2a. While My Guitar Gently Weeps

“Then it switches to playing two-note or three-note clusters in the verses, going chug … chug or chug-chug-chug. In the chugging bass sections, in many cases, but not all, Paul plays two-note chords on the bass, rather than single notes. These distorted bass chords are much of what makes the song feel heavy.”

George Harrison suffered from being the third songwriter in a band where the first two songwriters were among the best in history. It must have taken enormous courage to present his songs to the band, knowing that his bandmates would probably come along with songs of the calibre of “Eleanor Rigby” or “Norwegian Wood”. In the early days, especially, it would have been like trying to compete in the high jump competition at the Olympics without technique, training or experience. In hindsight we know he had the potential, but nobody knew that then. Geroge was well aware of the challenge he faced. In Melody Maker he said, “when you’re competing against John and Paul, you have to be very good to even get into the same league” (Rodriguez 2012, p.68).

John and Paul were both very strong personalities and straight talkers, so George got some frank feedback about the quality of his songs. There is a recording of a meeting between John, Paul and George in September 1969, where Paul said, “Well the thing is, I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George’s. Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours” (Fawcett, 1977). Paul’s comment does seem to under-rate George’s songs on the White Album, and what about “Taxman”? But I do agree that George’s songs improved a lot between 1963 and 1968. John and Paul’s attitudes were shaped by his earlier songs, and they were slow to recognise that the best of his later contributions were “at least as good as ours”.

This slow recognition was part of a general pattern where The Beatles tended not to praise each other even when praise was warranted. Here’s a quote from an interview George gave to Crawdaddy magazine in 1977.

“I had a little encouragement from time to time, but it was very little. It was like they were doing me a favour. I didn't have much confidence in writing songs because of that. Because they never said, 'Yeah that's a good song.'”

Going beyond lack of encouragement, John didn’t even play on a bunch of George’s later songs: “Savoy Truffle”, “Long, Long, Long”, “Here Comes the Sun” and “I Me Mine”. In part this is explained by the fact that John was recovering from a car accident during the recording of “Here Comes the Sun” and he had quit the band before they recorded “I Me Mine”. But the absence of John on a number of George songs, and his minimal contribution to some others, including “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, must have been noticed by George.

Clearly, it was hard for George. In the Crawdaddy interview, he talked explicitly about his problems getting songs included on Beatles albums.

“They had such a lot of tunes and they automatically thought that theirs should be priority. So for me, I'd always have to wait through 10 of their songs before they'd even listen to one of mine. That was why 'All Things Must Pass' had so many songs, because it was like I'd been constipated.” (http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1977.0200.beatles.html)

He’s got a fair point, although the number 10 is exaggerated. Of the tracks The Beatles released between 1965 and 1970, if you break it down by songwriting contributions, John wrote 56, Paul wrote 61 and George wrote 21 (Pannell 2023). That comes to one George song for every 5.5 Lennon and McCartney songs. George was more productive than he thought.

So we come to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

{extract of second verse}

This is clearly an outstanding song, but one George presented before his songwriting was really respected by the others. “While My Guitar …” is one of the highlights of side 1 of the White Album, which is a side that is brimming with highlights. Even with this excellent song, George felt that John and Paul were still not taking his work seriously enough. Here’s what he said about it in the Anthology book.

 “We tried to record it, 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. It wasn't happening. They weren't taking it seriously and I don't think they were even all playing on it, and so I went home that night thinking, 'Well, that's a shame,' because I knew the song was pretty good.

The next day I was driving into London with Eric Clapton, 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.' I said, 'Look, it's my song and I'd like you to play on it.'

So he came in. I said, 'Eric's going to play on this one,' and it was good because that then made everyone act better. Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously.” (The Beatles 2000).

In Eric Clapton’s 2007 autobiography he reinforces George’s point. He says that, while Lennon and McCartney were "fairly non-committal", he thought the track "sounded fantastic".

