We got some great entries, and are delighted to post the texts of the Winner and the Runner-Up here.
First up is Sophie Meehan, a Junior Sophister (3rd year) student who took George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'.
Here's Sophie's essay in full.
Enjoy!
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS--A CLOSE READING
by Sophie Meehan
‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is George Harrison’s most
personal song. One of his more conspicuous contributions, it was written during
the Beatles collective opening up to Eastern thought and practise, both
musically and philosophically. The song is not explicitly spiritual or
religious in the same way as some of Harrison’s other Beatles and solo work
such as ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’, but examination of its
lyrics, its method of composition and its arrangement reveal more about George
and his beliefs than any other of his songs.
George Harrison wrote ‘While My Guitar gently Weeps’ as an
experiment while reading the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’ I Ching. I Ching is at its simplest a book of oracles and a
divination manual, but it is a complex book and one of the core texts of
Eastern belief systems. The core belief of the book is that coincidence does
not exist, and that every combination of elements is a work of fate and
significance. George, experimenting on this line of belief, decided to try to
write a song prompted by opening any book on a random page and writing a song
prompted by the first words he saw. The words were “gently weeps”.
I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book – as it would be relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps’, then laid the book down again and started the song.
The method of writing here is almost automatic. The prompt
words “gently weeps” give Harrison the rein to write from a natural place, to
skim the surface of his mind and lay it down into the song. John Lennon’s
‘Help!’ can also be seen to have been written in a similar way, having been
composed hastily on the back of an envelope to correspond with the naming of
the Beatles second film. If we follow the philosophy of I Ching, the naming of the film was not a coincidence, and it
certainly came at a time when John needed a cry for help. The fact that the
song was written to a prompt phrase, as with ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’,
was freeing to Lennon’s writing self. ‘Help!’ was a song waiting to be written,
it was rushed out and the lines were plucked neatly from the upper layer of
John’s mind at this time. The automatic, almost unconscious nature of its
writing made it his most personal to date. Both Harrison and Lennon found that
writing to a prompt meant they wrote very revealing and songs, and said things
they hadn’t previously had the opportunity or inclination to say. The words
“gently weeps” could have led up any number of narrative paths, but Harrison
used the prompt to write the most personal and introspective song of his whole
career. In ‘Gently Weeps’ , George speaks both to and from himself, and it is
neither a love song nor a devotional mantra. It is so personal that it seems to
shy away from itself. Lines that can be read as comments on George’s personal
life are followed by reestablishments of distance. For example in the lines
I look
at you all see the love there that’s sleeping
While
my guitar gently weeps
I look
at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
While
my guitar gently weeps
George goes from what is almost definitely a comment on the
Beatles ailing friendships at the time of the White Album sessions in the first
line, to reverting back to the irrelevant everyday detail of a dirty floor. By
making a profound statement on love and following it with a banal commentary of
every day life, George gently reminds us of the “space between us all/And the
people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion” that he’d previously
written of in ‘Within You Without You’.
In the line “I look
at you all see the love there that’s sleeping” George extricates himself from
the Beatles and views them from a solitary standpoint. The line speaks both inwardly and outwardly
simultaneously, and this is something Harrison does much in the song, and as a
songwriter in general. While it faces inwardly to the Beatles daily lives of
recording tension, it faces outwardly to the world at large. George’s aim as a
songwriter and as a person was to make people see themselves as one part of the
universe as a whole, both spiritually and physically. One of the core beliefs
of the Eastern philosophies of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness that George subscribed to is that we are part of a whole, every
being has a soul and our every action has an impact on the universe. In his
songs, Harrison aims to make people aware of the distractions facing them in
daily life and allow them to view the world in a more spiritual way. He does
this even on deceptively simple songs like ‘Here Comes The Sun’, with the sun
being the source of all life and energy, but ever-present and all too easy to
ignore and take for granted. The “sun, sun, sun, here it comes” segment is
redolent of a repetitive Hare Krishna mantra, the aims of chanting being to
transcend the daily concerns of life and reach a higher plain of consciousness.
