Composition
While members of his 1974 tour group, including future wife Olivia Arias, have spoken of Harrison's defiant attitude towards the negative tour reports, Leng suggests that, with the Rolling Stone articles, he "reacted to them as personal attacks" and adds: "which is hardly surprising. They were." During a holiday in Hawaii with Arias in early 1975, Harrison wrote "This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)", a song that, he told Musician magazine in 1987, "came about because the press and critics tried to nail me on the 1974–5 tour. They got really nasty."
The song title is a play on that of his 1968 composition "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", released on the Beatles' White Album and performed by Harrison throughout the 1974 tour. While concert reviewers had focused on his altering of the lyric to "While my guitar gently smiles" and "... tries to smile", Harrison told BBC Radio 1's Paul Gambaccini in September 1975 that it was a track that was consistently well received by audiences throughout the tour. Harrison described the new composition as "son of 'Guitar Gently Weeps'".
Like the Beatles track, "This Guitar" is structured around short, minor-key verses that conclude with the song title, rather than distinct choruses; author Ian Inglis also notes the "evident similarity" between the melody of the two compositions. As with Harrison's lyrics for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", Inglis writes, "This Guitar" follows in a tradition established by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bo Diddley, of attributing emotions and actions to a musical instrument. The song lyrics begin, "Found myself out on a limb / But I'm happier than I've ever been", the second line of which echoes Harrison's statements to Fong-Torres and other interviewers during the tour, that he had never been as happy as he was now – in a band with Scott, Billy Preston and Willie Weeks, and as a servant of the Hindu god Krishna instead of living out the public's perception of him as "Beatle George". Referring to the released recording of the song, Inglis opines that, rather than happiness, "the bitterness in his vocal performance tells a different story."
In his brief discussion of "This Guitar" in his autobiography, Harrison introduces the lyrics to verse two with a mention of the need to "struggle" through adversity, "even though we are all rats and valueless", in an effort "to become better human beings":
Learned to get up when I fall
Can even climb Rolling Stone walls
This guitar can't keep from crying.
Noting that Harrison was "bound to fight back against what he saw as unfair, malicious criticism", Leng views these and other lines in the song as typical of a dialogue then common in rock music, between artists and critics. Leng cites Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and John Lennon as other singer-songwriters who encouraged this dialogue and in some instances suffered for doing so.
Theologian Dale Allison writes of Harrison's "deep hurt" being reflected in the lyrics to "This Guitar". The two bridge sections document the "unwarranted abuse that comes his way", Inglis writes, while typifying the theme that " is the guitar":
This here guitar can be quite sad
Can be high strung, sometimes gets mad
Can't understand or deal with hate
Responds much better to love.
After Harrison has named Rolling Stone as the main perpetrator of his anguish, Leng suggests that he is unable to sustain the previous "artifice", whereby the lyrics' shift in perspective from first-person to third-person represented the apparently "happy" private man versus the "wounded" musician, as "personified by his guitar". Instead, Harrison "flays his detractors" in the song's subsequent verses. In these final rhyming couplets – "Thought by now you knew the score / You missed the point just like before" and "While you attack, create offence / I'll put it down to your ignorance" – Inglis interprets the criticism on Harrison as being not without precedent. Lindsay Planer of Allmusic describes the final verses as "suggesting that there is more to Harrison's music than is being taken into consideration by narrow-minded journalists".
Read more about this topic: This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying)
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