That gives us a clear picture of George’s position in The Beatles in mid 1968, and his dissatisfaction with it. Now I’ll go back in time and talk about the writing of the song.

Songwriting

The prompt for writing “While My Guitar …” arose from George’s interests in Eastern religions. Here’s another George quote from the The Beatles Anthology book that explains how the song came about.

“I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, “The Book of Changes”. In the West we think of coincidence as being something that just happens. … But the Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and there’s no such thing as coincidence – every little item that’s going down has a purpose. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was just a simple study based on that theory. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book. … I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw “gently weeps”, then laid the book down and started the song.” (The Beatles 2000, p.306)

Whether or not you agree that there is no such thing as coincidence, the approach sure inspired a wonderful song.

Rolling Stone (2010) speculated that the source of the “gently weeps” phrase may have been a poem from 1849 called “Rain on the Roof” by Coates Kinney. It includes the lines, “And the melancholy darkness / Gently weeps in rainy tears”. This poem is included in several of Kinney’s books, including Lyrics of the Ideal and the Real, from 1888. It doesn’t seem highly likely that this was sitting on a bookshelf at Harry and Louise Harrison’s house, where George wrote the song, but you never know.

Given the theme of the song, it might seem like something that George would have written while the band was in India in February/March. They did write dozens of songs while they were there. It may have been the most concentrated burst of song writing in their whole history. But this wasn’t one of those songs. In fact, as I said, he wrote it at his parents’ house. This was the house that George bought for them in late 1965, to help them escape from Beatles fans hanging around their house in Liverpool. It was a bungalow in Appleton Thorn, near Warrington, which is about halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. Interestingly, in one interview about the song, he refers to it as his Mother’s house, although his Dad lived there too! I wonder whether his mother stood out more in his mind because of her strong outgoing personality, while his father was relatively quiet. Of all The Beatles’ parents, George’s Mum was the most supportive and enthusiastic when it came to the band, particularly in their early days.

It isn’t clear from the published information whether George wrote the song before or after the Beatles’ trip to India.

Music

The White Album version starts with an instrumental introduction, which is basically half a verse with the singing replaced by an improvised piano part played by Paul.

{extract of intro}

This piano part in the intro is a trademark of the song, and even George was complementary about it in a later interview.

“When it came time to do the occasional song of mine – although it was usually difficult to get to that point – Paul would always be really creative with what he’d contribute. For instance, that galloping piano part on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ was Paul’s, and it’s brilliant right to this day. On the Live In Japan album, I got our keyboardist to play it note for note.” (George Harrison, 1992, Guitar World, January 2001)

It’s a bit ironic that a song about a guitar is introduced by a memorable piano line, although of course Clapton’s lead guitar features in the rest of the song.

The other most prominent element of the intro is also played by Paul – the descending bass line, A, G, F#, F.

{extract of descending bass line}

The Beatles included descending bass lines in a number of songs, including “For No-one”, a song of Paul’s, and “Dear Prudence”, a John song.

You may have raised your eyebrows when I said that it was Paul playing bass, because the official word by Kevin Howlett in the Super Deluxe Edition book is that it was John. I’ll present my case that it was Paul later on.

At the end of the intro, we hear the first interjection of Clapton’s lead guitar.

{extract of Clapton’s guitar}

As well as Clapton’s two long solos, these improvised interjections occur regularly throughout the song, in the gaps between George’s singing.

After the intro, the general structure of the song is: verse, middle eight, verse, guitar solo, middle eight, verse, guitar solo, and that second solo continues and is faded out. The sections I’m calling middle eights are located where you would expect a chorus to be, but they don’t have the sing-along flavour of a chorus, partly because the words are different in the two middle eights.

There are no timing or structural surprises in the song. The verses and middle eights are each 16 bars long and the song is in 4/4 time throughout.

