Clapton, George and Pattie – and Layla’s magic guitar riff

Layla was an Arabic poem from antiquity that Eric Clapton turned into a striking rock song to try to woo his best mate’s wife.

Eric Clapton pictured in concert in Adelaide in 1990

In 1970 Eric Clapton was a heroin addict blowing up his life and those of others. He stole the rhythm section of a band he had joined, formed another that he called Derek and The Dominos in which he hid pretending to be “Derek”, and then set about stealing best mate George Harrison’s wife Pattie with songs written for her.

And he was busy. He had passed through the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (twice), formed rock’s first supergroups – Cream and Blind Faith – jammed with an up-and-comer on the UK scene called Jimi Hendrix, had two US top 10 hits (Sunshine of Your Love and White Room), featured on the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and written a song with Harrison (Badge) and, when Harrison briefly quit his band in January 1969, was nominated by a grumpy John Lennon as a possible replacement.

In the late 1960s spray-painted signs appeared across London stating “Clapton is God”, spreading to New York and Europe, and Clapton was the best white blues guitarist in the world. He still may be. But he hated the attention and pressure it brought. After a shambolic tour with Blind Faith, and encouraged by Harrison, Clapton joined his support act, Bonnie & Delaney and Friends. At various times the Friends had included Harrison, Leon Russell, Rita Coolidge, Gram Parsons, Bobby Keys and Duane and Gregg Allman. Many of them played on Clapton’s first solo album, including drummer Jim Gordon, bass player Carl Radle and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock. These men joined Clapton in his next project, one in which he hoped to remain low profile. Derek and The Dominos gigged round London charging one pound for tickets and performing on the condition that promoters never used Clapton’s name to fill the venues. It worked, which, of course, meant it didn’t.

Detail from a photograph by Pattie Boyd of Eric Clapton and George Harrison in 1976. From the 2009 exhibition Pattie Boyd: Through the Eyes of a Muse at the Blender Gallery in Paddington, Sydney

His manager at that stage was the Australian Robert Stigwood who called the world’s hottest music producer, Tom Dowd, to oversee his client’s new album most assumed would inevitably be a hit. Dowd’s interesting CV included working on the top secret Manhattan Project that developed nuclear weapons at the end of WWII from which emerged the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the conflict. He is almost certainly the only nuclear physicist to record albums by the Bee Gees, Meat Loaf, Diana Ross, Rod Stewart and Otis Redding.

The day Stigwood called Dowd, the already legendary producer was at the top of his game. He had pioneered stereo recording techniques – for years record companies couldn’t see the point in stereo – and pushed the technology of multitrack recording and insisted on the development of the sliding linear faders you see on every recording and mixing desk in the world. Until Dowd, these had been clunky, imperfect bakelite dials.

Dowd – more than able on piano, tuba, bass and violin – never told any musician what to do, but he had full control over the sounds they made. He had been the recording engineer on the landmark Cream albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire, featuring the international hits White Room, Sunshine of Your Love and Strange Brew (the striking artwork for each was by Sydney artist Martin Sharpe).

Pattie Boyd in her modelling days

When Stigwood, who was born in Port Pirie, a Spencer Gulf town 225kms north of Adelaide, called Dowd, the producer was in Miami working on the second Allman Brothers album, a slow burner that, after some years, would achieve its own greatness. The planet’s most influential music mogul wanted the most influential producer to supervise his newest signing’s debut record. Wheels were turning within wheels; it had been at one of Stigwood’s outlandish London parties that Clapton, a couple of years earlier, had been introduced to Pattie Boyd. On the day of Stigwood’s call, Clapton was obsessed by two things: Harrison’s wife and heroin. But only one was available.

Dowd mentioned to the outlandishly talented Duane Allman that Clapton was coming. Allman asked to meet him, not knowing that he had already caught Clapton’s ear with his brilliantly improvised solo at the end of Wilson Pickettt’s 1969 version of Hey Jude. Clapton went to see the Allman Brothers Band on August 26, 1970. Duane and Clapton spent the night talking about music, a friend noting “they were afraid of each other”. The following day Allman was in the studio. He stayed a few weeks, off and on, and can be heard on most tracks of the double album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Clapton and Boyd as husband and wife

Soon, Clapton played him a song he had been working on but couldn’t quite untangle. Back in London, he’d been given a book of poems by oddball Scottish playwright Ian Dallas. These had been written in the 12th century and based on an Arab tale, The Story of Layla and Majnun, in which Layla’s father stops her marriage to Majnun (Arabic for crazy) and he goes mad. “Make the best of the situation, before I finally go insane,” was one of the first lines of despair that Clapton wrote for Layla. When Allman heard it he suggested they speed it up and then strapped on his guitar and played a dramatic burst of seven notes igniting Clapton’s ballad which exploded in another direction. Clapton had been right to be afraid. Propelled by Allman’s intro he changed his approach delivering his angry words with feverish intensity. Clapton doesn’t hold back: “I tried to give you consolation when your old man had let you down,” he notes scornfully of the woman on whom Harrison had long been cheating.

Duane Allman pictured in 1969 with the Gibson guitar on which he helped create the legendary Eric Clapton sing Layla. Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

It is Clapton playing the seven-note phrase his new mate wrote, then Allman soars over the song from its fifth bar with his slide guitar and it’s game on as they exchange notes like the lightning of thunder gods. By 3.07 it was exhausted and over. But Clapton recalled he had been enchanted by a piano piece drummer Gordon had noodling with in the studio. He encouraged Gordon to complete it and it was recorded as they worked furiously on the rest of the album. It is disputed who decided to make Gordon’s mournful instrumental the piano coda, but Dowd brilliantly spliced them together with Allman’s slide notes sitting just beyond the main game completing the details of a sad story.

Cover art of Layla and other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos

Gordon was living with singer Rita Coolidge – she later married Kris Kristofferson – and it appears he adapted a melody she had written for what became Layla’s gentle coda. Gordon helped on the song called Time (first recorded by Coolidge’s sister Priscilla who, in 2014, would be murdered by her husband). Coolidge had offered it to and played it for Clapton. “I left a demo on the piano,” she said years later. Later, Gordon punched Coolidge and she left him. The next time she heard her music was when Layla popped up on radio. She has never been given a credit – nor a cheque.

Of those who worked on the song, Clapton – he finally married Pattie and it lasted 10 years – and Whitlock play on. Allman died in a motorcycle crash the following year. Gordon is alive, but has spent the last 39 years in a California jail after murdering his mother with a hammer having heard a voice telling him to.