Great Moments on Video №1: George Harrison - While My Guitar Gently Weeps
(The Concert for Bangla Desh, August 1, 1971)
In this short-length series, which I shall try to maintain on a weekly basis, I want to go over and fix in place some of the most memorable highlights of various live concerts that I have seen over the years — some from my favorite artists of all time, some from not-so-favorite artists that nevertheless managed to capture a certain je-ne-sais-quoi by accident. Some of these I have in my own DVD collection, others were simply watched on YouTube, but the necessary condition for all of them is that these are video moments to which I have returned time and time again, and which have actually made me feel better at times when I really needed it — my little bits of "musical medicine", if you wish. So this is simply a way of saying thank you to the musicians who made it happen — and, for that matter, to the film-making and sound-recording people who ensured these magic moments were preserved for us to enjoy any time we want it.
George Harrison: While My Guitar Gently Weeps
(The Concert for Bangla Desh, August 1, 1971)
Unfortunately, for copyright reasons only inferior versions are currently available on YT; any respectable music lover should try to own the entire Bangla Desh Concert DVD, though.
As unoriginal as it may be, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is my favorite Beatle-era Harrison song, and, like just about any Beatle song, it is hard to imagine it ever being improved upon in a live performance, let alone one that would also be captured on film. George himself diligently included it in the setlists of all (both?) of his concert tours, and the recording captured on the Live In Japan album (1992), with Clapton on second guitar, is certainly worthwhile, but suffers from the usual flaws so typical of live versions of Beatle songs — staying respectably close to the original, it does not throw in any interesting new ideas to make it valuable on its own.
However, I have always had a special place in my heart reserved for the Bangla Desh concert version — ever since I first heard it at the tender age of 13, not yet daring to dream that some day I’d even get to see it (for the sake of trivia, this happened during my first short visit to the US in 1989, when the generous daughter of our hostess in the God-forsaken town of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey — don’t even ask how I got there! — agreed to copy some of her worn-out and scratched LPs on tape for her Beatle-hungry young Russian guest). Back then, I had absolutely no idea of how mixed the average reaction to this particular performance has always been, from critics and fans alike; all I knew was that this performance of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, whose original version I certainly knew by heart by this time, was... unusual.
On that night, George held no special reverence for those few of his Beatle-era songs that he did perform — ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’ among them — still treating them like living, growing entities that could be amended and mutated at will, depending on, let’s say, God’s intentions on any particular day. This here ‘Guitar’, for instance, completely drops the piano intro, instead starting out brusquely and abruptly — with Billy Preston’s organ, in fact, replacing the piano as lead keyboard instrument throughout — and then goes on to introduce even more changes, so as to accommodate itself to the huge concert setting (backing vocals, for instance). All of this is definitely unsubtle, including George’s vocals which, I’ll be the first to admit, rarely, if ever, stay in key (well, technically he never got to be a great concert singer).
Then, of course, there’s Clapton. Over the years, his performance at the Bangla Desh concert, and on this song in particular, has taken a ton of flack. He was really not into it at all. His mind was not really on the concert. He was high on heroin and barely even knew what he was doing. He chose the wrong guitar for the concert, it should have been a Fender. No, it should have been the original Gibson Les Paul instead of the Gibson Byrdland model used here. His tone is too quiet. Why doesn’t he even try to play the original solo? He himself has admitted that he was far from his best form during the show.
It’s a good thing I have encountered all these criticisms only long after I have learned to love the guitar work on this version almost as much as on the original studio performance, or they might have somehow twisted the emotional impulses in my head to a bad degree. In any case, if you are new to this, it would pay off to watch and listen a few times. The most discomforting thing about the performance is the mix — there are so many players on stage that Eric’s thin, quiet, almost humble tone gets seriously buried, in stark contrast to the studio performance where, on the contrary, George Martin made the solo rise high above everything else. You have to give it some time before your ears start properly concentrating on what he is playing.
And if you do, you might just hear what I have been happy to hear for all those years: a deeply lyrical and utterly tragic sequence of bluesy phrasings, perhaps even more in an agreement with the «gently weeping» theme of the song than it was back in 1968. With no distortion or special studio processing on the guitar sound whatsoever, Eric is simply standing there and... smarting. Maybe he was not in top form — but it’s still been less than a year since he’d given some of the most soulfully expressive live performances of his career with the Dominos, and it would be hard for me to believe that a part of his spiritual torment was not active within him on that day of August in 1971, no matter how high he might have been.
