Honey Pie – Jazz Mills

August 11, 2010 in Podcast, The White Album

Recorded on July 25, 2010, original version recorded on October 1, 1968.

Jazz Mills: Vocals
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele

Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY

About the Song

Honey Pie is a Paul McCartney number from the 1968 White Album. It is a song about time travel.

Not that long ago, five thousand years or so, all human knowledge was stored in the brains of the people who happened to be alive at that particular moment. These people were genetically almost identical to us. They had the similar physical equipment, though their bodies were probably more ravaged by hunger and disease than ours.

Like us they had joy, pain, humor, anger, love, hate, sex and violence.

Like us they had music, dance, poetry and story telling

About which we know almost nothing. How incredibly tragic. I’d like to do a show for the History Channel someday, and employ the best research to try to recreate these lost creative worlds. What kind of music did the Romans play at The Coliseum between gladiator fights? What sort of songs did 10-year old Greek boys sing for Plato? What did Egyptians walk like

For most of human history music and dance was like a Buddhist sand painting, or to put it in the words of those Wizards from Kansas, “Dust in the wind.” Fleeting. Ephemeral.

It is a rather recent miracle of the last hundred years or so that allows us to hear the voice of Enrico Caruso or see the acting of Sarah Bernhardt.

Consider this. If The Beatles had been born in the 1840’s instead of the 1940’s, no one now alive would know the sound of their voices, or would ever have seen them in the movies or on TV. Those alive then could have plausibly caught them in concert though, both Dickens and Oscar Wilde toured America profitably in the 1800’s. Funny how the music business has come full circle and the financial emphasis again is on selling tickets to see the artist perform in person.

And here I am in 2010, a  record producing dinosaur, pretending the comet never hit.

Timing is everything

McCartney was never a Robespierre; he was not then nor is he now a rabble-rouser. Paul was a constitutionally conservative creature carefully navigating a rapidly shifting radical landscape. Even the “ground breaking” and “visionary” Sgt. Pepper’s album had the band posing as Late Victorian military musicians, at that time 70 years distant. The past is Paul’s territory, and one of the many magics of music is how a song can instantly remind you of a long ago time and place, and do it so completely that you feel the exact same emotion in the present that you felt back then. Whenever I hear the White Album I am instantly transported to my 7th birthday on Christmas Eve smelling a decorated pine tree and opening presents while watching the astronauts circling the moon on color TV, full of a giddy sense of excitement. How does music do that?

Because music carries a mystery voodoo juice that stores and transmits mojo from generation to generation. Because music and magic both have 5 letters, start with M and end with C and both contain an I, and neither word includes the letter E, that most common and square of letters.

Hence E=MC Hammer.

That’s what I mean by Honey Pie being about time travel. It’s about the phenomenon of a tune taking you back to a previous reality and state of mind. It’s a memory machine. That’s why you’re thinking of brightly colored baggy pants right now.

It is 40 years since Honey Pie was written and recorded. And the popular song style that Honey Pie was performed in was then 40 years old. There’s a nice counterpoint to that. And once again The Beatles here proved prescient in ways they couldn’t have anticipated or intended.

1968 marks the approximate turning point where culture and society stopped moving in the direction of modernism, innovation, and exploration, and the momentum began to sway back towards a mode of conservative curation of consensus concepts.

One interpretation of The White Album I’ve seen is that it is an homage to the history of pop music. There’s the schmaltzy Golden Age of Hollywood glamour of Goodnight, the shoot-em up Cowboy Western soundtrack of Rocky Raccoon, and a combination Chuck Berry/Beach Boys tip of the hat on Back In The USSR. George Martin and The Beatles didn’t just imitate the old styles of songwriting and singing, they also emulated the old production. That nobody had ever done before.

There is a direct aesthetic line from using the sound design of an old scratchy 78 record and Paul’s tinny lo-fi midrange 20’s replica vocal effect in Honey Pie to recording an exact historical recreation of a Motown 1966 production as heard on Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album. The Winehouse record was intended to sound as closely as possible to a 40-year-old production, albeit with modern tabloid lyrics. The difference is The Beatles did this on only one song and style at a time. Had they released an entire album in the 1960’s using 1920’s song form and technology, they would have been considered crazy. But actually now that I come to think about it, that would have been a really cool experiment.

A Sgt Pepper’s of today would not distinguish itself by audio innovation, but by conceptual restriction. The cool thing now would be to utilize not just `1890’s fashion, but 1890’s technology. You would have to have a live band playing only acoustic brass band instruments in the same room as the singers, arrayed around the horn of an Edison Phonograph. The balance and mix could only be effected by how loud everyone played and where they were placed around the room. A handle on the phonograph would be by cranked by an engineer with excellent rhythm; otherwise the recording would speed up and slow down and vary sharp or flat in pitch.

Honey Pie is written in the style of the great goofy English Vaudevillian and fierce ukulele master George Formby.

It is the most ideally suited for ukulele of any Beatle song. Certain chord changes within it, such as E flat 7 to E 7, and G to F# to F, which are awkward on piano, are super simple on uke. John should have played uke on this song, instead of the electric guitar he does play. At least it’s a nice warm jazz guitar tone though, no rockiness about it. The instrumental section is schizy. There is a cryptic and incomplete solo that John plays on guitar, it really sounds to me like the chords were too jazzy and going by too fast for him to finish the thought. Paul fills the abandoned solo space with a hammy vocal improv, using another of his multitudinous voices.

The story is a complete fiction about an imaginary relationship between a  nobody from England in love with an American Movie Starlet, a typical Music Hall trope. The twist is that in real life it was millions of anonymous American women and closeted gay men who fantasized daily about Beatle Paul, legend of stage and screen.

I really like the dorky rhyme of “You are driving me frantic, sail across the Atlantic.”

“Will the wind that blew her boat across the sea… kindly send her sailing back to me?”

“Will the wind that blew her boat” has such a lovely flow. “Kindly send her sailing” has a great rhythm. Treating the wind as a person or spirit is whimsical and pagan. Celtic.

Hats off to the vintage arrangement by George Martin. The clarinet is really the signature solo instrument of the 20’s, very period appropriate, but the voicings and harmonies of the parts are really more Big Band 30’s. Swing was really Martin’s thing, that and classical. The eighth note triplet clarinets in harmony are simultaneously flashy and old-fogeyish; a contrast that always feels wistfully Beatlesque to me.

The New Improved Roger version of Honey Pie is sung by the divine Jazz Mills. Her voice is magical and her personality is beautiful and she kicks my ass at scrabble.