George Harrison Said His Ego Would Rather Have Eric Clapton Play on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’
George Harrison and Eric Clapton first crossed paths when their bands, The Beatles and The Yardbirds, were on the same bill in the early 1960s. The guitarists crossed paths again at a Lovin’ Spoonful concert. George thought Clapton looked lonely, but that’s just how he was; a lone wolf.
Clapton had already become a blues missionary and was confident in his own guitar playing, so George didn’t intimidate him. The Beatle wasn’t scared of the lone wolf either. They recognized they were each others’ equals and started a life-long friendship.
George Harrison and Eric Clapton were twin flames
Initially, Clapton was suspicious of The Beatles. It was like they were one person; it was a strange phenomenon he couldn’t figure out. However, he realized that each member had their own talents, especially George.
“He [George Harrison] was clearly an innovator,” Clapton explained in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World.
“George, to me, was taking certain elements of R&B and rock and rockabilly and creating something unique. They were very generous to everybody. They took time to come and take to everybody. I didn’t feel threatened at all because I had quite a lot of self-confidence going in my concept of myself as being this sort of blues missionary, as it were. I wasn’t looking for any favors from anybody.”
Clapton connected with George the most out of all The Beatles. He explained that George recognized him as an equal because Clapton had a “level of proficiency even then that he saw as being fairly unique too.”
“George chose to move into a house in Esher, and Esher is maybe eight miles north of where I was born,” Clapton said. “We became friends, and I would go and visit them there, and something grew out of the music and the kind of people we were.”
Clapton thinks George envied that he was a lone wolf.
“I think we shared a lot of tastes too, in superficial things, cars or clothes, and women obviously,” Clapton explained, alluding to having been married to the same woman, Pattie Boyd. “But I think what George might have liked about me was the fact that I was a kind of free agent.
“And I think, if anything, he may have already been wondering about whether he was in the right place being in a group. Because the group politic is a tricky one. There was a lot about what he had going, which I envied, and there was a lot about what I had going that he envied.”
Clapton said one of the good things about being George’s friend was that it was like “basking in the sunshine of this immense creativity.”
There was a lot of collaboration between George and Clapton over the years.
George said his ego wanted Clapton to play on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’
When The Beatles began recording The White Album, George was at his wit’s end with his bandmates. No one would help him on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” so he asked Clapton.
George told Guitar Player that letting Clapton play on the song didn’t hurt his ego. “No, my ego would rather have Eric play on it,” George explained. “I’ll tell you, I worked on that song with John, Paul and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all. And I knew inside of me that it was a nice song.
“The next day, I was with Eric, and I was going into the session, and I said, ‘We’re going to do this song. Come on and play on it.’ He said, ‘Oh, no. I can’t do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles records.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s my song, and I want you to play on it.'”
They had to make the song sound more ‘Beatle-y’
There was another reason why George let Clapton play on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” He knew Clapton did things on the guitar that took him ages to figure out.
“I love the touch he has on his guitar,” George said. “When he comes over to play on my songs, he doesn’t bring an amplifier or a guitar; he says, ‘Oh, you’ve got a good Stratocaster.’ He knows I’ve got one because he gave it to me. [Laughs] He plugs in, and just his vibrato and everything… he makes that guitar sound like Eric.
“That’s the beauty of all the different players that there are. There are players who are better than each other, or not as good, but everybody’s got their own thing. It’s like a 12-bar blues. You can’t do a 12-bar the same way twice, so they say. There’s things that Eric can do where it would take me all night to get it right – he can knock it off in one take. Because he plays all the time.”
George doubted his own skills on guitar. However, he knew Clapton liked his work just as much as he liked Clapton’s. So, since they both knew they were great, it didn’t matter who played what when they collaborated. Plus, they had their own styles. If a song needed one particular kind, that’s who got to play on it.
When they collaborated on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Clapton’s work wasn’t completely perfect. They had some tweaking to do to make the song sound more “Beatle-y.”
“So Eric came in and the other guys were as good as gold – because he was there. Also, it left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal,” George said.
“So Eric played that, and I thought it was really good. Then we listened to it back and he said, ‘Ah, there’s a problem though. It’s not a Beatle-y enough’ – so we put it through the ADT [automatic double tracker(opens in new tab)] to wobble it a bit.”
That first collaboration opened the door to many more over the following decades. They all worked out well because George and Clapton loved each other’s playing equally. There were no egos involved.
