I have an-other project with the same format as this one but focused on the Beatles. A couple days ago, I figured out some of the piano in "I Want to Tell You," so - just for fun - I started playing the guitar phrase, which I'd figured out in January. Yester-day morning, I discovered that the guitar phrase in "Pleasant Valley Sunday" is very similar to the guitar phrase in "I Want to Tell You." Both are in A major, employ glissandi, alternate between an open A string and notes on the D string, and use only six pitches: A, D, E, F#, G, and A an octave higher.
In both songs, there are sections where these phrases are repeated over and over again, but here's a single instance of each (give or take a few notes) in tablature (I use tildes [~] to indicate glissandi):
"I Want to Tell You"
D|-7~5---2---5-0---4-0---|
A|-----0---0-----0-----0-|
"Pleasant Valley Sunday"
D|---7---5~4-0---2---0-4~5-0---|
A|-0---0-------0---0---------0-|
While they're obviously different, they use something of the same musical vocabulary.
According to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, "I Want to Tell You" was released on Revolver in August 1966 [on the 5th in the U.K. and on the 8th in the U.S.], and according to Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation, "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was recorded in June 1967 [the 10th, 11th, 13th, and "possibly other dates in June"], so it's certainly possible that the guitar phrase in "I Want to Tell You" influenced the guitar phrase in "Pleasant Valley Sunday."
