "Brian Wilson's Puppets?" by Alan Walsh (November 12, 1966), and "Brian: Loved or Loathed Genius" by Tracy Thomas (January 28, 1967). In Taylor's writings, Wilson was presented as a pop luminary on the level of esteemed contemporaries such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan, as well as classical figures such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. What follows is a typical excerpt by Taylor, identified as "'60s Hollywood reporter Jerry Fineman", and contains some exaggerated claims:

This is Brian Wilson. He is a Beach Boy. Some say he is more. Some say he is a Beach Boy and a genius. This twenty-three-year-old powerhouse not only sings with the famous group, he writes the words and music then arranges, engineers, and produces the disc ... Even the packaging and design on the record jacket is controlled by the talented Mr. Wilson. He has often been called "genius", and it's a burden.

Had it not been some 40 years too early for the now in-vogue term “trans-media narrative,” the then 24-year-old Taylor surely would have used it to describe what he was doing with his boss’ in-progress goods: building a story through multiple mediums.

“The excitement of a recording session transforms him into a human dynamo,” Taylor wrote in an early report titled “Brian Wilson: Whizzkid behind The Beach Boys,” one of many that he dispatched (and arranged for other writers) as Wilson held session after session. “He races from studio to control booth, in his effort to be both singer and producer,” Taylor described. In December, Brian appeared on CBS’ Leonard Bernstein’s Inside Pop television special and performed a solo piano renditions of a new song called “Surf’s Up.”

The sessions continued, as did the breathless updates in magazine features and gossip column notices that explained exactly how this new-fangled concept album was going to work. Without leaking a note of actual music, Taylor uploaded SMiLE to the world long before it was done. It would prove to be quite useful. 

Promoting The Byrds, The Beach Boys and Captain Beefheart, among others, Taylor found himself surrounded by the counterculture in 1966. He was behind the rebranding of Brian Wilson as a genius, writing in his regular Disc And Music Echo column, “Our Man In America”, that October, ‘‘[The] Beach Boys have a giant, monster, mountainous, world-topping, vast rolling ocean, mixed metaphor of a hit of hits in ‘Good Vibrations’, a record which, before the first copy is even in the stores, is named with total abandon, by disc jockeys, as a certain No1.”

In November 1996, when we shared a table at the Q Awards. That year, Tony Blair was in the ascendant; Jarvis Cocker mooned Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards; Britpop was at its peak and bad behaviour was definitely on the agenda. Taylor was back in the EMI fold after helping to promote the release of The Beatles Anthology and was in fine, rollicking form, dispensing insults, gossip and wisdom in a rapid, seamless stream. Even in his sixties, he was a master of the insider pop code. Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Oasis and U2 were all in attendance. George Martin was presented with an award for the year’s best compilation/reissue (for his work on the Anthology discs). The person handing him the award was Peter Blake, who used the floor to complain about the fact that he’d only received £200 for his work on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. When Blake started musing about whether he owned the copyright, Taylor stated, very loudly and precisely, “Shut up, you pompous c***.” There was a sudden hush. Taylor owned the room.