The Beach Boys was a band.
The Beach Boys . The Beach Boys began as a garage band managed by the Wilsons ' father Murry , with Brian 's increasingly sophisticated songwriting and recording abilities dominating their creative direction . In 1966 , the Pet Sounds album and `` Good Vibrations '' single vaulted the group to the top level of rock innovators and established the band as symbols of the nascent counterculture era . The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed , commercially successful , and widely influential bands of all time . The group had over eighty songs chart worldwide , thirty-six of them US Top 40 hits ( the most by an American rock band ) , four reaching number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart .