As backstories go it’s up there with the best: mercurially-gifted superstar guitarist with a passion for the blues falls hopelessly in love with the wife of his best friend, an ex-Beatle, then writes a song about her that goes on to become one of the greatest songs ever written. What’s more, it contains one of the killer guitar riffs of all time.
The song was Layla, the guitarist was Eric Clapton and he wrote it about his unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, wife of George Harrison.
Layla is Clapton’s masterpiece, a proclamation of love which unveils his agony and heartache at falling in love with the wife of his best friend. It’s also a song that, remains an exhilarating and timeless classic — 55 years since it was recorded.
Along with Clapton there were three other pivotal figures involved in the creation of Layla.
The first is drummer Jim Gordon, who is credited as Clapton’s co-writer on the song after he penned its beautifully evocative piano coda (Gordon was a troubled figure who ended his life in prison after murdering his mother in a psychotic episode).
The second is Duane Allman, whose inspired playing elevates this song to real heights. It was Allman who came up with and played the iconic riff.
Finally, there is producer Tom Dowd, the most unsung of them all.
Dowd had worked with artists such as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.
He had also worked with Cream and The Allman Brothers Band — which is how he knew exactly what Eric Clapton and Duane Allman were capable of.
Criteria Studios in Miami was the location for the recording of Layla, and the album from which it came, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
The recording took place in autumn 1970, and for Clapton it was the beginning of a whole new chapter.
Ever since Cream disbanded in late 1968 and the short-lived Blind Faith imploded the following year, Clapton had strived to distance himself from the role of guitar hero.
He had ventured up to Woodstock in New York State to visit The Band and see if he could be a part of what they were doing.
"What I appreciated about The Band was that they were more concerned with songs and singing,” Clapton told Darrin Fox of Guitar Player magazine in 2001. “The guitar was put back into perspective as being [the] accompaniment. That suited me well, because I had gotten so tired of the virtuosity… long, boring guitar solos."
Clapton went on to tour small UK venues as guitarist with Delaney & Bonnie in late 1969.
Such anonymity and playing for the song was arguably the very last thing that Clapton fans wanted. But it suited him fine.
With the same ethos in mind, he assembled a new band, based around Delaney & Bonnie’s former rhythm section: Carl Radle on bass, Jim Gordon on drums and Bobby Whitlock on keyboards and vocals.
Clapton arrived at the name Derek And The Dominos and welcomed the fact that there was absolutely no mention of him in the band’s name.
This was the band that arrived at Criteria Studios in Miami in the summer of 1970.
On 26 August that year, Tom Dowd suggested that he, Clapton and the group attended an Allman Brothers Band concert at the Miami Beach Convention Centre.
“They were already playing when we got there and I could hear this amazing, wailing guitar from about half a mile away,” recalled Clapton in an Uncut interview, published in October 2006. “I sat on the grass in front of the stage and was mesmerised. After the show, I asked them back to the studio to hear what we’d done and I took to Duane straight away.”
Duane Allman became a guest member of Derek And The Dominos — and he and Clapton immediately gelled.
They were mutual fans, and when they plugged in at Criteria, creative sparks began to fly.
"There had to be some sort of telepathy going on because I've never seen spontaneous inspiration happen at that rate and level,” Tom Dowd told Guitar World magazine in 2012. “One of them would play something, and the other reacted instantaneously.
“Never once did either of them have to say, 'Could you play that again, please?'. It was like two hands in a glove. And they got tremendously off on playing with each other."
The recording of Layla took place on 9 September, 1970.
The song was partially inspired by a book Clapton had been given called The Story Of Layla And Manjun, a Persian story about being driven mad by falling in love with a beautiful, unavailable woman.
For Clapton, the woman in question was Pattie Boyd.
“I loved the name and I had the main body of a song that was obviously about Pattie,” he told Uncut magazine. “But I knew it needed something else. A motif.”
The song was originally conceived by Clapton as a ballad. But when Allman came up with the song’s signature guitar riff, everything changed.
Clapton recalled: “I realised we had something after Duane Allman came up with the riff… that was pretty much a direct lift from an Albert King song, As The Years Go Passing By, from the Stax album Born Under A Bad Sign.
“It’s a slow blues, and there’s a line that goes, ‘There is nothing I can do if you leave me here to cry’, and we used that.”
This soaring seven-note riff followed by five-notes on slide still sounds exhilarating over five decades on.
It’s a stratospheric launch into the song and a highlight throughout, with its effortlessly fluid hammer-ons and pull-offs.
The whole thing is underpinned by a chord sequence of Dm-Bb-C-Dm and as the last note of the riff tails off, the band shifts up into C#m7 for the verse.
Layla is a beautifully crafted song, with a deft and graceful chord structure.
“What will you do when you get lonely?” begins Clapton as the chords shift from C#m7 to G#7 and then ascend through C#m7-C-D-E-E7 for the line “No one waiting by your side”.
His voice has rarely sounded better, and there’s real grit and soulfulness to his timbre.
Another shining highlight of the song is the infectious, fluid groove of drummer Jim Gordon and bassist Carl Radle. It’s Gordon’s toms that accentuate the rhythmic inflections, although it’s the dynamic ascents and swoops of Radle’s walking bass line that really make this song fly.
