While My Guitar Gently Weeps
"George go the idea to write While My Guitar Gently Weeps out of a book. In fact, he was reading the "I Ching" (Chinese book of changes) and decided to write a song with the first line he got out of a book. The line was "gently weeps". The song demonstrates that George had already grown a lot as composer, and this was a clear demonstration of it. From the first song demo, which can be found in Anthology 3, an outstanding acoustic version of the song, the number proved to be almost magical. However, it was quite hard for Harrison to achieve the same magic with more instruments. For the first time, The Beatles brought in an 8 track machine to record a song in Abbey Road, and several tries were made to record the song.
But a crying guitar was not that easy to play. Well, any other musician would have had an immediate solution (a tone pedal, wah-wah, or a Cry-Baby -commercial brand). George however wished the guitar to cry, but not as 60's guitars were crying all over, specially in Hendrix's hands. First he tried to record a backwards solo, but the thing didn't quite work out. The day after, as Eric Clapton gave him a lift from Surrey into London, he suggested Eric might want to play a bit for The Beatles. Clapton didn't want to "because no one plays with The Beatles". However, George finally convinced him, and a Gibson Les Paul can be heard crying all over the song.
Eric Clapton didn't make much fuzz about this session. He went in, delivered a solo out of this world and left. The solo did in any case, and in Clapton's opinion, sound "too Clapton". Chris Thomas was given the job to give the guitar a flanging effect by playing around with an oscillator. A hard job, worth a masterpiece."
from:
http://www.spanishbeatles.com/I'd rather like that way.
