Few rock songs arrive with their meaning hidden in plain sight. When Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs appeared in November 1970, credited to a band most listeners had never heard of — Derek and the Dominos — its centrepiece sounded like a plea to some exotic stranger. In fact, “Layla” was the most public private confession in rock: Eric Clapton, then 25, singing his desperation for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his close friend George Harrison. The album flopped, the band fell apart within months, and the song itself took two years, then two decades, to conquer the charts — twice, in two completely different forms.
A 12th-Century Poem and a Friend’s Wife
The title came from literature. Clapton’s friend Ian Dallas, who was converting to Islam, told him the story of Layla and Majnun, the classical tale retold by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi: a young man falls obsessively in love with a beautiful girl who is married off to another man, and the unrequited passion drives him mad. Dallas gave Clapton a copy of the poem, and it struck him with uncomfortable force, because it mirrored his own situation exactly.
Clapton and Harrison had become close in the late 1960s. Clapton played the celebrated guitar solo on Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for The Beatles in 1968, and Harrison returned the favour by co-writing “Badge” for Cream’s Goodbye. Somewhere in that friendship, between his spells in Cream and Blind Faith, Clapton fell hopelessly in love with Boyd, a model Harrison had married in 1966 after meeting her on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. “Layla” was the result: a love song addressed to a woman he could not have, disguised under a name borrowed from a Persian princess.
Building the Dominos
The band that recorded it came together almost by accident. In the spring of 1970, Clapton learned that three members of Delaney & Bonnie’s backing group — bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock — were leaving. He recruited all three, and the new quartet, Derek and the Dominos, effectively served its apprenticeship backing Harrison on his first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass. Then, in August 1970, they went to Criteria Studios in Miami with producer Tom Dowd to make an album of their own.
It was Dowd who changed everything. On 26 August 1970 he took Clapton to an Allman Brothers Band concert in Miami and introduced him to Duane Allman. The two guitarists were already mutual admirers, and the chemistry was instant. Dowd later recalled: “There had to be some sort of telepathy going on because I’ve never seen spontaneous inspiration happen at that rate and level. One of them would play something, and the other reacted instantaneously.” Allman stayed, and a good band became a great one.
The Riff, the Champ and Notes That Aren’t on the Instrument
Clapton had written “Layla” as a ballad — a straightforward vehicle for his unrequited lyric. It became a rocker when Allman fashioned its signature riff, adapting a melody from Albert King’s slow blues “As the Years Go Passing By” and speeding it up into the urgent, seven-note figure that opens the song. The title track was recorded on 9 September 1970, and the first movement alone used sixteen tracks, six of them guitars: Clapton’s rhythm, layers of harmonised lead lines, Allman’s fretted solos in the verses and his slide in the outro. Both men plugged into a single two-input Fender Champ amplifier.
Allman’s slide playing supplied the record’s most otherworldly sound. By pushing the slide beyond the end of the fretboard, he reached pitches higher than the guitar was designed to produce — what Dowd called “notes that aren’t on the instrument.” They give the song its keening, almost vocal quality, a second voice crying alongside Clapton’s.
The construction underneath is just as deliberate. The choruses sit in D minor, built around the riff’s hammer-ons and power chords, while the verses drop to C-sharp minor, tightening the tension before each release. Around the two guitarists, the Dominos played with a restraint the song’s reputation sometimes obscures: Whitlock’s Hammond organ and harmony vocal thickening the choruses, Radle’s bass holding the whole edifice steady, and Gordon — a drummer by trade — driving the record he would shortly help to transform. Clapton later marvelled at the band’s one-take ESP, but the Miami tapes show something more mundane and more impressive: five musicians, most of them barely known to the public, playing like a group with a decade behind them rather than a few months.
The Piano Coda — and Its Disputed Author
The song’s famous second half arrived by chance. Shortly after the main session, Clapton returned to the studio and heard drummer Jim Gordon playing a gentle piano piece of his own. Impressed, he persuaded Gordon to let him attach it to “Layla” as a coda. The “Piano Exit” was recorded about a week after the first movement, with Gordon at the piano, Clapton on acoustic and slide guitar, and Allman weaving electric and bottleneck slide around the melody; Dowd then spliced the two halves together. During mixing the coda’s tape was sped up slightly, leaving its pitch suspended between C and C-sharp.
Only Gordon received a writing credit for the coda, and that has been disputed ever since. Bobby Whitlock has long maintained that Gordon took the melody from his then girlfriend Rita Coolidge, with whom he had been writing a song called “Time” — a song later recorded by Coolidge’s sister Priscilla with Booker T. Jones. Coolidge repeated the claim in her 2016 autobiography. The credit on the record, however, still reads Clapton–Gordon.
A Hit in Two Acts
None of it mattered at first. Clapton’s name appeared only on the album’s back cover, the seven-minute song was far too long for radio, and the album never charted in Britain. Atco released a truncated 2:43 single edit in March 1971, which stalled at number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100. Only when the song was reissued in 1972, in its full-length form, on the back of the compilations The History of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman’s An Anthology, did it break through: number 10 in the United States and number seven in the UK. A further UK reissue in 1982 took it to number four, and in the streaming era the original recording has been certified Platinum in Britain — belated, accumulating honours for a single that had failed twice before it succeeded. Critic Dave Marsh wrote that hearing “Layla” was “akin to witnessing a murder or a suicide,” and ranked it among the greatest singles ever made.
The Unplugged Rebirth
Twenty years later, the song was born again. On 16 January 1992, Clapton recorded an MTV Unplugged session at Bray Studios in Berkshire. Working with guitarist Andy Fairweather Low, he recast “Layla” as a slow shuffle, singing it an octave lower and dropping the piano coda, with Chuck Leavell taking the piano role inside the song instead. Clapton introduced it to the unsuspecting audience with a grin: “See if you can spot this one.” Released as a single in September 1992, the acoustic “Layla” reached number 12 on the Hot 100, topped the Canadian chart, and won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. The 1939 Martin OOO-42 he played that night later sold at Christie’s for $791,500.
Legacy
“Layla” now sits near the top of every canon: number 27 on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, and more than eight million broadcast performances by 2016. It was among the most performed songs of both 1972 and, astonishingly, 1992, and by the summer of 1994 the acoustic version alone had passed two million broadcast performances. In September 1983, at the ARMS charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Clapton performed it in a jam with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page — the three men who had successively held the Yardbirds’ lead guitar chair. Twenty years after that, the Allman Brothers Band took the song into their own concerts, with Derek Trucks, Duane Allman’s namesake in spirit, playing his slide parts and Gregg Allman at the piano: a tribute to Duane, and to Dowd, who had died the previous year. Martin Scorsese built a celebrated sequence of Goodfellas around the piano coda, planning the camera moves to the music on set. And the personal story resolved itself, after a fashion: Boyd divorced Harrison in 1977 and married Clapton in 1979 — Harrison, remarkably, attended the wedding party alongside Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney — before she and Clapton divorced in 1989. Boyd later said of the song’s raw emotion: “He’s such an incredible musician that he’s able to put his emotions into music in such a way that the audience can feel it instinctively. It goes right through you.” Clapton himself has said that “Layla” feels almost like someone else’s song — the work of a band he is simply a fan of. It may be the most painful song he ever wrote, and the one the world has most completely made its own.