From "The Beatles (White Album) Super Deluxe Edition" coming next month, this gorgeous early acoustic version of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
From Rolling Stone:
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (Acoustic Version, Take 2) was recorded on July 25th, 1968, with just George on guitar and Paul on harmonium. It’s a dark and meditative draft of a still-evolving song, as Paul follows along, learning the chords. George tells the Abbey Road crew, “Maybe you’d have to give him his own mike.” (A previous run-through from the same day was on Anthology 3, but this take was just discovered during the research for this project.) George sings original lines he ended up discarding: “I look from the wings at the play you are staging / As I’m sitting here doing nothing but aging."
….The Beatles didn’t go back to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” until three weeks after this acoustic draft. In the meantime, they toiled over George’s “Not Guilty” — a song that went through 102 takes and still got axed, which sums up the torment of the five-month sessions. (“Not Guilty” didn’t see the light of day until over a decade later, when an understandably traumatized George finally put it on a 1979 solo record.) “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” wasn’t finished until September, when he brought in a special guest on lead guitar — his best friend Eric Clapton.
