There are many unknown stories about popular songs that have been hardwired in people’s brains. FMT Lifestyle begins a series about stories you haven’t heard about a song you fancy.
The series starts with Layla, a love song that remains a signpost in rock history – 50 years after it was recorded in 1970.
The co-writers of the song are Eric Clapton, who was lovesick over George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd, and drummer Jim Gordon who went on to be a murderer.
Clapton celebrated his 75th birthday in March this year while Gordon, who also turned 75 this month, has spent 36 years in prison for the murder of his mother.
It has also been 30 years since Martin Scorsese set Layla to one of the all-time favourite gangster movie sequences in Goodfellas.
The rousing piano coda of Layla unspools as Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) moves against the others involved in the Lufthansa job.
Clapton and Duane Allman’s intertwined guitars weep for the rash criminals whose bodies are discovered in a pink Cadillac, at the back of a garbage truck and hanging from a hook in a meat truck.
The story of Layla began in 1970, when Clapton formed the blues rock band, Derek and the Dominos, with Carl Radle (bass), Gordon (drums) and Bobby Whitlock (keyboards), from Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, the band he joined after Blind Faith split, in early 1970.
Who is Derek? Eric Patrick Clapton’s nickname was Del. Del and Eric were combined to become Derek.
At their first gig, they were going to call themselves Derek and The Dynamos, but Tony Ashton of the British rock trio, Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who opened for them, wrongly introduced them as Derek and the Dominos and the name stuck.
Why Layla? Someone gave Clapton a book called The Story of Layla and Majnun, a Persian story about being obsessively in love with a beautiful, unavailable woman.
Clapton loved the name and made it his declaration of love for Boyd, the wife of his friend, neighbour and former Beatle Harrison.
The seminal album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs has a few songs about Boyd – I Am Yours, Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad and a cover of Have You Ever Loved A Woman?, first recorded by blues artiste Freddie King in 1960. But it’s the 7:08-minute-long Layla that is easily Clapton’s most expressive statement of his love for Boyd.
Allman’s manic riff provided the motif Clapton needed for the song. The 1957 Goldtop Gibson Les Paul that Allman used on the track was sold at an auction for US$1 million last year.
The riff was somewhat a lift from an Albert King song, As the Years Go Passing By from the album Born Under A Bad Sign.
The piano part was a pure accident. It came from the drummer Gordon and the song does not sound right without it.
Gordon came up with the piano-laced coda with Rita Coolidge, whom he was dating at the time. A vexed Coolidge claimed in her memoir, Delta Lady, that she was unfairly denied song-writing credit on Layla.
The relationship that developed between Clapton, Harrison and Boyd devastated all of them. Still, a cocky Clapton said in an interview: “That was the spirit of the times. It didn’t even seem anything unusual. It was like one of those 1960s wife swapping movies, like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”
Inevitably, it got difficult at times. Everybody remained friends and Clapton got his girl – Layla helping his case.
But pretty much everyone else involved with the record got burnt bad. Drugs and alcohol didn’t help.
After they had made the 14-song double album, it was the end of The Dominos. The strange thing was the album did not sell well at first and the song itself wasn’t a hit until a year-and-a-half after the band broke up.
By then, nobody even really knew who Derek and the Dominos were.
Within a year of its recording, Allman died at age 24, followed by Radle whose kidneys gave up in 1980.
After murdering his mother in 1983, Gordon, one of rock’s great session drummers, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is now in a mental hospital.
Boyd finally left Harrison in 1974, only for her and Clapton to separate in 1986.
Remarkably, Boyd inspired some of the most famous songs in rock history: The Beatles’ Something, If I Needed Someone and For You Blue; and Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight.