Parks initially became aware of the Beach Boys during their early popularity in the early 1960s. Speaking of them in 1995, he said, "I knew they didn't surf.…I felt some resentment about , and I had been a fan of "Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones".…Instinctively, I was not a Beach Boy fan. 'Something really dumb about it.'" He added that, "I loved "Pet Sounds", you see. I came back to love them, and thought they had done a great job. It seemed to me that they would be fine in fighting spirit to take on this challenge of wresting that trophy out of the hands of those interlopers." Parks has gone on to call Wilson "the biggest event of that era" but is hesitant to label him a "genius," believing Wilson to be more "a lucky guy with a tremendous amount of talent and a lot of people collaborating beautifully around him."