Latest Breaking News Online News Portal
George Harrison may not have been given enough of a chance to write and record many of his songs for The Beatles records, but the ones he did squeeze through have become all-time greats. Tracks like Here Comes the Sun, Something, I Me Mine and I Need You are just a few examples, but one of his best-known tracks appeared on The White Album, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. However, he almost didn’t get it recorded until he started thinking outside the box.
Harrison wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps and at his mother’s house in the 1960s and instantly knew he had a hit.
When he took it to the recording studio in the following days, however, he found himself struggling to get the song laid down by the rest of the band.
“We tried to record it,” Harrison recalled. “But John and Paul were so used to just cranking out their tunes that it was very difficult at times to get serious and record one of mine.”
He noted that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were simply “not taking it seriously”. He added: “I don’t think they were even all playing on it.” Harrison went home dejected.
Harrison recalled in The Beatles Anthology: “So, I went home that night thinking: ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ because I knew the song was pretty good.”
The following day, the Quiet Beatle decided to approach recording his smash hit with a different strategy. This time around, he enlisted an outsider to help him get the song laid down.
“I was driving into London with Eric Clapton,” Harrison recalled. “And I said: ‘What are you doing today? Why don’t you come to the studio and play on this song for me?’ He said: ‘Oh, no – I can’t do that. Nobody’s ever played on a Beatles record and the others wouldn’t like it.'”
Harrison understood Clapton’s reservations, but he assured him: “It’s my song and I’d like you to play on it.”
When he arrived at the studio with Clapton, he got a reaction he didn’t quite expect.
Harrison walked into the recording studio with Clapton on his heels. He took one look at the rest of the band and said to them: “Eric’s going to play on this one”. And his comment had the perfect reaction.
“It was good because that then made everyone act better,” Harrison said. “Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously.” The song was recorded that day, and Clapton was credited as an additional musician on the song – one of the first and only.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps was never released as a single, but has since been touted as one of the Fab Four’s best songs ever written.
It also proved, yet again, that Harrison could write a hit if he was given a chance, and that it the songwriting didn’t always have to be left to Lennon and McCartney.
Looking back on writing the track, Harrison thanked a Chinese book for the inspiration he used to pen it.
“Harrison said: “I wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps at my mother’s house in Warrington. I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes… the Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and that there’s no such thing as coincidence – every little item that’s going down has a purpose.”
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps was a simple study based on that theory,” he went on. “I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book – as it would be a relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps’, then laid the book down again and started the song.”
SOURCE