In terms of the chord sequences, it’s fairly simple. There are only two main chord sequences in the song. There is the sequence in the middle eight, which is in A major and includes chords you commonly hear in A major like F#m, C#m, and E. And then there is the chord sequence used in every other part of the song: the intro, the verses, the guitar solos and the fade out. This starts in A minor, with the descending bass line, and then includes F, G, D, C and E, with some embellishments. It’s interesting that there is no overlap in the chords between the verse and the middle eight, apart from the E that finishes both sequences and provides the transition into the next section.

In each verse, the same chords and the melody are almost repeated twice, but not quite. For the first “weeps”, the chord is D and the note in the melody is A.

{extract of “weeps” part at end of second line of verse}

The second time around, the chord for “weeps” is C and the melody goes up to a higher C.

{extract of “weeps” part at end of the verse}

It’s a small change but it makes a big difference. The C chord near the end of the verse combined with the higher melody note creates a strong sense of the song building up for the middle eight.

The verse has a relatively melancholy feel, due to all the minor chords it includes and the sparse bass line. In the middle eight, the feel is quite different, largely due to a combination of the switch to major chords and the change in the bass part to a more active, snakey part.

{extract of bass from middle eight}

The way that the instruments are arranged means that the song builds in intensity as it progresses. The bass contributes to that. It starts off very simply with one note per bar in the intro and most of the first verse.

{except of start of bass part}

Then it switches to playing two-note or three-note clusters in the verses, going chug …. chug or chug-chug-chug. In the chugging bass sections, in many cases, but not all, Paul plays two-note chords on the bass, rather than single notes. These distorted bass chords are much of what makes the song feel heavy.

Various other elements are added to the arrangement as the song progresses, contributing to the building intensity. These include harmony vocals in the verses by Paul, castanets on the verses, a tambourine in the solo, the snakey bass parts in the middle eights, a high-pitched organ played by George, and George’s vocal improvisations during the second guitar solo and fade out. It’s a full arrangement, facilitated by their first use of EMI’s eight-track tape recorder, but it doesn’t feel too busy or crowded.

So, it is essentially a simple structure but cleverly arranged to create building intensity and the rather foreboding mood of the song. The different moods of the verses and the middle eights provide variety and energy. Ironically, the parts that sound more positive musically – the middle eights – have more negative lyrics. Let’s dig more deeply into the lyrics.

Lyrics

Reading the lyrics, it’s hard to see where the original idea about coincidence comes in. It seems that the coincidence element is just the use of two random words to initiate the song.

The verses seem to be about George contemplating the state of the world. He’s not delighted with what he sees, but he’s not giving up hope either. Leaving out the title lines, the first two verses say,

I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping

I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping

I look at the world and I notice it’s turning

With every mistake, we must surely be learning

There is dissatisfaction expressed there, but it’s relatively mild. Hertsgaard (1995) describes that last line, “With every mistake, we must surely be learning”, as “a plea for progress, not an affirmation”.

Then the sentiments in the middle eights are rather more negative. The first middle eight is,

I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you

If we stop and contemplate these words, they are pretty dark, as is the second middle eight,

I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted, too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you

George developed a reputation for being preachy in his songs. These lyrics do come across as preachy, or at least judgemental, but it’s not clear to me from the lyrics alone what George is unhappy about or what he’d like us to do to make things better. But given what we know about George’s spiritual awakening, which was in full flower at this time, I presume that what is bothering him most is our lack of spirituality.

Those are the lyrics in the final version, but through the process of demoing and recording the song, the lyrics changed quite a bit. In the initial demo the line about the floor needing sweeping was instead:

The problems you sow are the troubles you're reaping

Again, rather preachy. And the last verse in the initial demo was:

I look at the trouble and hate that is raging
While my guitar gently weeps
As I'm sitting here, doing nothing but ageing
Still my guitar gently weeps

By the time of the first studio recording, a quiet acoustic demo, the first line of that last verse had changed to “I look from the wings at the play you are staging”, but later he dropped that verse entirely and the last verse became a partial repetition of the first verse, somewhat simplified.

