FOR your LOVE
50TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL
ERIC CLAPTON NEVER made an album as personal or as emotionally naked as the one he made anonymously: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Credited to Derek and the Dominos, and featuring an appearance by a then-unknown Duane Allman, the 1970 double-album was a valentine of aching and longing for a woman whose own identity was, at the time of its creation, known to only a few. They included Clapton’s bandmates, keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon; his longtime friend George Harrison; and Harrison’s wife, Pattie, the object of Clapton’s affection. His Layla.
Clapton had come to know Pattie as his friendship with Harrison developed in the mid 1960s. By the end of the decade, Harrison was deep into studying and converting to Hinduism, leaving the two more time to spend together, alone. As their feelings for each other grew stronger, Clapton encouraged Pattie to leave Harrison, despite his friendship with him, and in spite of the fact that he was already deeply involved with Alice Ormsby-Gore, a socialite and daughter of the British politician Sir David Ormsby-Gore. Pattie encouraged Clapton’s attentions, teetered on the brink, and still resisted.
“I was a bachelor when I made that album, really,” Clapton said. “I had various optimisms about becoming embroiled with Pattie… but we weren’t at that moment in a relationship. It was just something I was trying to write on the wall. And so Layla was that — a proclamation. But it was as anonymous as can be.”
The name Layla — “of the night” — was more than a cover. It was a literary appropriation suited to the romantic circumstances in which Clapton chose to stake his friendship and mental health. Its source is an epic poem written in the 12th century by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, and based on a 7th century story that is the equal of Romeo and Juliet. In Nizami’s telling, the young man Majnun is mad with passion for Layla, but his proclamation of love for her is considered an abomination that violates the secrecy of divine love. Layla is given in marriage to another man, but when he dies she’s confined to her house for another two years. Layla dies in torment, and Majnun weeps at her grave before expiring. It’s torridly melodramatic stuff. And it neatly summed up Clapton’s desperation.
Beyond his feelings for Pattie, Clapton had another reason to go undercover: He was tired of fame. The 1960s had seen him rise from obscurity to prominence, first as a member of the Yardbirds and then as the hotshot guitar slinger in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in April 1965. It was around that time that an unknown fan spray-painted “Clapton Is God” on a corrugated metal wall in Islington, London. In the following years, the sentiment expressed in graffiti would be embraced by guitarists and music fans across the continents when Clapton took his electric guitar playing to greater heights in Cream, the commercially successful supergroup trio he formed with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker in 1966.
But by 1968, he’d had enough. Hoping to tone down the theatrical aspects of Cream’s blues-rock, he launched Blind Faith, a comparatively low-key affair with Baker, Steve Winwood and Rick Grech. Assembled quickly, the group recorded one album before going out on tour woefully underprepared. Lacking even an hour’s worth of original material, they were forced to rely on playing the Cream songs Clapton had come to loathe. Audiences were delighted. It was the Eric Clapton they wanted, the one he no longer wished to be, and the band’s demise followed swiftly.
“Our names got in the way — all that supergroup hype,” Clapton told Guitar Player back in 1970. “The best stuff we did was when we were just jamming at Steve’s place, or at my house. We have tapes of that, which are just hours of instrumental, fun-type jazz things. That’s what Blind Faith was all about, but it was never exposed to the public.”
“THIS QUARTET WAS ONE OF THE MOT POWERFUL BANDS I’VE EVER BEEN ANYWHERE NEAR. AND I WAS IN IT!”
— ERIC CLAPTON
With Derek and the Dominos, however, Clapton set out to create a hard-working blues-rock band lacking the kind of star power of his earlier groups. Working with skilled, seasoned American musicians, none of whom were known to audiences on either side of the Atlantic, Clapton could slip undetected into record bins, charts and venues.
It worked. was released without fanfare in November 1970. Its cover featured no band name or title, simply a rendering — — by French-Danish painter Emile Frandsen de Schomberg. Its back cover showed a photo of a guitar — Brownie, the 1956 Fender Stratocaster that Clapton played on the album — with a pair of black-and-white square-toed derby shoes, surrounded by a tumble of dominos. There was nothing to indicate that the sleeve contained two slabs of anguished, potent blues rock played and sung by one of the day’s most popular and influential guitarists.