In the lyrics of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, George
Harrison speaks to himself by speaking about himself. George would have never
been able to write this song in the first person, but by addressing an unnamed
“you”,
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
How to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you
,he is
speaking about his upbringing, his fame, and his eventual spiritual
enlightenment. George grew up in working
class Liverpool in the 1940s and 50s, and only after the Beatles reached
mainstream success did he find his “home”, the spiritual sanctity of India that
somewhere inside he must always have longed for. Nobody had told him how to
unfold his love in the way that the Eastern spiritual practises he was to adopt
under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar were to teach him. He speaks again both
inwardly and outwardly, within himself and without himself, in lines like “I
don’t know how someone controlled
you/They bought and sold you”. This line speaks of the loss of privacy and
control the Beatles felt during the Beatlemania era.
It’s
interesting that after writing this song which spoke so strongly and deeply to,
and from, his own soul, George enlisted someone else to play on it. He recalls in the Beatles Anthology
We tried to record it, but Paul and John were so used to just cracking out their tunes that it was very difficult at times to get serious and record one of mine. It wasn’t happening...The next day I was driving into London with Eric Clapton, and I said “What are you doing today, why don’t you come into 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 want you to play on it”. (my emphasis)
While acknowledging
his ownership of the song, George still wants someone else to play on it. He is
not completely comfortable at this point with having such a personal song be
song completely his own. His invitation
to Clapton was also a way of asserting himself in the band at a time when there
was tension developing between The Beatles. Paul says in the Anthology that
“George was keen to have [Clapton] play it-which was nice of George because he
could have played it himself and then it would have been him on the big hit”.
However Clapton understood his role as a confidence booster for George when the
other Beatles weren’t taking his song seriously: “I
think it fitted a need of his and mine, that he could elevate himself by having
this guy that could be like a gunslinger to them.”
If George
had been more confident in his songwriting, and received more support from the
other Beatles, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ could have been a very different song.
Clapton’s playing on the record, while elevating the song musically to a more
timely classic rock sound, muffles George’s lyrics considerably. When making
the ‘Love’ album, Giles and George Martin used one of George’s original demos for
the song, and when Olivia Harrison protested that this was too raw, added some
orchestral backing, but used none of Clapton’s guitar. The demo, as well as
having some lyrical differences, is an altogether more introspective
arrangement, it is just George, his voice his guitar, his lyrics. George’s
vocals are brought to the fore, and more than just his vocals, his real voice
can be heard. His words, rather than being wrapped in the woolly guitar of the
recorded version, are laid bare, and his vocal is achingly soulful. Unlike
early Beatles performances, when George’ s was scarcely distinguishable from
Paul’s, this voice is definitely George Harrison, and he alone. The Scouse
accent is there, the nasality is stronger, and he borrows wavering warble
endnotes from John. On the recorded version on the White Album, the vocal is
drowned out and overshadowed by Clapton’s guitar, and George is sometimes
literally cut off mid line.
‘While My
Guitar Gently Weeps’ sprang directly from George Harrison’s feelings and
preoccupations during the acrimonious White Album sessions, and yet it is as a
result the same feelings that the song it could have been was suppressed. In
enlisting Eric Clapton to play on his song George neutralised the atmosphere in
the studio, and also neutralised his emotional, yearning song. This is why one
of the most lyrical and beautiful lyrical compositions in George Harrison and
The Beatles’ whole output has its legacy
in classic rock radio airplay, and not as a cherished example of delicately
crafted Beatles penmanship. The song spilled out from George’s unconscious, but
perhaps he wasn’t willing to believe what it was saying. The earliest
version of the lyrics are different to the completed version and the lines “The
problems you sow are the troubles you’re reaping” and “I look at the trouble
and see that it’s raging” are omitted. The final version of the song has no
mention of troubles, George wasn’t willing to admit the prevalence of tensions
within the Beatles at the time of the White Album sessions. Instead he chooses
to see “the love that is sleeping” between the band members. Ringo Starr writes
in The Beatles Anthology about his
brief departure from the band during recording The White Album,
I knew we were all in a messed-up stage. It wasn't just me; the whole thing was going down. I had definitely left, I couldn't take it any more. There was no magic and the relationships were terrible. I'd come to a bad spot in life. It could have been paranoia, but I just didn't feel good - I felt like an outsider. But then I realised that we were all feeling like outsiders...When I got back to the studio I found George had had it decked out with flowers - there were flowers everywhere. I felt good about myself again, we'd got through that little crisis and it was great.
Ultimately, for spiritual
George, what was most important was the deep love and friendship the Beatles shared, and the mystical quality
of love in all elements of nature. George Harrison was arguably undervalued as
a songwriter, but as a friend, he was sacred.
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