While My Guitar Gently Weeps: Why it’s a Masterpiece

It’s hard to believe that its been 50 years since the Beatles released ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, because the song still sounds modern. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. It continues to show up in movies, in cover versions and on critics’ lists of the best songs of all time.

So why has it lasted so long?

Well, there are a lot of reasons. The Beatles wrote it just after their legendary abum Sergeant Pepper, so they were at the height of their popularity and skill, not to mention they had crap loads of money to spend in the studio. They had also just gotten their hands on the new eight-track recording machine, which allowed them to get even more ambitious with their compositions.

All of these points are valid, but I think you can’t understand why ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is so iconic without also understanding what happened the year it came out.

1968 was a year of social and political turmoil. It began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which led to massive anti-war protests. It also saw the Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia, which the Soviet Union violently crushed, and mass student movements taking place in countries like France.

And then Martin Luther King was killed.

Martin Luther King’s assassination sparked widespread racial violence in the United States. All of this upheaval ended up scaring a lot of people, who voted for Richard Nixon, who promised to bring back law and order. But in Nixon’s mind, law and order meant cracking down even harder on the counterculture.

In other words, 1968 marked the end of the era of optimism that had defined the early 60s.

George Harrison, who wrote the ‘While my Guitar Gently Weeps’ seems to be darkly aware of this. On the song, he revisits the theme of universal love, which the Beatles had explored several times before in songs like ‘All You Need is Love’ and ‘The Word’. In these songs, the Beatles expressed their belief in love’s ability to solve the world’s problems. But ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is the opposite. As the theology professor Dale Allison writes in his analysis of the song: the theme is that “love has not conquered all”.

Part of what makes the song so effective is that Harrison uses the music itself to convey this idea. It’s one of the few Beatles songs that uses totally different instruments in its demo and album versions. Sonically, the final version is heavier and more stripped back. It’s a complete rejection of the over-the-top psychedelic rock the Beatles themselves helped pioneer two years earlier. And where the Beatles’ 1967 songs were complex, with various sections and interludes and sometimes entire orchestras, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is brutally simple. It’s built around two verses in A minor and a bridge in A major, followed by an outro where the lead vocals drop away and Harrison leaves us with just the guitar by itself.

The lyrics are also simple. There’s none of the fantasy imagery or long narratives that had defined Sergeant Pepper. Instead, Harrison presents us with straightforward 4-line verses in an alternating rhyme scheme. This pattern only changes over the bridge, where Harrison uses a repetitive rhyme scheme that he says was a nod to Bob Dylan’s lyrical style.

Each of these sections is addressed to an unnamed ‘you’. A lot of critics think the ‘you’ Harrison is referring to here are the members of the Flower Power generation who tried to bring about social change but who failed to do so, as the events of 1968 showed. Others think Harrison’s addressing the Beatles themselves, along with other musicians of their time, who claimed to be helping that movement through their music, but who actually did little to change the lives of ordinary people. Rather than being revolutionary, Harrison is saying, rock music — even the Beatles’ music — was just co-opted by the system as yet another commodity to be bought and sold.

During all the chaos of 1968, a lot of the Beatles’ fans were looking to them as a kind of guide. With ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, Harrison seems to say sure, “I’ll be your guide, but I’m not going to give you what you want. You won’t get a cheesy love song or a psychedelic epic, and I’m not going to let you off the hook.” Instead, he gives us the Beatles at their most direct and honest — and pessimistic.

For those of us who weren’t there, we can never really imagine how it felt to live through 1968. But when we listen to ‘While my Guitar Gently Weeps’, for the space of 4 minutes and 45 seconds, it almost feels like we can. Thanks for reading.