160. Honey Pie

The White Album is a great album not in spite of fluff like this, but because of it

People used to love to criticize the White Album as a chaotic mess, with a bunch of filler tracks that never should have seen the light of day. I think that’s less common these days, but it still lingers on the margins. And tracks like Honey Pie are usually the reason why.¹

I think is wrong, and wrong in a really significant way. Not because I love Honey Pie particularly (it’s nice enough, but you can see from the ranking that it’s hardly one of my favorite), but because it is an essential part of the experience of the White Album. If Honey Pie didn’t exist, I would never in a million years say ‘the thing that’s really missing from this record is a bit of imitation music hall.’ But it would be true.

Disc two, side two is a bizarre hodgepodge of songs, each of which could be reasonably subjected to the simple question: why? Couldn’t they edit themselves a little bit? They really needed to include this one?² And yet, despite being the weakest side in terms of its songs, I also think it might be the most interesting in terms of intention and design. The Revolution bookends—iconoclastic and chaotic—establish two very strange pillars. But after each one, you get a palate cleanser: the antediluvian Honey Pie and the pure schmaltz of Good Night. There’s an important yin and yang quality to those pairings, a balance which is necessary to sustain the whole principle of the record.

Because this is fundamentally what the White Album is about: a cracked kaleidoscope of 20^th century musical styles. And importantly, they’re all taken seriously, not played for laughs. Which isn’t to say the songs themselves can’t be funny, or even ridiculous. But there’s no smarm here, no smug distancing from the material. If John thinks some of this stuff is crap, he’ll absolutely say so. He’ll sit there and grimace and moan and mock and insult, but when the tapes start to roll he’ll also do the job until Paul is satisfied. I mean, check out the guitar solo on Honey Pie. It’s fantastic. That’s John, doing the business, even on a song he hated.

And not to get too teleological, but the way you know that Honey Pie works is that they did ultimately include it. You might say ‘that’s not saying much; they included everything’ on this one. But actually, they didn’t. That’s just how prolific they were in 1968 that there was actually a lot left on the cutting room floor. Including some genuine bangers that would eventually show up on solo albums (Junk, Jealous Guy née Child of Nature, Look at Me, Not Guilty) and a couple of John’s tunes from the Abbey Road medley. On the one hand, this is baffling. Junk is an incredible song and Honey Pie is…not. And I certainly would not be complaining if they’d included Junk. But it’s still true that Honey Pie reshapes the album in a way that Junk wouldn’t, despite being a far superior song.

You can also see how how Honey Pie works by comparing it to a different sort of track that did get cut: What’s the New Mary Jane. Which would have stuck out like a sore thumb on the album. Not just because it’s kind of a trainwreck of a song (although it is that, too) but because Mary Jane was essentially trying to occupy the same hipster lane that they were already filling with Revolution 9—a track that may have its haters, but which at least definitively achieves the thing it’s trying to achieve. That success would have been massively undercut with the inclusion of an inferior, half-baked version of the same product.

As it turns out, the incredible juggling act of the White Album does not depend on every listener enjoying every song. Not at all. What it does require is that the listener believe that each track achieves what it sets out to achieve, even if that objective is small, or offensive to the individual listener’s taste.

And you can absolutely say that about Honey Pie. Like it or hate it, you have to admit that Paul nailed what he was trying to do. It’s a pitch-perfect take on the genre, right down to the faux-old-timey intro, which then launches into a little brass bop, which Alan Pollack has delightfully described as “authentically stylized to point of being surreal.”

It’s nowhere close to my favorite Beatles song. But it’s a good tune. And I’m very happy it exists.

1. I also talked about this a bit in the essays on Bungalow Bill and Wild Honey Pie—other classic targets for the ‘filler’ accusation.

2. Okay, ‘each’ is maybe too strong. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that about Cry Baby Cry.