One of the strengths of Layla is that it’s a surprisingly simple structure. There is no bridge and no middle eight.
It takes just 40 seconds for the first chorus to kick in and for that iconic riff to come soaring back in again.
In an interview with Guitar Player magazine in 1985, Clapton recalled that the first section of the song consisted of 16 tracks, of which six were guitar tracks. These included a rhythm part and three tracks of guitar harmonies played by Clapton. They also included a track of solos by Allman, fretted solos with bent notes in the verses and a slide solo during the outro. One of the tracks featured both Allman and Clapton playing duplicate solos.
According to Clapton, he and Allman used the same Fender Champ amplifier to record the song.
Clapton reportedly played a Strat on the Layla sessions. Allman used a 1957 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top, known, not too surprisingly, as the ‘Layla guitar’. This guitar would fetch $1.25 million at auction in 2019.
Part of what makes Layla such a classic song is the majestic piano coda which forms the second half of the song.
The piano was played by the band’s revered drummer Jim Gordon, a much in-demand LA session drummer.
The inclusion of this coda on the song happened by complete chance.
“The piano part was a pure accident,” Clapton told Uncut in 2006. “When the band left the studio, it turned out that, unknown to us, Jim would sneak back in and use the time to make his own record. Basically, he was poaching.
“One night, I went back to the studio to collect something and I caught him playing that piano riff. I think the deal we offered him was that we’d let him carry on using our studio time to make his record if we could have that tune for the LP.
“I don’t think he ever did finish his album, but the piano theme fitted what we were doing perfectly and now the song just doesn’t sound right without it.”
This piano coda is a hugely evocative piece of music, elevated further by some inspired slide playing from Duane Allman.
In 1990, the coda would be used to superb effect in Martin Scorcese’s film Goodfellas, the song’s beauty providing a contrast to the violence played out on screen.
While Jim Gordon was credited as the writer of this piano coda and the co-writer of Layla, two-time Grammy award winning singer-songwriter Rita Coolidge subsequently alleged that she co-wrote the piano coda part with Gordon, who was her boyfriend at the time, but said her contribution was never officially acknowledged.
Coolidge spoke of the composition in her 2016 autobiography Delta Lady: A Memoir, written with Michael Walker.
“One afternoon in 1970, Jim Gordon came over to my house in Hollywood, sat down at the piano, and played for me a chord progression he’d just composed… As we played with it, a second progression suddenly came to me, a countermelody in the key of G that ‘answered’ and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo that bridged the song’s beginning and ending… Jim and I ended up calling it Time (Don’t Let The World Get In Our Way) and taped a demo.”
In 1971, Coolidge was at a photo session after finishing her first album, when Layla came on the radio.
She recalled: “I was thinking, ‘Wait, I think I’ve heard that before…’ Suddenly, it dawned on me: the song on the radio was my song, except that I’d never recorded it. The veins must have been popping out on my neck. I cried, ‘That’s my music! That’s my music!’”
Coolidge got hold of a copy of the Layla album and checked the credits, but her name wasn’t listed on the track. “I was infuriated,” she said.
Coolidge’s account was subsequently supported by Derek And The Dominos’ keyboard player Bobby Whitlock.
“Jim took the melody from Rita’s song and didn’t give her credit for writing it,” he said in a 2011 interview on the Where’s Eric! website.
Layla and the album which bears its name was a short-lived high point for Derek A d The Dominos. Clapton told Uncut magazine that he tried to get Allman to join the band permanently, but Duane told him “he had to be loyal to what he called ‘the family’”.
Clapton explained: “We went on tour and I don’t know how we got through it with the amount of drugs we were doing. That’s when it got out of control.
“It frightens me to think about it. It was cocaine and heroin, and it wore the band down and a hostility was released that hadn’t been there before.
“Whatever held us together got thrown out and the atmosphere was so bad you could cut it with a knife. My instinct in those scenes is just to get out. I went back home and stayed there and locked all the doors.”
Layla was released in March 1971 and then re-released in May 1972, when it reached No.7 in the UK Singles Chart and No.10 in the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was released again in 1982, when it reached No.4 in the UK.
That could have been the close of the Layla story, but for Clapton’s MTV Unplugged performance in 1992, when he reimagined the song as a slow and intimate acoustic shuffle. This would help make the subsequent Eric Clapton Unplugged album his biggest-selling album to date.
![Eric Clapton - Layla [Live Unplugged] Lyrics On Screen - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Mm7GWGppDgg/maxresdefault.jpg)
For Clapton, Layla remains a significant high point of his career.
“I’m very proud of the one album we made and that song,” he said of his time with Derek And The Dominos. “You never really get used to having ownership of something that powerful, and it still knocks me out every time I play it.”
In an interview with writer Mike Hrano in 2011, Clapton said he sometimes perceives the song from a third person perspective.
“It’s almost like I wasn't in that band,” he said. “It's just a band that I'm a fan of.
“Sometimes, my own music can be like that. When it's served its purpose [of] being good music, I don't associate myself with it any more. It's like someone else.”
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