Hi! How are you today, music lovers? Today I want to talk about not only one of the greatest rock albums of all time, but also about one of the most interesting stories on the history of music. Today I want to talk about Eric Clapton’s magnum opus, Layla (And Other Assorted Love Songs).
To talk about this album, we need a panorama of Clapton’s life at the time. The year was 1969, Clapton’s band at the time, Cream, had just imploded. He figured out another band with his friends Steve Vinwood and Ric Grech from the band Traffic and Cream’s drummer Ginger Baker. The band was called Blind Faith and recorded/released an eponymous album in 1969. Clapton was having real troubles with Heroin and Cocaine at the time and was receiving a real help from his friend… George Harrison.
This is the alternate cover to Blind Faith's album, the original is NSFW (look it up)
Harrison is as important to this story as Clapton, Harrison was married at the time with the beautiful Pattie Boyd, that was a really, really big friend of Clapton as well. So friend that… they fell in love with each other. Yes, Clapton fell in love with Harrison’s wife. That’s where this album begins its story, a forbidden love.
Clapton was so in love with Pattie Boyd that wrote a song, it’s was called Layla. Layla is based on a book called The Story Of Layla and Manjun, a 12th-century poem book by a Persian poet called Nizami Ganjavi, and tell the story of a young man that fell in love so profoundly with a woman that went crazy and couldn’t marry her, which was exactly how he was feeling with Pattie at the time.
So he went on the studio with the producer Tom Dowd, that was producing The Allman Brothers’ second album Idlewood South, and introduced Clapton to Allman Brothers’ guitar player, Duane Allman, and they fell in love with each other style and began to jam with a band formed of master session musicians: Carl Radle on the bass, Bobby Whitlock on the keys and Jim Gordon on the drums, they were Derek & The Dominos, a band assembled to record Eric’s next album: Layla (And Other Assorted Love Songs).
Clapton and Duane Allman in studio, 1970.
The album was a love letter not only to Pattie, but also to Blues, they recorded three blues standards: Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Key to The Highway and Have you Ever Loved a Woman. And another aspect of this story is that they recorded Little Wing as a homage to Jimi Hendrix, but he never had the chance to hear it, since he passed barely two months earlier, so the song became a tribute to the recently deceased Hendrix.
But the main piece of the album is the song that gives its title to the album, Layla is not only one of the best guitar tracks ever, but is also Clapton’s biggest hit until today and a wonderful love song, Pattie Boyd called it “the most powerful song that she ever heard” (and the girl already had Something, by The Beatles, dedicated to her, so she was not overestimating it).
Pattie and Clapton, 1983
Patti and Harrison broke up a couple years later and married Clapton in 1979, they were married for 10 years. Despite of this story, Harrison and Clapton stayed friends until Harrison passed in 2001.
A great album with a great great story, that’s Layla, one of the most powerful records ever recorded.
My other articles from the Magnificent Albums series:
https://steemit.com/music/@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-04-what-s-going-on-marvin-gaye-1971
https://steemit.com/music/@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-05-ramones-the-ramones-1976
https://steemit.com/music/@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-06-the-piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn-pink-floyd-1967