“Just Like Honey” by THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
A bittersweet honey, from '70s Japanese guitar distortion pedals to Lost In Translation -- it's so good, so good.
Listen to the girl
The love song is its own meta-genre, a bundle of tropes that cuts across eras and styles. Songs about loves lost, found, and unrequited have been popular music’s most prevalent theme since it was first put down on wax; the slower ones get called ballads, which carries it back even further, to the oral storytelling traditions of folk culture. That makes the modern love song both easy and very, very hard to do. There’s an inherent romance in writing a song for someone, but how do you not make it as trite as rhyming “moon” and “June”? You make it, like love often is, fraught and messy.
The Jesus and Mary Chain were a messy band. Jim and William Reid drenched songs in a record-setting levels of feedback, swamping their pretty melodies — straight out of ‘60s American pop — in a squall of noise. The band played short sets (“There’s no band alive that’s good enough to play for longer than 20 minutes”) and mostly with their backs to the audience, two things that would get bottles thrown at the stage. They’d sometimes throw them back, or brandish a mic stand at the crowd. This incipient violence added to the band’s mystique. Actual violence then became the draw for an element looking for just that sort of thing, which resulted in canceled gigs and the band being banned in some municipalities. This scene, much more than the music, got them called the “new Sex Pistols” in the British tabloids. It was also around this time that the NME called them “the best band in the world.”
“Just Like Honey” was the band’s third single and reached #45 on the UK charts in 1985. It’s also the first track on the band’s debut album, Psychocandy. The song begins with an echoing solo drum beat lifted straight from Hal Blaine’s1 famous intro to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.”2 Where Phil Spector commanded a rock orchestra to create his wall of sound for “Be My Baby,” William Reid cranked a hollow-body guitar through a Japanese fuzz-wah pedal from the ‘70s3. The Jesus and Mary Chain weren’t alone among their contemporaries in their love of guitar feedback, where the amplified sound from the guitar is picked up by the guitar itself and amplified again and again and again. Bands like My Bloody Valentine turned feedback into a central part of compositions, where it sounds like both a tornado siren and the tornado itself. “Just Like Honey,” however, sounds tender — and not just by comparison.
Walking back to you
Is the hardest thing that
I can do
That I can do for you
For you
The song isn’t a me + you = happily ever after fantasy. Neither is it one of pained unrequited love or even simple desire. It’s somewhere uncomfortably in between. All that fuzzed-out noise cloaking Jim Reid’s impassive vocal gives the otherwise winsome song its crepuscular tone: This is a love caught somewhere between the coming and the dying of the light. The pull of “Just Like Honey” is in how it embodies that messiness — insecurity, wounded pride, and those moments where none of that matters because, as the lyrics put it, “it’s so good, so good, it’s so good.”
“Just Like Honey” memorably scores the last goodbyes in the closing scene of Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, a film that found a certain poetry in love’s in-between spaces. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s song itself ends with the title repeated a dozen times by Reid and backup singer Karen Parker. Their vocals are perfectly out of synch; it’s the resonant, messy sound of two people not quite in harmony, holding onto something naturally sweet and delicious but maybe not enough to sustain.
9 Song Playlist
The Jesus and Mary Chain liked to keep their sets under a half hour, so this playlist is, too.
Please Listen
Not for me, but for John and Mark, who are kind enough to use their skills and professionalism to make it sound like something real.
Thank You
Thanks to those of you who’ve shared this newsletters to friends who might enjoy it. It feels like the audience for The Best Song Ever (This Week) is all friends of friends, which is pretty great. Speaking of friends, Pamela was a champ this week with her support and encouragement.
You’ve seen The Wrecking Crew documentary, yes? If not, I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.
The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson called “Be My Baby” the “greatest pop record ever made.”
Mostly a Shin-ei Companion WF-8, you big nerd