(Personal reflections inspired by Beatles songs)
Song: “While My Guitar
Gently Weeps”
Album: The Beatles
Release Date: November
1968
Back in April, Boston Globe Correspondent Stuart Miller wrote a nice piece on the Beatles in recognition of their official disbandment 50 years ago to the month. Miller’s article centered around the results of an exhaustive survey he performed over the course of the prior months, whereby he asked participants to list their 30 favorite Beatles songs in order. Miller then took the feedback (he cut it off after 64 participated), developed a ranking scheme, and compiled it. His tally of the top 180 Beatles songs of all time was included in his article, where he also discussed his overall findings.
One of the key findings in Stuart Miller’s article was a big surprise to him; that being the song that came in at # 2: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFDg-pgE0Hk ). This song only got three # 1 votes, but through Miller’s ranking scheme (30 points for # 1, 29 points for # 2, and so on) it climbed almost all the way to the top (only “A Day In the Life” beat it out, which included thirteen # 1 votes).
As I close in on the final handful of Music and Memory blog entries over the upcoming months, I have to say “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” has been my biggest song-surprise of this Fab Foundations year too.
As has been the case with every one of these Music and Memory series (Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Who, Bob Dylan, Beatles), I inevitably bumped into several already-familiar songs this year that blew me away in novel ways. Sometimes it’s just the music that hits me from a new angle, and other times it’s more profound than that. The short list of surprises this year includes “Because”, “Back in the USSR”, “Birthday” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. I’ll get to more talking points about that last song (this week’s spotlight tune) soon enough. Right now, however, I’d like to take a deeper dive into the how’s and why’s of what it is that has some music hit you fast and furious, while other music is more of a slow drip of greatness.
The test of time is always telling. Pecking orders of value can end up being shuffled around and ironed out in more natural ways than initially conceived (or even fabricated). This is clearly the case in the art world, including literature, paintings, films, poetry, and music. Viewpoints change. New generations weigh in. Stereotypical opinions are overcome. Case in point, Rolling Stone magazine just released its latest top 500 albums of all time. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came in at # 24. Not bad. However, back in 1987, when Rolling Stone first did such a “top” list, this renowned album came in at # 1. More to the point, in that hot-off-the-presses “top” list, Sgt Pepper finished behind two other Beatles albums (Abbey Road at # 5, and Revolver at # 11), with several others nipping at its heals (the “White Album” at # 29 and Rubber Soul at # 35).
How do these sorts of things happen? What is it that accounts for this type of ‘market correction’? Why do cultural moods shift when it comes to value?
Back when I started blogging, I got a recommendation from my good friend Pat Shea to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The book was an eyeopener. A main theme was the protagonist’s quest for Quality (in keeping with the book’s approach I capitalize the word here). In a nutshell the answer to his quest was in a blending and balancing of rational sources of wisdom (science, reason, and technology) with seemingly irrational sources of wisdom (faith, love, trust). I tend to agree and find myself fortunate in this regard. My observation has been that it’s the rare person who strikes the right balance between their quest for scientific answers to the world’s problems with their quest for faith-based answers (which essentially cuts to the core of the meaning of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”).
We humans have an instinctual 6th sense for Quality (whether we turn to it or not is another matter). Yes, we have individual tastes as well, but when a song like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” climbs to the # 2 slot on a well-planned survey of Beatles songs, it’s more than just about individual tastes. That’s high enough up the ladder to consider that some type of cultural correction is going on.
Focusing more on that Sgt Pepper slip down the best-ever charts, which I believe is a correction in the opposite direction. A big part of the reason for this correction is related to hype. Sgt. Pepper made such a giant splash when it was released in 1967 that the ramifications lasted a good 20 years. It was a splash of psychedelia and technicolor and flower power and long hair. It germinated the summer of love. Most of the critics jumped on the bandwagon.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a lot of things, but some of it was a wee-bit superficial. When you looked under the hood there is less of a message to Sgt. Pepper than one would hope. There certainly is depth in a handful of songs, including “A Day in the Life”, “Within You Without You”, and “She’s Leaving Home” (and maybe even “A Little Help from My Friends”). But much of the rest of the album is just plain fun. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with fun. It’s just that, this sort of statement must ultimately run its course when it comes to ‘game changer’. It turns out for Sgt. Pepper that, after the dust settled, there was a shelf life in relation to its super-hyped, crème-of-the-crop reputation. This is because there was a limit to its level of Quality.