The different lyrics used in the Esher demo are shown in one of the images of George’s hand-written lyrics in his book I Me Mine, along with some other lyrics for the song that were never used. This image also provides a glimpse into George’s lyric-writing process as it shows a list of words he was obviously considering using as rhymes, including towering, toppling, wandering, wavering, whispering and wondering. Interestingly, he half-sings a similarly random list of “ing” word rhymes at the end of Take 44 of “Long, Long, Long” on the White Album Super Deluxe Edition:

{Excerpt from Long, Long, Long Take 44 “Gathering, gesturing, glimmering, glittering” and so on.}

Maybe these words were sitting on his lyric sheet for that song and he spontaneously read them out.

Although some of the verse lyrics in the demo were changed or deleted, the structure of the lyrics in the verses remained the same in all cases. In each verse the first and third lines are pairs of statements or observations that rhyme, and the second and fourth lines say “While my guitar gently weeps” or “Still my guitar gently weeps”. The exception is the last verse, where the third line is just “Look at you all”, which doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t fill the available space, but it works fine.

Overall, while the lyrics are serviceable, George didn’t have the facility with words that both John and Paul had. They had both practiced being creative with words since their mid-teenage years, and they were well-read, especially John, but George was having to develop his lyrical skills as an adult, and very much in public. The lyrics to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” are fine, but they certainly aren’t what makes it a great song.

Recording process

The White Album was the only Beatles album where they got together and recorded demos of most of the songs before going into the studio. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was one of the demos. It was probably recorded at Kinfauns, George’s bungalow in Esher, Surrey, south-west of London. As can be heard in the 2018 release of all 27 demos, they are mainly based on acoustic guitars, they employ rudimentary double tracking on the vocals in many cases, and they have pretty good sound quality. It seems likely that the Beatles themselves operated the recording equipment, although I’ve not seen this confirmed anywhere. The demo for “While My Guitar …” was recorded on May 28, 1968. As I noted earlier, it included a number of different lyrics from the final version. It also was played in a different key: F# minor instead of A minor. It was played with a capo on the fourth fret of George’s acoustic guitar, and he used a D minor fingering shape for the first chord. The final version was played using no capo and with A minor fingering, resulting in George having to sing three semitones higher. My theory on why he changed the key is that A minor would have been preferred by a blues-oriented lead guitarist, but that’s just a guess.

The original Esher demo recording included Paul playing organ or harmonium during the middle eights and the ending (Rybaczewski, undated), but this was not included in the officially released mix of that demo.

{extract of Esher demo including harmonium}

Most of the White Album songs went straight from demo versions to final recordings in the studio, but for some reason George decided to record a studio-quality demo of “While My Guitar …” at Abbey Road, on July 25, 1968. This was a couple of months into the main recording session for the White Album, reinforcing George’s comment that it took the Beatles a while to get around to doing his songs. On this studio demo version, George played acoustic guitar and Paul accompanied him on harmonium.

{extract of studio demo including harmonium}

Unlike the Esher demo, George’s lead vocal was not double tracked. Given that Paul was involved, maybe it was an attempt at making the final version, rather than a demo, but if so, George wasn’t satisfied with it. This version was recorded in G minor, up one semitone from the Esher demo, with George’s capo on the fifth fret.

Mark Lewisohn (1988) reported that, on the same day as the acoustic demo, July 25, “the Beatles rehearsed several takes, all of which were taken away by George for home listening.” It’s not clear who played on these rehearsals or what the arrangement was like. I think it’s most likely that he’s referring to the light acoustic version we have a recording of, but it might have been an early attempt at a fuller band arrangement.

About three weeks later, on August 16, George set about having it recorded as a full band version. We don’t know what key this one was in because it’s never been released or leaked. They recorded 14 basic takes of the song, with George on acoustic guitar, John on organ, Paul on bass and Ringo on drums (Lewisohn 1988). The comment by George I mentioned earlier, that “I don't think they were even all playing on it” was not true, at least on this day. Maybe he was remembering what I’ve called the studio demo. Initially, George was happy with how the first full-band version was going. The studio tapes capture him saying, “I like the way it suddenly changes into a song” (Howlett 2018). They chose take 14 as best and did further work on that. They mixed it down to two tracks to free up space on the four-track tape, combining drums and bass on one track, and organ and guitar on the other. This became take 15. The guitar was treated with flanging, and the whole thing was slowed down substantially, enough to extend the song by about a minute and reduce its pitch by about three semitones, which is a lot!