The jam at the end is even more inspiring: listen, for instance, to the intense-as-hell little buildup that Eric constructs beginning with 3:22, taking off from George’s closing line, and lasts until about 3:40. It does sound thinner and weaker than the «power-wail» of the original, but in some ways, you could argue, this makes it even truer to the message of the song — the helplessness of a single person to change the world that is burning all around them. And when I was finally able to watch this rather than just hear it, I remember being almost baffled by the total and absolute lack of showmanship — see Eric just standing there, barely moving a muscle other than his fingers, with his face a complete and absolute blank as he’s pouring his heart out into those licks. It’s such a tremendous display of «anti-showfulness» that, following the law of attracting opposites, it eventually becomes the ultimate show in its own way.
When George himself joins the final jam, things become even more exciting — from a technical perspective, the Clapton-Harrison duet here is incomparable to, say, the duets with Duane Allman on ‘Layla’ or ‘Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?’, but in terms of an «emotional competition» between the two guitarists, it is just as, if not more, expressive. See how George actually moves around even more than Clapton — his wailing tone is a little thicker, deeper, sharper than Clapton’s, but where Eric lays down a smooth, uninterrupted, classically-structured series of phrases, Harrison breaks in with disrupted, isolated licks that feel dissonant next to Eric’s, yet still manage to fit in perfectly with the flow. It’s like a poet and a caveman joining their voices in distressed unison at the fate of the world — a unique and exquisite double lament that gives a whole extra dimension to the song. (At certain points, you can even see Eric looking at George and giving him a faint smile — the most «open emotion» he can allow himself here and still speaking volumes more than all the contorted faces guitarists typically pull during soloing).
The objective facts that this particular performance was captured at a particularly crappy time both for George (with his post-Beatle troubles) and Eric (with his George troubles), and for Bangla Desh and God knows for what and whom else make the performance even more poignant because you simply know how much it must have felt for them at the moment — and this, in turn, makes it poignant to watch and hear at any time when a song like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ becomes especially relevant for the world (like right about now, for instance?). Rough, crude, poorly rehearsed, and utterly brilliant in all of its raw pain.
As a post-scriptum, fast forward thirty-plus years ahead to the Concert for George, where the song was performed by at least four of the same people who were also there in 1971 (Eric, Billy, and the two drummers – Ringo and Jim Keltner), plus Paul on the «restored» piano intro. Here, it’s just Eric diligently performing all the duties, singing more on key than George and playing a perfectly rehearsed set of solos — the first one restored from the studio recording almost note-for-note, the second one more improvised — and while this is still a great performance, it also is what it is: a respectful and emotional tribute to a departed friend, rather than a collective embodiment of that barely bearable Weltschmerz that the song was in 1971. Behind Eric’s back, the rest of the band sounds like a well-oiled funeral orchestra, and everything about the performance makes it so much more watchable for the general audience — the camera work, the film quality, the perfect sound mix — but whenever I watch this, my thoughts always go back to "oh, what a wonderful human being and artist George was", as opposed to "oh, what a wonderful sort of pain it is to synergize with my own" whenever I go back to 1971.
(As a post-post-scriptum, I suppose I should also add that the most popular version of the song on YouTube is the 2004 Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame performance with Tom Petty and Prince — which simply goes to confirm the obvious truth that the average person typically values showmanship and flash above everything else; Prince’s much-lauded final solo is brilliant if you take it on Prince’s own terms, but it fits the spirit of George’s song about the same way as if you were to mash-up The Seventh Seal with a battle scene from the Vikings TV show. I’ve watched it twice, I think, and have no desire whatsoever to endure it any more; in fact, I think I’d rather hear the Jeff Healey cover instead).
So glad, you are back!
You're right, you made me see the Bangla Desh version is awesome, less is more, raw is better, all of that. The Prince version was impressive at the time (specially him coming out of nowhere) but it serves more as a showcase for his guitar playing than a service to the song. Recently I've found this Frampton/Clapton version of the song that I feel it's the non plus ultra in guitar pyrotechnics, and it's more bluessy too. Frampton can play, huh. Link at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1ijcpo1Ep8&ab_channel=Journeyman461 - And finally this acoustic little candy with a scat solo (we have to make do here :D ) by our own beloved Pedro Aznar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nL69ipD-NA&ab_channel=PedroAznar