Каролина, Нет: История одной песни Beach Boys

1966 song by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys

"Caroline, No" is a song by American musician Brian Wilson that was released as his first solo record on March 7, 1966 and, two months later, reissued as the closing track on the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. Written with Tony Asher, the lyrics describe a disillusioned man who reflects on his former love interest and the loss of her innocence. Musically, it is distinguished for its jazz chords and unusual combination of instruments, including bass flutes, 12 string electric guitar, and muted harpsichord. The words were inspired by a past girlfriend of Asher's named Carol Amen. He initially conceived the title phrase as "Carol, I Know", misheard by Wilson as "Caroline, No". Other reports, which Wilson disputed, variously suggest that the song was written about himself, his former schoolmate Carol Mountain, or his then wife Marilyn. Asher credited the impetus for the song partly to Wilson's disenchantment with his music career and with "sweet little girls" who grow up into "bitchy hardened adults". Wilson produced the track in early 1966 at Western Studio with 12 session musicians who variously played harpsichord, flutes, guitars, basses, and vibraphone. Some of the percussion involved an empty water cooler jug struck from the bottom with a mallet. Wilson sped up the mix by one semitone to make his voice sound younger. The album version was edited to include a non musical tag consisting of the sounds of Wilson's dogs barking and a passing train. "Caroline, No", issued with the B side "Summer Means New Love", peaked at number 32 in the US and failed to chart in the UK. To mitigate the poor sales, Capitol quickly issued "Sloop John B" as the Beach Boys' next single. Wilson later cited "Caroline, No" as his favorite track on Pet Sounds and among the finest songs he ever wrote. In 2004, it was ranked number 214 in Rolling Stones list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".

"Caroline, No" was written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, possibly within a few days of writing "Wouldn't It Be Nice". Although Wilson claimed that Asher only provided the words to his music, Asher credited himself with contributing musical ideas to at least three songs on Pet Sounds, including "Caroline, No". He credited Wilson with the subject matter, however, as "he'd always wanted to write a song about lost innocence, a young girl who changes as she matures and somehow, something's lost." Wilson's 2016 memoir describes "Caroline, No" both as "a new song [Tony had been] working on" and a song on which Wilson "wrote the music". His 1991 memoir says that after discussing the proposed lyric theme, Asher "took a tape home, embellished on my concept, and completed the words." Asher initially conceived the title phrase as "Carol, I Know". When spoken, however, Wilson heard this as "Caroline, No". After the confusion was resolved, the pair decided to keep the new title, feeling that it had brought an especially poignant quality to the song. The lyrics describe a man who reflects on his former love interest and the loss of her innocence, asking, "Where did your long hair go? Where is the girl I used to know? How could you lose that happy glow?" At the end of the song, the singer asks if they could ever work together to bring back "the things that made me love you so much then", before pleading, "Oh, Caroline, no". Wilson commented, "[The lyrics are] a real tear jerker, very like 'Hey Girl' [a 1963 record] by Freddie Scott."

Brian's brother Dennis stated in a 1976 interview that "Caroline, No" was "about a girl that Brian was really in love with in high school. He saw her again years later, and it all came back to him, and he wrote the song." Marilyn went on to say that Brian "constantly remembers his past and still relates to it and everybody in it. And that's another thing at seventeen years old that was hard for me to understand. You want this man to talk about you, and he was talking about all his old girlfriends." Bruce Johnston similarly denied that "Caroline" was a real person and said that the song was actually "directly about Brian himself and the death of a quality within him that was so vital. His innocence. He knows it too." Asher supported that another impetus for the song was "Brian's wish that he could go back to simpler days, his wish that the group could return to the days when the whole thing was a lot of fun and very little pressure." Perone observed that while the melody engages in "wide tessitura changes and wide melodic intervals, it is the largely the instrumentation that makes 'Caroline, No' sound completely unlike recordings by other major pop artists in 1966." Granata referred to the arrangement as Wilson's "instrumental pinnacle" and cited the percussion as playing "a key role in extending the breezy feel of the performance", although "it's the flutes and [saxophone] that really make the difference, infusing the melody with an enchanting glow."