Mark Lewisohn observes that the tape boxes for this day’s sessions noted that the producer was The Beatles, rather than George Martin or Chris Thomas. They were getting a lot more independent and didn’t need the sort of guidance that they had once relied on.

Take 15 sat around for another few weeks while George thought about what to do next. When he came back to it on September 3, he worked on take 16 without the other Beatles, trying to record a backwards guitar that would sound like it was weeping. This went from 7:00pm to 3:30am, illustrating the incredibly strong focus and work ethic that The Beatles had when they were recording.

One of the studio engineers, Brian Gibson, is quoted by Mark Lewisohn: “George particularly wanted to get the sound of a crying guitar but he didn’t want to use a wah-wah pedal, so he was experimenting with a backwards guitar solo. This meant a lot of time-consuming shuttling back and forth from the studio to the control room. We spent a long night trying to get it to work.”

Notably, this session working on George’s backward solo was The Beatles’ first eight-track recording session at Abbey Road. At The Beatles’ request, their engineers liberated the eight-track machine from the office of somebody in the studio complex who had not yet finished getting it ready for use. The Beatles were apparently able to use it effectively, although it had a habit of blasting really loud noise into The Beatles’ headphones when the tape was being rewound. They greatly disliked this, but put up with it because they really wanted to use the eight-track recorder.

The day after that, September 4, they recorded the videos for “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” at Twickenham film studios.

{extract of “Revolution” from video, with doo wop vocals}

Then they were back at EMI studios on September 5th for more band work on the song. According to most accounts, this was an auspicious day because it marked Ringo’s first recording session back with the band after having quit on August 22.

Let me divert a little to comment on Ringo quitting the band at this stage. It’s very understandable that he was dissatisfied with his lot. There were several contributing factors. Now that The Beatles had quit touring, Ringo’s entire working life consisted of being a studio drummer on the other three Beatles’ songs. The White Album sessions extended over five months, and they would at times have been incredibly tedious for Ringo. He had to play dozens of takes of some songs, and on other days or nights he had to spend hours and hours sitting around waiting for one of the other Beatles to want his services. Ringo said he left partly because he wasn’t playing great, and this would be why. Mark Lewisohn quotes tape operator Richard Lush as saying “Ringo probably had the hardest job in the band, playing for hours and hours, and he probably shared the same view that we occasionally had, ‘I played that last night for nine hours, do I have to do it again?’ He had a hard job trying to please them.” That last comment reinforces my earlier point that the Beatles weren’t very good at praising each other. For once, they recognised this mistake and Ringo describes how they sent a message saying that he was the best rock and roll drummer in the world, and they covered his drum kit in flowers for when he returned, or most likely they got their roadie, Mal Evans, to do it.

Another factor influencing Ringo’s temporary departure was probably that disagreements and tensions were emerging within the band, partly because of the continuous presence of Yoko in the studio, and partly because they now had to make their own business decisions, since their manager Brian Epstein had died. Geoff Emerick quit as engineer on the sessions because of the tensions, although other engineers have said that Emerick’s complaints were somewhat exaggerated.

George Martin said, “I think they were all feeling a little paranoid. When you have a rift between people – if you go to a party and the husband and wife have been having a row – there’s a tension, an atmosphere. And you wonder whether you are making things worse by being there. I think that was the kind of situation we found with Ringo. He was probably feeling a little bit odd because of the mental strangeness with John and Yoko and Paul, and none of them having quite the buddiness they used to have. He might have said to himself, ‘am I the cause?’” (The Beatles 2000, p.312)

The third issue was Ringo’s lingering unease about his role in the band, particularly given the band’s history. The other three had been as close as they could possibly be for 10 years, Ringo was a relative late comer with only six years of shared history. You’d think that six years should have been enough, and he clearly fitted in extremely well, but it seems that it may have still played on his mind. In Anthology he said, “I left because … I felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John. … I said ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.” (The Beatles 2000).

