‘Wild Honey Pie’: everything wrong with The Beatles’ White Album in one song
Every double album has the potential to be an absolute mess before it even comes out. A single album exists so an artist doesn’t overstay their welcome, but the minute they get more wiggle room, there will be pieces that never come together the way they should. And while it’s hard to deny the brilliance that The Beatles made for themselves on The White Album, one of the biggest faults with the record can be summed up with only one track, and it’s not even ‘Revolution 9’.
At the same time, it’s easy to see what the Fab Four were going for on an album like this. Each of them had grown into a mature songwriter in their own right, and while they had different opinions about how the album should go, hearing all of their solo songs stacked on top of each other wasn’t the worst idea.
Granted, that’s already the first problem: by separating things, everything is bound to be disjointed. No matter how much people might like the sound of ‘Back in the USSR’ leading into ‘Dear Prudence’, it’s always going to be a bit jarring going from the heartbreakingly honest songs that John Lennon sang to McCartney’s whimsical tunes like ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ or ‘Rocky Raccoon’.
And while the second half of the project probably didn’t need to be rounded out by Lennon’s eight-minute extension of the single ‘Revolution’, it’s at least easy to see what that song is trying to do. Looking at the rest of the record and what Lennon had been doing wth Yoko Ono on their own experimental projects, it’s at least a fascinating piece of sound design for what it is despite it not being right for the record.
An album has to be doing something more than that to piss off the audience, and by the time that fans get to ‘Wild Honey Pie’, they start to realise that they might not be listening to the best Beatles album. Even though ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ and ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ are far from the best songs in their catalogue, putting a piece of discordant noise does nothing to make them sound better.
Then again, there’s at least a cute story behind the song. Paul McCartney had initially been making this track to test pieces of the recording equipment, but while everyone elected to throw it out, they kept it in because Harrison’s wife took a fancy to it. That’s wholesome enough, but for the album as a whole, that “anything goes” approach makes it so disjointed.
Because looking through the rest of the record, that kind of laissez-faire attitude is what bogs down the tracks. Even when listening to songs that are far from great, like ‘Cry Baby Cry’, hearing McCartney sprinkle in a piece of a different song is downright infuriating, knowing that they could easily make a good song out of that but can’t be arsed.
So while ‘Revolution 9’ might be the more egregious example of the problems with The White Album, ‘Wild Honey Pie’ is patient zero for why the album should be considered spotty. One could argue that spottiness gives everything character, but whether in the age of streaming or listening to it on vinyl, no one will casually put on ‘Wild Honey Pie’ and claim that it speaks to them.
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