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“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”:
On this day in 1968, the Beatles self-titled LP known as the White Album debuted at #1 on the UK Albums Chart (December 7)
The plain white cover was a massive and deliberate visual contrast to their previous LP “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”.
This was also the last Beatles album to be mixed separately for stereo and mono.
Most of the songs for the album were written during a Transcendental Meditation course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, between February and April 1968.
"Regardless of what I was supposed to be doing," Lennon later recalled, "I did write some of my best songs there."
It features Beatles favourites like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (featuring Eric Clapton on lead), “Dear Prudence”, and “Back in the USSR”.
The double LP covers a wide range of genres, and interestingly only about half of the tracks feature all four band members performing.
It was the Beatles only studio double album, and despite George Martin suggesting they reduce the number of songs to form a single album featuring their stronger work; the band refused.
Whilst George Harrison agreed with the double album concept at the time, later he reflected that some tracks could have been released as B-sides or withheld, but "there was a lot of ego in that band."
Ringo commented that the album should have been two separate records, which he jokingly called "The White Album" and "The Whiter Album".
McCartney said that the record was fine as it was: "It was great. It sold. It's the bloody Beatles' White Album. Shut up!"
The sessions for the album highlighted increasing tensions within the band, and also marked the first appearance in the studio of Lennon's new domestic and artistic partner, Yoko Ono, who was thereafter a more or less constant presence at Beatles recording sessions.
As a result of these tensions, Ringo abruptly left the studio on 22 August during the session for "Back in the U.S.S.R.", feeling that his role in the group was peripheral compared to the other members, and upset at McCartney's constant criticism of his drumming on the track.
In his absence, McCartney played the drums on "Dear Prudence".
For "Back in the U.S.S.R.", the three remaining Beatles each made contributions on bass and drums, and the drum part is a composite of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison's playing.
Ringo returned a couple of weeks later, but the band lasted less than two more years before splitting.
The Beatles album spent nine weeks at #1 in the US, and a massive 215 weeks on the Billboard 200 Album Chart.
It also topped the charts around the world in countries including the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland and Germany.
In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked The Beatles self-titled White Album at #29 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
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