The rock ballad Glenn Frey called perfect: “So beautiful”
Anyone looking to make a perfect rock and roll record is fighting a losing battle. No matter how often you get close to perfection, there’s usually something in the way that prevents a song from being spotless from back to front. Songwriting is a different story, though, and for Glenn Frey, every note of The Beach Boys’ ‘Caroline No’ was immaculate.
Before the Eagles became the litmus test for what California sounded like, Brian Wilson was bringing that fun-in-the-sun energy worldwide. He may not have known how to surf as well as his brother Dennis, but his tunes about spending 24 hours at the beach and then riding around in a hot new car were the soundtrack to what every single American kid was dreaming about in the early 1960s.
As the hippy revolution started, though, Wilson wanted to let out all of the emotion inside him on Pet Sounds. There would always be time for odes to surfing, but making an album that stood as a major statement was something no one would take away from him, and ‘Caroline No’ was no exception.
If anything, this could qualify as a Brian Wilson solo song since he wrote most of the lyrics, and there is hardly another Beach Boy present. While it operates as the closer to Pet Sounds, hearing him sing about a relationship falling apart is one of the most genuinely heartbreaking songs he ever committed to tape, especially towards the end of the second chorus, when it sounds like he’s crying in the studio.
For Frey, The Beach Boys’ opus worked just as well as any standard, which is why he decided to include it on his cover album After Hours. Amid his versions of ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ and ‘For Sentimental Reasons’, Frey argued that ‘Caroline No’ should be in the same company, telling Rolling Stone, “I didn’t want it to be all songs from the Forties. I wanted it to be a record for piano. And, of course, the melody is so beautiful, and the chord changes are so rich and perfect. Nothing is out of place.”
Although The Beatles are celebrated for introducing new concepts to rock and roll, you’d have to wonder if Paul McCartney was looking at this album directly when he recorded his own harmonies. As much as the Fab Four blended together to create a strange musical stew, it’s hard to listen to what Macca did later on ‘Silly Love Songs’ and not think it comes from Wilson’s playbook.
There are even a handful of Eagles cuts that carry on the same tradition of complex chord changes alongside beautiful harmonies. It might be considered more of a soulful song, but ‘Wasted Time’ might be their finest moment of putting together a chord structure, especially when the rest of the group starts singing in falsetto for the final lines of the track.
But writing a good tune wasn’t the only thing Wilson was doing when creating Pet Sounds. Whether he knew it or not, he was creating a road map that the rest of the world could follow for generations to come, and Frey is just one in a long line of artists who have had their world set alight by his tunes.
