The three artists that made Glenn Frey want to be a musician: “The pioneers”
No musical movement happens by accident. Even if it just comes down to a bunch of people dicking around in their garage trying to find some decent riff to jam on, those success stories are what lead to millions of people wanting to make their own versions of it and turning what could have been a mindless jam session into an entire musical force of nature. Although Glenn Frey could single-handedly be credited for transforming the California sound with the Eagles, he believed things had already started when the British invasion was still happening.
By the time that Frey had come to California, though, things were still pretty green. The hippie dream hadn’t quite faded yet, but artists were looking to move beyond the traditional songs that had to deal with government movements and move along to the simple pleasures in life.
For Frey, the idea of someone living like this in California would have probably been the equivalent of asking him if he wanted to go to the moon. He had come from the streets of Detroit, so having that kid transition into the world of Los Angeles with warm air and everyone brandishing an acoustic guitar could have practically been a utopia.
Of all the great bands of the time, Frey knew that three of them loomed large over everyone else, telling PBS, “The pioneers were really the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds. Those bands from the late 60s, that’s what really, you know, made all of us want to move to California, and then we just sort of did our thing.”
Once you listen to the Eagles’ music, you can hear traces of all three of those bands. Buffalo Springfield may have had a rock-based foundation that the Eagles built themselves on, but the melodic sensibilities that they put into many of their songs tend to be reminiscent of The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn more often than not.
You have to remember that the band were partway between country and rock most of the time, and McGuinn’s chiming 12-string on The Byrds’ biggest hits was practically a guide for where Frey would take his own music. And if you’re talking about what The Beach Boys did for rock and roll, you only have to listen to the band’s harmonies for about two seconds.
There are a lot of descendants of Appalachian-style harmony in the way that they sing, but when you hear the way that songs like ‘New Kid in Town’ and ‘Seven Bridges Road’ are arranged, they have Brian Wilson’s fingerprints all over them. If there was one man who had one impact above anyone else, though, it’s probably Gram Parsons.
Parsons may have been part of the later iteration of The Byrds, but his solo career is probably a more authentic version of the country-rock synthesis that the Eagles were doing. Since Bernie Leadon had played with Parsons in the Flyin’ Burrito Brothers, he also brought his fair share of country chops, being proficient in guitar, banjo, and almost anything else with strings on it.
That’s not to say that any of these bands were better at the Eagles’ brand of rootsy rock and roll than anyone else. If anything, Don Henley and Frey took the lion’s share of every one of those bands and ended up turning themselves into the perfect encapsulation of what California is supposed to be.
