This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)

1975 song by George Harrison

"This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)" is a song by English rock musician George Harrison, released on his 1975 studio album Extra Texture (Read All About It). Harrison wrote the song as a sequel to his popular Beatles composition "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", in response to the personal criticism he had received during and after his 1974 North American tour with Ravi Shankar, particularly from Rolling Stone magazine. An edit of "This Guitar" was issued as a single in December 1975, as the final release by Apple Records in its original incarnation. The single failed to chart in either the United States or Britain. The song follows in a tradition established by singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, of attributing emotions and actions to a musical instrument. The lyrics also serve as an example of a dialogue that was commonplace during the 1970s between songwriters and music critics. Contributing to Harrison's sense of injustice in "This Guitar", he and his tour musicians believed that detractors had ignored the successful aspects of the 1974 shows – which blended rock, jazz, funk and Indian classical music – and had focused instead on his failure to pay due respect to the legacy of the Beatles. Rolling Stones scathing assessment of Harrison's tour and accompanying album, Dark Horse, represented an about face by the publication, previously one of his most vocal supporters, and led to Harrison's continued resentment towards the magazine over subsequent decades. Harrison recorded "This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)" in Los Angeles during April and May 1975, a period marked by his post tour despondency. The recording features guitar solos played by Harrison and American musician Jesse Ed Davis. The song serves as a rare guitar oriented selection on the keyboard heavy Extra Texture album, although David Foster, Gary Wright and Harrison all contributed keyboard parts to the track. "This Guitar" has traditionally received a mixed reception from reviewers, partly due to the inevitable comparisons with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Harrison re recorded the song in 1992 with former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, who used it to promote his Platinum Weird project in 2006. This version appears as a bonus track on the 2014 Apple Years 1968–75 reissue of Extra Texture.

George Harrison's stated aim for his North American tour with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, which took place from 2 November to 20 December 1974, was to offer concert goers "another kind of experience" from the typical mid 1970s rock show. With its blending of Western rock, funk and jazz genres with Indian classical music, author Robert Rodriguez describes the result as a musical form "[that] one day would be called 'world music'". Of the critical reception given to the Harrison–Shankar venture, tour wide, Rodriguez writes of the "genuine highlights that went mostly unreported", since: "Smaller press outlets without axes to grind tended to review the shows the best, whereas rock establishment coverage, such as Rolling Stones, tended to spin the tour as something close to an unmitigated disaster "

Along with Harrison and band leader Tom Scott, tour musicians Jim Horn, Jim Keltner and Andy Newmark have each challenged the reliability of these negative reports, Horn declaring the Harrison–Shankar tour "one of the best I've been on". Concert goers likewise questioned their accuracy; according to author Nicholas Schaffner, Beatles fanzine Strawberry Fields Forever had been "deluged with letters protesting the nasty reviews". At the time, Scott voiced his objections to Fong Torres' article for focusing excessively on the uneven opening concert at Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum. This piece was followed by Larry Sloman's article on the East Coast shows. As Harrison discovered soon after the tour, Sloman had submitted a favourable piece on the concerts but, to Sloman's annoyance, the magazine's editors revised it before publication. Harrison complained that Rolling Stone deliberately "edited everything positive out" about the shows. Sloman recalled that when he subsequently explained the situation to Harrison, the latter told him: "I'm glad you sent me that [unedited] article, Larry. I thought you were an asshole and then I realize that it was Rolling Stone that was the asshole." Under the heading "Transcendental Mediocrity", Rolling Stone critic Jim Miller wrote of the "disastrous album" appearing "in the wake of his disastrous tour" – completing what Harrison biographer Elliot Huntley describes as the magazine's "volte face" on an artist it had traditionally supported. refn|group=nb|In a December 2001 article for the San Francisco Chronicle, Fong Torres wrote that his "Lumbering in the Material World" feature "drew the most negative mail in my dozen years at Rolling Stone". While members of his 1974 tour group, including future wife Olivia Arias, have spoken of Harrison's defiant attitude towards the negative reviews, Leng states that he "reacted to them as personal attacks". Harrison wrote "This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)" while on holiday in Hawaii with Arias, in February 1975.

