George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
Re-interpreting the impact of a masterpiece
Rock ’n’ Roll with Me is an email newsletter presenting one or more of my favorite danceable rock ’n’ roll songs, from the sixties onwards, along with some fun facts and memories.
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Our song of the day
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the seventh track on The Beatles album (aka the White Album) released in November 1968, is one my favorite songs ever, and I’ve often wondered about the story behind it.
Fortunately, my friend Anna gave me a copy of The Beatles Anthology she didn’t want anymore (thank you, Anna!), in which George Harrison gives his recollections on the writing and production of that song. I’ve found other sources representing people who were also directly involved in the making of the album — fellow Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney, guitarist Eric Clapton, and sound engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott — and pieced together the story.
I wanted to hear from people who were there, not people who were speculating or opining on what happened, and doing so has shifted my thinking not only about the evolution of the song, but also about the role that that particular song played in the history of the Beatles as a group that was soon to fall apart.
First, let’s take a close listen to the 2009 remaster of the version that appeared on the album. I was going to include the actual original but couldn’t find it online, and the 2018 mix has sparked wildly divergent reactions — from enthusiastic acceptance to derision and rejection — from musicians and fans, so I’ve opted not to use that. As you listen, the question to ask yourself is, what kind of song is this, and does it meet the expectations of a Beatles song?
To respond to any of you who say ‘I thought you’re only covering danceable songs,’ I agree that nowadays you wouldn’t dance to that. But back in the day we could dance to anything with a fast enough beat — with our arsenal of groovy sixties moves.
The song that George actually brought to the recording session at EMI’s Abbey Road studios on July 25th of that year was not danceable, however. It was a slow, plaintive acoustic version, included later as track 16 on the Anthology 3 compilation album put out in 1996. If you haven’t heard this beautiful acoustic solo by George, you’re in for a treat:
The other Beatles had heard the song already when they had gathered at George’s Esher home Kinfauns two months earlier to review the 27 songs they wished to be considered for the album and make preliminary recordings. The Esher demo of the song is noticeably livelier and includes a verse George later discarded. This just might be my favorite version.
After EMI recording sessions of the song with the full band on August 16th and then on September 5th, George recounted that he believed “they weren’t taking it seriously…so I went home that night thinking, ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ because I knew the song was pretty good.”
As usual, George’s compositions were taking a backseat to those of John and Paul. And yet, as EMI recording engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, George had just composed, produced, and released Apple Record’s first single as a label, the hard rock debut of Jackie Lomax called “Sour Milk Sea,” and knew exactly what he wanted, using Paul on bass, Ringo on drums, and his friend Eric Clapton on guitar. He was growing in confidence and coming into his own as a songwriter and producer.
This was the context in which Beatles history was made the following day on September 6th. Eric Clapton drove into London with George and, either when they were driving or upon arrival at the Abbey Road studios (their accounts vary), George asked him to come in and play on “When My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Eric was taken aback, flattered, and nervous, and didn’t even have his guitar with him. He protested that no one had ever played on a Beatles record and the others wouldn’t like it, but George insisted. “Look, it’s my song and I’d like you to play on it.”
When George brought Eric into the studio and announced to the others that Eric was going to play on the song, no one protested. Perhaps John was amenable because, as he later shared in a Rolling Stone interview, he and George had wanted to bring other exceptional artists like Billy Preston into the group but “they were never allowed.” He was also friends with Eric, and further, as Geoff Emerick observed, John and George seemed to be the only Beatles getting along during the making of the White Album.
Ringo might have been particularly supportive because, when he returned after having walked out in upset at the acrimonious climate in the recording sessions and stayed away for two weeks, George had been the one to welcome him back by decorating his drum kit with flowers.
Paul was perhaps the one most likely to protest under the circumstances, but as he shared in the Beatles Anthology, Eric “was very nice, very accommodating and humble and a good player…It was good fun actually. His style fitted well with the song and I think George was keen to have him play it — which was nice of George because he could have played it himself and then it would have been him on the big hit.” (p.306)
George’s own view was that Eric being there made everyone behave better and take it seriously, as he noted happened again when Billy Preston joined them on Let It Be. Paul “got on the piano and played a nice intro,” and Eric nailed his guitar part in one take. When they finished, John and Paul were non-committal but Eric thought the song “sounded fantastic,” and said that George seemed happy as he listened to it again and again in the control room, adding effects and doing a rough mix.
The song, as we know, made it onto Side 1 of the double album and Eric Clapton proved correct. The song was ranked 135th in Rolling Stones’ poll of musicians, critics, and industry figures for “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and placed a whopping seventh (7th) in the “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time” and tenth (10th) in “The Beatles’ 100 Greatest Songs,” not to mention that Clapton’s contribution was ranked 42nd in Guitar World’s “100 Greatest Guitar Solos” (2008).
But, as I hinted above, this song played a special role in the history of the group and, I would contend, helped to hasten its breakup. George had not only impelled the group into a violation of tradition by bringing Eric Clapton into the inner sanctum of their recording sessions as a participating musician, but he had also placed his musical stake in the ground alongside John Lennon’s — on one side of the emerging chasm between two diametrically opposed musical directions that were, one could argue, being forced upon the rock ’n’ roll industry in the late 1960s.
