Due to his understated nature, it took a while for The Beatles to allow George Harrison to be more prominent in the songwriting process, and even then, he still needed to struggle to get his efforts brought to life. However, for arguably his greatest composition, Harrison had an ace up his sleeve that trumped his bandmates to the point that they allowed him to go ahead and capture it in all its glory without so much of a whisper of complaint.
Of course, the song in question is ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, taken from 1968’s The White Album. Notably, Harrison’s ace was his close friend, Eric Clapton, the day’s foremost guitarist, whose presence even John Lennon and Paul McCartney could not question. While Harrison first recorded the track as a sparse effort containing an acoustic guitar and harmonium, he later recorded it with the whole group, opting for a more full-bodied approach featuring Clapton’s lead lines, which many people have long wrongly deemed Harrison’s.
As fans of the pair will know, it was one of numerous collaborations between Harrison and Clapton during this period. It was followed by the track ‘Badge’ for the latter’s pioneering psychedelic supergroup, Cream.
When speaking to Guitar World in 1987, Harrison recalled how Harrison came to star on the track and miraculously revealed that his other band mates, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, “were not interested in it at all” when he first worked on it with them. However, his decision to enlist Clapton suddenly changed their mind.
He told the publication: “No, my ego would rather have Eric play on it. I’ll tell you, I worked on that song with John, Paul, and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all. And I knew inside of me that it was a nice song. The next day I was with Eric, and I was going into the session, and I said, ‘We’re going to do this song. Come on and play on it.’ He said, ‘Oh, no. I can’t do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles records.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s my song, and I want you to play on it.’”
“So Eric came in, and the other guys were as good as gold–because he was there. Also, it left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal. So Eric played that, and I thought it was really good. Then we listened to it back, and he said, ‘Ah, there’s a problem, though; it’s not Beatley enough’–so we put it through the ADT [automatic double-tracker], to wobble it a bit.”
Listen to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ below.