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 reviewers of the 1974 concerts had focused on his altering of the lyric to "While my guitar gently smiles" and " tries to smile",

Like the Beatles track, "This Guitar" is structured around short, minor key verses (in this case, in the key of G minor) that conclude with the song title, rather than distinct choruses. In a contemporary review, music journalist Ray Coleman said that the song's lyrics, together with the yearning quality of Harrison's singing and guitar playing on the track, "will raise questions about its relevance to his personal life". the second of which echoes Harrison's statement to Fong Torres 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".

Discussing Extra Texture in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner wrote of Harrison's "worldly critics" responding "like bulls to a red flag" to "This Guitar" and other "treatises on how reviewers always 'miss the point'". Schaffner added: "True, the critics had been unfair, even vicious. But one could only hope George would rise above them, and produce a work good enough to fake them all out. Which is exactly what he would do a year later with Thirty Three and a Third." Rodriguez writes that "Critics by nature tended to regard the Beatles' catalog as sacrosanct" and therefore "dissed [Harrison] for producing a sequel to 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'". In another unfavourable review from Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh dismissed much of the album's first side as "padded subterfuge" while opining that "there just isn't compensation here for the failed promise of 'This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)'". NME writers Roy Carr and Tony Tyler said that, in comparison with the Beatles track, Harrison's "often impressively lachrymose guitar falls short of true grief stricken form here", adding: "The lack of a tune doesn't help." Conversely, Record Worlds single reviewer wrote that Harrison "hits the mark with this edited extra textural ballad" and highlighted Wright's ARP strings among the "superb accompaniment". In his review for Melody Maker, Ray Coleman admired "This Guitar" as a "scorching track" with a lyrical message that he deemed "Hot, pertinent, touching". Cash Box said that Harrison "treads in the same musical direction that he has for the last couple of years: bending the strings so that they whine in an inflated blues style instead of screaming/squealing like some of Harrison's wilder minded contemporaries", adding that "George’s vocal is very complimentary and the words are gently serious."

quote box|quote= [Harrison] criticizes Rolling Stone for missing the point of what he was doing, then tells himself it's because of their ignorance. Probably no one bitched more about their critics than the solo Beatles until Public Enemy and Eminem came along. Andrew Grant Jackson features the track in his book Still the Greatest: The Essential Solo Beatles Songs. He recognises Harrison's bitterness towards his detractors as a common trait among the former Beatles, and "desperation" in his revisiting a revered Beatles song to air his grievances. Robert Rodriguez considers it to be a "fine track" containing one of Harrison's "finest vocal performances", yet he also identifies an unwelcome "air of defensiveness, bordering on arrogance" in the lyrics. Reviewing the 2014 Apple Years reissues of Harrison's catalogue, New Zealand Herald journalist Graham Reid says the track is "a much better song than it seemed at the time", while Oregano Rathbone of Record Collector cites it as an example of how each of Harrison's Apple albums after the critically acclaimed All Things Must Pass "contains shivery moments of release". By contrast, Nick DeRiso of Ultimate Classic Rock rates it as the worst song on Extra Texture, calling it "a superfluous reworking of a Beatles tune [that] served as a signpost for this album's creatively bankrupt, dead end vibe". Among Harrison biographers, Simon Leng describes "This Guitar" as a "harrowing song", with a "passionate and powerful" Harrison vocal, and draws parallels between it and Neil Young's similarly anti journalistic "Ambulance Blues". Dale Allison describes "This Guitar" as a "beautiful song" with "ardent lyrics", and groups it with Harrison compositions such as "Isn't It a Pity", "The Light That Has Lighted the World", "Blow Away" and "Sat Singing" – all songs that "remain close to the hearts of those familiar with them".