Before I explain, listen to this performance of “When My Guitar Gently Weeps” by rockers Prince, Tom Petty (the Heartbreakers), Jeff Lynne (ELO), Steve Winwood (Traffic, Blind Faith), and George’s son Dhani in 2004, when George was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — alongside Prince and Traffic. Prince does a knockout version of Eric Clapton’s solo. But what does this rendition tell us about the song?
As Bob Stanley explains in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (2013), if we go back to late 1967, we find a major inflection point in rock ’n’ roll that ushered in a split between pop music aimed at radio and TV audiences on the one hand and album-oriented rock on the other. The British Government passed the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act and in one fell swoop shut down Radio Caroline, Radio London, and other pirate stations broadcasting rock ’n’ roll music from a few miles off the coast in international waters and replaced them with one state-owned station, BBC Radio 1, on which middle-aged DJs played ‘safe’ pop music. In reaction to this aggressive and deliberate imposition of the music of ‘the Man’ aimed at parents and ‘grannies,’ many in the UK rock ’n’ roll world responded by jettisoning softness and orchestration and becoming louder, heavier, more political, and more belligerent. Of course, this paralleled other developments occurring on the other side of the Atlantic with the progression of the Vietnam War and the effect of the counterculture and the protest movement on music.
Six months later the Beatles are making the White Album and the battle lines between the old and the new have been drawn, with Paul on one side, John and George on the other, and Ringo as the drummer for everyone caught in the tumultuous middle. John, as usual, insisted on making his songs “Revolution I” and “Revolution 9” first, and turned the amp to ear-splitting level to get distortion because he wanted it to sound “dirtier” and “nasty,” such distorted guitar sounds having been introduced by such acts as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The same was repeated on “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” with John and George turning their volume so high that Paul couldn’t compete and had to overdub his part later. John was quoted by Geoff Emerick as saying “This is the direction the Beatles should be going in from now on.”
Paul apparently had a big row with John over “Revolution 9,” which he didn’t see as Beatles music or the direction the group should be going in, and which he didn’t want included on the album. He in turn brought the song “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” as his first song to record, which John in turn hated and called “granny music shit.” In his 1971 Rolling Stone interview, John observed that “Rock & roll is going like jazz,” whereas he considered himself “in the avant garde of rock & roll,” and placed Paul firmly on the opposing side by calling his post-Beatles McCartney album as “rubbish…’light and easy.’”
What the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame performance exemplifies is that George, like John, chose to abandon the ‘pop rock’ past that had defined the Beatles and follow his friends Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones into what came to be known as ‘hard rock.’ Whereas Paul’s collaborators in later years would be such artists as Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett, and pop superstar Lady Gaga, George would go on to co-found with Jeff Lynne the supergroup Traveling Wilburys, with Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty.
I’m not a rock historian and expert, but what my reading about the making of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” suggests to me is that this song was at the epicenter of the rock ’n’ roll faultline that, through accelerating and unstoppable political, economic, social, and cultural developments, eventually cracked the earth wide open and sent the Beatles (as well other middle-of-the-road pop-rock groups) hurtling to a much too early demise.
What I’m also saying is, it wasn’t Yoko (or “the wives,” as some contended). As much as it tickles my fancy to think that one tiny woman could sit quietly in recording sessions and exercise such awesome invisible power that she brought down the longstanding creative and business partnership of four remarkably self-assured, talented, and willful men, I’m not buying it.
I believe that, in the main, the Beatles’ demise was down to irreparable creative differences, exacerbated by discovering that they were bankrupt, losing their long-time manager Brian Epstein, and instigating the chaos that was Apple. (The documentary Beatles, Hippies and Hells Angels: Inside the Crazy World of Apple provides an eye-opening review of these factors.)
That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it…for now, at least.
Some fun facts
One of the ongoing controversies surrounding this song is who played bass. Although credited to Paul, the Youtube channel You Can’t Unhear This makes a case (see video below) for it possibly being John on a six-string Fender Bass VI, one of the pieces of evidence being that producer George Martin’s son, Giles, said in an NPR interview that John did indeed play said instrument on the track. However, as someone in the comments below the Youtube video shared, George Harrison himself indicated otherwise in a November 1987 interview in Guitar magazine (quoted in Beatlesongs by William J. Dowlding, Fireside Books 1989): "‘When we laid that track down, I sang it with the acoustic guitar, with Paul on piano, and Eric and Ringo - That's how we laid the track down. Later, Paul overdubbed the bass on it.’”
On the other hand, the recording engineer for the session, Ken Scott (after Geoff Emerick abruptly quit) recalled in his autobiography, Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, that the four-string bass was doubled by a six-string bass on that as well as some other songs on the White Album, and that the two basses were "always played together, and never overdubbed individually," which would suggest that Paul and John overdubbed the bass together.
Whatever you conclude, I recommend viewing You Can’t Unhear This’s video (below), as he reviews the evolution of the song from its earliest version (Esher demo) and isolates the sounds of the different instruments in the final version that appears on the White Album. It’s a fascinating look into the construction of the song. You might also find it fun to listen to Take 27 in which George gives his lunch order right before launching the band into the song.
Questions for discussion in the comments
Which version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is your favorite?
Soft rock, hard rock, yacht rock, punk rock? Eenie-meenie-miney-moe — where do you end up?
How many rockstars does it take to change a lightbulb? (Finish the joke.)
Paul or John, who do you think played the bass, and why?
Were you diverted, perverted, inverted, alerted too? (Explain.)