The White Album 50 Project: "Wild Honey Pie"

I'd seen the title "Wild Honey Pie" in a Beatles book before I first bought the group's White Album in 1981, when I was fifteen.  With a name like that, "Wild Honey Pie" promised to be an intriguing track.  

Then I actually heard it.

What the heck was this?  Less than a minute or so of Paul McCartney (below) playing a demented Beach Boys-style melody on a strident guitar with the dull thump of a bass drum (also played by Paul) in the background as Paul sings a multi-tracked vocal of what Ringo Starr would say was "about five words?"  The Beatles didn't even think it was necessary to include the words to "Wild Honey Pie" on the lyric sheet that came with the album.

"Wild Honey Pie" is a curiosity, but a tuneful one; it gets better with each listen.  But there's nothing particularly profound  about it; rather, it's just Paul experimenting with a tape machine and seeing what he could pull off by himself with a good bit of ad-libbing. Paul was always the most easily adept Beatle, able to come up with a melody out of nowhere and come up with some words to go with it on the drop of a hat.  At times, this talent has led to great songs like "Yesterday," while at other times it's produced a carefree, spontaneous sound that allowed him to experiment and enjoy himself a bit.  It was that vibe that fueled the recording of his first solo album in 1970, on which he played all the music; if the White Album was actually the beginning of the Beatles's solo careers, "Wild Honey Pie" was a sneak preview of Paul's down-home, laid-back approach to going it alone.

"Wild Honey Pie" evolved from a singalong Paul messed around with along with some of the other participants in the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation course at Rishikesh.  While the Beatles were recording the White Album, Paul decided to do something with it.  "We were in an experimental mode," Paul told his official biographer Barry Miles, "and so I said, 'Can I just make something up?' I started off with the guitar and did a multi-tracking experiment in the control room or maybe in the little room next door. It was very home-made; it wasn't a big production at all. I just made up this short piece and I multi-tracked a harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and built it up sculpturally with a lot of vibrato on the [guitar] strings, really pulling the strings madly."

For those who still find "Wild Honey Pie" a waste of time (albeit a brief one), you can blame George Harrison's first wife Pattie (below) for its release. Explaining that he wasn't sure about putting it out, Paul said that Pattie "liked it very much so we decided to leave it on the album."

"Wild Honey Pie" is a quintessentially British artistic device - a link within a larger whole, placed there to keep the work flowing.  As used in comedy, particularly in Monty Python episodes, it adds to the humor and the satire; in music, it demonstrates the artiste's ambition.  In the case of the Beatles, "Wild Honey Pie" shows that not only does the band have enough material for a double album, there's even some to spare.