Release and Reception
In November 1970, "Wah-Wah" was released as the third track on All Things Must Pass, the song's anger and defiance contrasting with the "elegiac, plaintive song of reconciliation", "Isn't It a Pity", which followed. Like "Isn't It a Pity", the album's title track, and Barry Feinstein's cover photo of Harrison surrounded by four comical-looking garden gnomes, "Wah-Wah" was soon recognised as a comment by Harrison on his Beatle past. In February 1971, he, Lennon and Starr united in the British high court to challenge McCartney's suit to dissolve the band's legal partnership, all three of them submitting affidavits that mentioned their difficult experiences of working with him, particularly during the Get Back sessions. As a result of this post-breakup unity, "Wah-Wah" was widely assumed to be directed at McCartney only, just as Harrison's walkout two years before was thought to have been due solely to McCartney.
In his album review for Rolling Stone magazine, Ben Gerson described "Wah-Wah" as a "vintage Beatle song" and "a grand cacophony of sound in which horns sound like guitars and vice versa". Allmusic's Bill Janovitz sums up the track as "a glorious rocker ... as edgy as anything Harrison ever sang while in the Beatles, if not more so", and "a driving, majestic song on the edge of being out of control". Writing for PopMatters, John Bergstrom opines that the best moments on All Things Must Pass "involve Harrison addressing his former band"; of these, the "raucous, killer jam" of "Wah-Wah" dismisses the Beatles’ strife-filled final years as "so much white noise". While the song is "cutting", Bergstrom adds, "the sense of liberation is almost palpable."
Among Harrison's biographers, Ian Inglis writes of "Wah-Wah": "Spector's powerful production may cloak Harrison's words behind the conventions of a hard rock song and conceal the ferocity of his attack, but its forceful rhythm also reflects the momentum of his anger." Leng concludes his discussion of this "unusually heavy chunk of rock" with the observation: "It's a song of anger and alienation, redolent of betrayal and hostility. To that extent, it's a good-time number to rival Delaney & Bonnie, with a heart of pure stone." Noting the production's "layer upon layer of sonic bombast", Huntley opines that "Spector fans must have been in seventh heaven" when they first heard "Wah-Wah". Huntley refers to it as "one of the outstanding tracks" of Harrison's career, a "definite to-be-played-at-maximum-volume" song, and a welcome though rare "flat-out, kick-ass rocker" in the Harrison canon.
Still dissatisfied with Spector's "Cinemascope"-like production on "Wah-Wah", when All Things Must Pass was reissued in January 2001, Harrison admitted that he had been tempted to remix many of the tracks rather than simply remaster the album's original mixes. In an interview with Guitar World magazine to promote the reissue, he also revealed that McCartney had "long since" apologised for his behaviour towards him during the Beatles years.
Read more about this topic: Wah-Wah (George Harrison Song)
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