My Amazon Reviews: John Lennon and Yoko Ono "Milk and Honey"

The Milking of The Legend Begins Here  
2 Out of 5 Stars

Three years after John Lennon was assassinated, the first of his posthumous albums appeared. "Milk and Honey" is a collection of songs that John and Yoko were working on at the time of "Double Fantasy," but were unfinished. So let's be frank about this; "Milk and Honey" is half a finished album composed primarily of John Lennon's incomplete demos and Yoko's finished works.

While in 1983, this might have been met with the still lingering pain of John's murder, 26 years later and newly remastered, this album comes up painfully short. It's interesting to hear Lennon's playfulness and the goofy ad-libs, but that is the kind of patter that would have been gone when the time for the master take was laid down. When I hear the la-la's and na-na's in "Borrowed Time," I get the feeling that Lennon was still treating the lyrics as a work in progress. Even the album's best known single, "Nobody Told Me," has such a jerky chorus vocal that I figured it to be an unfinished segment. (Even so, it's one of "Milk and Honey's" highlights.)

Only once does the roughness of the recordings transcend, and that is on Lennon's cassette demo of "Grow Old With Me." Lennon was aiming for the stars on this one, and there's a certain raw charisma that comes out of this very simple love song. There's a hint of an "Imagine" to come, had there only been the chance. Like what the surviving Beatles ultimately did with a similar cassette of "Real Love" years later, perhaps.

Yoko also gets one really great song, in the closing "You're The One," which she wrote after John's death. "In the world's eyes, we were Laurel and Hardy," she pines, only to follow that verse with "in our minds, we were Heathcliff and Cathy." It's one of the few times she's hit upon an amazing song, and it almost justifies the album's purchase. But ultimately, while not as gawd-awful as "Menlove Ave" (which not-so-mysteriously did not get in this 2010 remastering blitz), "Milk and Honey" is unfinished music, placed on the market to feed the morbidly curious. I re-bought it, yes, but now I remember why I sold it out of the collection decades ago.