George confirmed that these feelings of insecurity were felt by everyone. “Everybody felt the same. We were all getting cheesed off. I felt, ‘What’s the point in me being around here? They all seem so cool and groovy and I just don’t fit.’ I actually left on the next album.”

Interestingly, Ringo’s memory that he used his time away from recording the White Album to go to Sardinia and spend time on Peter Sellers’ yacht has recently been shown to be faulty. On his wonderful podcast Gimme Some Truth, Obadiah Jones showed convincingly that the trip to Sardinia happened later in the year, in October, while Ringo’s walk-out happened in August. I recommend having a listen to that episode of Gimme Some Truth for the full story.

Obadiah also casts doubt on whether September 5 was really his first recording session back in the group. It may have been the previous week. I’ll leave it until the episode on “Dear Prudence” to explore that.

Either way, we can imagine everyone getting on happily on September 5, 1968 thanks to Ringo’s return that day or earlier. As a reminder, in the previous session, two days before, the band had got to the point where there was a backing track for the first band version. It had been slowed down and transferred to an eight-track recorder, and George had painstakingly added a backwards guitar solo.

Now, according to Mark Lewisohn (1988) in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and all subsequent writers, they got on with overdubs. George added two lead vocals, and then the band added maracas, additional drums and another guitar. Then, they paused to play back where they had got to, and the result was that George decided to scrap this version entirely.

We know all the instruments and vocals that had been used on this second version of the song, because Lewisohn described them and they are listed on the tape box, which is shown in the book from the White Album Super Deluxe Edition. Unfortunately, though, we can’t hear whatever flaw George heard because this version has never been released or leaked. We have Mark Lewisohn’s word for it that it “was quite different from the released version, with less prominent Harrison vocals, and the backwards guitar and organ parts to the fore”, although those things could have been altered in the final mix. Given that it didn’t make it onto the 2018 Super Deluxe version of the White Album, and it didn’t make it onto Anthology 4, it seems possible that it may never be released, which is a pity. It’s one of very few notably different versions of a Beatles song that were comprehensively recorded but have never been released.

Before we leave version 2, there is an aspect of the standard timeline I’ve described that seems questionable. Would George really have kept adding overdubs to version 2 on September 5, as Mark Lewisohn reported, or would he have gone straight into recording version 3? Most of George’s various accounts of the day are not clear about when Eric Clapton arrived at the studio, but there is at least one where he seems to say that Eric arrived at the studio with him. In the Crawdaddy interview from 1977 he said, “The next day I brought Eric Clapton with me.” If that’s right, then the idea of Clapton sitting around while they did various overdubs seems far-fetched. More likely, the overdubs on version 2 would have been completed in the previous session on September 3 and they would have started afresh on version 3, including Clapton, on September 5. Adding weight to this theory is the fact that the tape box for take 16, which includes all the overdubs on version 2, is dated September 3, not September 5. You can check it out yourself in the White Album super deluxe book.

On the other hand, if Eric Clapton didn’t arrive at the session with George and instead came in later, maybe his arrival was the trigger for abandoning version 2 and starting version 3. I don’t think that’s the more likely scenario, but we can’t rule it out.

We’ll leave The Beatles at this point, on the cusp of recording the version of the song that made it onto the White Album. I’ll continue the complicated story of the recording of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in episode 2b.

Let me know what you think of the story so far in the comments. The transcript is available on everysoundthereis.net. Join me next time on Every Sound There Is for the rest of the story of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Theme music by Marcus Phelan with Stefan Koch. Music in the section announcements by Stefan Koch, David Pannell, and Marcus Phelan. Voice-overs by Michael Burton.

David Pannell

28 July 2026