Various Artists - While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Album)
There was a time when anyone wanting a compilation of mediocre, mostly forgotten semi-hits, sold on the coattails of slightly less mediocre semi-hits, would have to wait for the next Time-Life “Soft Rock” infomercial to come on, or at least go and have a trawl through the local record store bargain bin. Luckily, the good people at Universal have saved us all the trouble and given us a readily available alternative in While My Guitar Gently Weeps, a collection of nothing but the finest forgettable rock filler tracks in music history.
For the most part, the tracklist of Weeps reads like a burnt CD from somebody’s aging rocker dad – no, soft rocker dad. Marketed as a so-called “tribute to the guitar”, there’s all the usual wheezing suspects - Daddy Cool, The Doobie Brothers and Santana all make inevitable appearances. But things take a strange turn with the inclusion of veritable wild cards such as Rod Stewart (a guitar hero if I ever saw one) and Grinspoon, whose song Chemical Heart makes a reprise from all the way back in 2003 – you know, the heart of the classic rock era. Couple with these the legitimately virtuoso guitar stylings of Tommy Emmanuel and a late entry by the ever reflux-inducing Bread and you have a selection that is truly hard to fathom.
To be entirely fair though, its not really the content on Weeps that is so bad. Many of the featured artists are in fact undisputed rock legends, and deserve a place on a compilation that is focused on guitar rock. Somehow though, only their least notable tracks have been included – I can’t say I remember Jimmy Page and Robert Plant as rock legends by their recording of Most High, but then maybe I’m wrong. The problem is really that the whole thing is just a bizarre mish-mash of tracks that are largely inappropriate for the theme, incongruous with the other content, or just plain forgettable.
And even given all this, Weeps is at times undeniably enjoyable – maybe it’s just the wry hipster in me, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of profound excitement when surprised by Robert Palmer’s kitsch classic Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor) (even if I was forced to wear an smug half-smile throughout, making clear the fact that my pleasure derived was purely from irony). Also standout is the cover of the title track by the late Jeff Healy, who provides a guitar solo that is truly blistering, in the Jack Black sense of the word.
Nevertheless, if you’re going to rate a compilation album on anything then it really has to be on the quality of choice in the tracks, given that all the actual music is made by someone else. Going by this criterion, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a pretty woeful effort, to say the least. It doesn’t really deliver on its main selling point, and what it does deliver is pretty bland and familiar anyway. I also would have liked to see a bit more diversity in the selection of music eras (where was Eddie Van Halen? Yes, he might be a little scary looking, but any so-called guitar retrospective is incomplete without him). If you really need something like this, stay up late and buy it off the TV informercials, where at least you’ll get a charming sales pitch by the washed up former members of Air Supply.