"Caroline, No" was recorded on January 31, 1966 at Western Studio in Hollywood. The basic track was recorded with 12 musicians who variously played guitars, bass, flutes, and percussion. Wilson's dogs inspired the album's title. As the album version of "Caroline, No" fades out, it segues into the sounds of Wilson's barking dogs and a passing locomotive train sampled from the 1963 effects album Mister D's Machine ("Train #58, the Owl at Edison, California"). Its horn sounds a B7 trichord that transforms into a G7 (a consequence of the Doppler effect) as it approaches a railway crossing. Musicologist Daniel Harrison wrote, "There's no little irony that this effect was put on record by a group noted for their songs about cars." Granata, writing in his 2003 book about Pet Sounds, reported that "no one remembers" why Wilson chose to end the album as he did. Asked in a 1996 interview, Wilson said, "I'm not really sure [what I had in mind]. I can't answer that question. I took a tape recorder and I recorded their barks. And we went down and we looked through some sound effects tapes and we found a train. So we just put it all together." Edwin Pouncey of The Wire describes the "atmospheric, evocative and lonesome sounding" album tag as one of several notable "pop and rock musique concrète flirtations" from the period, while Adam Webb of BBC Music deems it a "forlorn soundtrack".

On March 7, 1966, "Caroline, No" (backed with the Summer Days instrumental "Summer Means New Love") was issued by Capitol Records as Wilson's first solo record. According to music historian Keith Badman, "everyone close to [Brian was] certain the disc [would] be a monster hit." In Marilyn's recollection, "Everybody at Capitol said it should be a single because it was so good, and there were no background vocals, so they said, 'Why don't we release this as a Brian Wilson single, because it's really not a Beach Boys song." To promote the single, Brian, Carl Wilson, Love, and Johnston recorded several 23 second "thank you" radio spots for different stations across the U. S., thanking them for playing the record and making it "a hit". The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 37, more than a month after it was released, and ultimately peaked at number 32 during its seven weeks on the chart. Badman states that Capitol quickly issued "Sloop John B" as a single "to cover up the unimpressive performance" of "Caroline, No". In the UK, "Caroline, No" was issued in April and failed to chart. Wilson was asked in 2001 if he would have issued Pet Sounds as a solo album had the single performed better, to which he responded, "Probably would've, yeah, but I didn't." Asked again on a later occasion, he said, "No, I just wanted to do that one. 'Caroline No' fit my voice more than the other guys "

Pet Sounds was released on May 16 with "Caroline, No" as its final track. In his self described "unbiased" review of the album for Record Mirror, Norman Jopling praised the song as the LP's best track, "Very sad and very romantic. In fact horribly sad." However, he decreed that the added sound effects ruined "an atmosphere which must have taken some amount of time and trouble to create. A pity because Beach Boy fans won't thank them for that kind of musical development." Cash Box described the song as a "tender, slow moving gentle ode about an unhappy fella who desperately wants to get back with his ex gal." Billboard called it an "easy go emotional ballad with strong back beat" that "has all the ingredients of a No. 1 smash." Among retrospective assessments, journalist Nick Kent in 1975 recognized "Caroline, No" as "arguably the most beautiful song [Brian] has ever written." In 2003, it was ranked number 214 in Rolling Stones list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Wilson himself stated that "Caroline, No" was his favorite Pet Sounds track, "the prettiest ballad I've ever sung. Awfully pretty song." A song called "Caroline Mountain" appears on Sugar Candy Mountain's album Mystic Hits (2013). The 2014 biopic Love & Mercy includes a depiction of the recording of "Caroline, No" and its dog barking session.

+Weekly chartsChart (1966)PeakpositionU. S. Billboard Hot 10032