‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’: The one vocal take George Harrison called “toilet singing”
When discussing The Beatles’ greatest strengths, the first thing that normally comes up is the harmonies. Although everyone from Eagles to Crosby, Stills, and Nash have made the vocals the calling card, hearing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sing in unison with each other is a sound that the musical gods practically anoint at this point. Although Harrison was always the late bloomer when it came to his own songs, he felt that he always could have sung this tune better than what he first started with.
Then again, Harrison was always the one who was a bit unsure of himself at the beginning. He always had an awareness that he was part of one of the best bands in England, but even listening to his playing on the first handful of records, you can hear him slowly get his confidence behind the fretboard, going from a few stuttering notes to playing beautiful pieces on ‘Something’.
But when he sang, his tone was always slightly different to what Lennon and McCartney were doing. He never claimed to train in the same way that Macca did to get that massive Little Richard-style yell, but listening to him playing later on in his career, his strength came less from the register of the notes and more from the conviction that he had in his voice, knowing that he went every word that he was singing.
Given how well he was progressing, it was a shame that Lennon and McCartney never had the time of day for him. They only begrudgingly helped him when he needed a few lines on tunes like ‘Taxman’, and even when he had perfect tunes to work with like ‘All Things Must Pass’, the Get Back sessions saw the group be more concerned with standard 12-bar blues affairs like ‘For You Blue’.
Hell, the only reason why ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ got pushed over the line was because of Eric Clapton coming into the session and turning in one of the best solos ever committed to tape on a Beatles record. When looking back on getting the song finished, Harrison remembered listening back to the original version of the tune he had and not liking what he heard.
Since the song had yet to have those trademark harmonies put on or the guitar solo, all Harrison heard was a fairly unconfident version of himself singing, saying, “What I was really disappointed in was take number one. I later realised what a shitty job I did singing it. Toilet singing! And that early version has been bootlegged because Abbey Road Studios used to play it when people took the studio tour.”
Listening to the solo version in isolation, though, Harrison should have had nothing to worry about. The song is admittedly a bit more lowkey than the version that wound up on the album, but by putting it in a different key, hearing Harrison’s rough vocal serves the lyrics a lot better, as if he’s gently crying alongside his instrument.
And with the new releases of the song on projects like Love, people are rediscovering what this version was supposed to sound like. The studio version might capture the drama behind a guitar weeping, but hearing Harrison in isolation like this really gets to the melancholy that comes from watching the world around him grow slightly colder.
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