On the flip side there is a song like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, which has always been recognized as a great composition, but not necessarily a cultural crème-of-the-crop tune. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was nested deep in the 30-song double White Album; an album which was not unanimously praised by critics upon release in the way that Sgt. Pepper was. And where Sgt. Pepper was a revolution in studio innovation, pop culture, musicality and sound, the White Album was none of these things.
Also, as opposed to the release date of Sgt. Pepper (May 1967), by late 1968, great rock music was cropping up all over the place (in part, thanks to Sgt. Pepper). Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, the Velvet Underground, the Band, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Van Morrison, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, and so many others were cranking out fantastic music on a regular basis by this time. The Beatles were now simply part of the musical landscape rather than the landscape itself. Finally, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was a George Harrison song, and as late as 1968, Harrison was still trying to establish his own reputation as a serious songwriter while under the shadows of the supersized Lennon/McCartney songwriting team.
The good thing: Such conditions can put a song in prime position for a latter-day climb up the “best-ever” charts. Most of the time, such conditions won’t work for a given song or album, because that record is, in the long run, mortal. Its Quality has already been realized. Its potential has already been tapped (or even over-tapped). There’s nowhere else you can go with it. Not so for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. It’s one of those songs that clearly had a lot of upend. To me, it is on a very short list of Beatles songs that hit Pink Floyd and Who levels in terms of pure intensity (the others that come to mind include “I Want You [She’s So Heavy]”, “Oh, Darling”, “Helter Skelter” and “Don’t Let Me Down”). Songs of this ilk may run a bit longer than your standard 3-minute ditty, but rarely do they run longer than 7 minutes…. and man do they pack an additional wallop in that relatively-short extra time span.
As I’ve stated before, it has been a long while since I have listened to Beatles songs as intensely and extensively as I have this year (I want to say at least 40 years). That’s proven to be a good thing. Revisits to past experiences can have a very different effect than the initial exposure, which has much to do with all the life that has been lived in the interim. Way back when, I mostly heard Eric Clapton’s brilliant lead guitar while listening to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. This time around, I hear much more the lyrics. George Harrison wrote many serious songs in his lifetime, and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” ranks right up there in the serious department. In fact, you can feel this song through the lyrics alone.
Paul McCartney’s musical contribution to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” cannot be overstated. He is there, in the moment for his bandmate (although it took a while for George Harrison to get his attention). McCartney’s opening piano line is just as lovely as the Eric Clapton guitar solo. His harmony vocals shine too, and his bass sets the undertone to the mood. The other virtuoso musical element to the song is George Harrison’s lead vocals, which is lock step with the feel and meaning behind each-and-every line, verse, and chorus. And Harrison’s moaning at the end has the same eerie feel as the lost souls in the ‘Jacob Marley’ scenes to several of the movie adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was already partly reviewed by me in Fab Foundations # 4, which was a general overall review of side 1 of the White Album. But as the year progressed, I felt that it needed its own entry. In that Fab Foundations # 4 entry I mentioned that, through his spirituality, George Harrison gained a reputation among Beatles fans for asking the tough questions we all must face if we aim to be virtuous. In “My Guitar Gently Weeps” Harrison frames these questions more as dejected statements of fact. This is particularly poignant in the 2 bridges:
“I don’t know why nobody told you
I don’t know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you”
“I don’t know how you were diverted
I don’t know how you were inverted
No one alerted you”
The “you” being anyone who does not reach their potential, or even come anywhere close to it (i.e. most of us). Truer words could not be spoken
George Harrison was only 25 at the time he wrote “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, which goes to show you can gain deep wisdom at a young age if you focus on the right things.
Quality in this case, had been found.
- Pete
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