After touring America with Blind Faith, a band that seemed to collapse under the weight of the musicians’ collective fame, Eric Clapton was in a moment of transition. Immediately dubbed a “supergroup,” convinced to rush their first album to market and play enormous venues rather than the intimate theaters they would have preferred, the band had to pad their set with hits from their previous bands, Cream and Traffic. The pressures of stardom were eclipsing the pleasure of playing. Meanwhile, the opening band on the Blind Faith tour, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, played with great joy every night. After the tour, Blind Faith came apart, even with their album still on the British charts. Eric sought refuge at Delaney and Bonnie’s home in Los Angeles and they became close friends. For the better part of the next year, he collaborated with the couple, an experience that culminated in a live album, On Tour with Eric Clapton. In the studio, Delaney helped produce Clapton’s first, eponymous solo album, co-writing songs and famously encouraging him to sing. Shortly after bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon, and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock parted ways with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, they each returned to play with Clapton. Neither Delaney nor Bonnie took their exodus well.
While working with Eric in England, the band was christened Derek and the Dominos, in another bid for Clapton to remain somewhat anonymous. He wanted the music to speak for itself. They recorded behind Eric’s close friend George Harrison on his first album after the dissolution of the Beatles, All Things Must Pass. It was during that project that Eric fell in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie, and the pain of that unrequited love fueled the writing of Layla and Other Love Songs. The album he wrote for the love he couldn’t have won her in the end, and it reached far beyond her, into the wider culture, where it is revered as one of the great masterpieces of rock and roll.
I’ve pored over many books and magazines about the Layla sessions, trying to understand the connection between my father and Eric that was so evident in the songs. The most revealing insights came from an unlikely source. A London-based musician named Sam Hare interviewed Eric in 1997 for his dissertation. At the time, Sam was a photography student at Norwich School of Art and Design, where he was asked to pick any subject he was passionate about for his final project. He chose the Allman Brothers Band and their influence on popular music. Sam knew he needed a primary source for his paper and decided to take a chance and write to Eric Clapton. To his great surprise, Clapton responded and they had a remarkable conversation. While the interview was never intended for wider publication, it came to the attention of the then-president of Hittin’ the Note magazine, who printed it, much to the surprise of Hare. The interview in its entirety has since been available to anyone willing to search for it online. The quotes contained here are from that interview.
“There were a lot of complications in my life. I’d fallen in love with someone else’s wife, and all of this coming—that’s what I was writing songs about. But there was also a tremendous bonding going on—the likes of which I’ve never known since,” Eric said.
When they were ready to go into the studio to record, Eric thought of Tom Dowd, the producer he had first worked with on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. Dowd was in the vanguard of music recording, an ingenious inventor who had found his calling as a producer. Many producers try to leave their stamp on the albums they cut, but Tom was an invisible guiding hand that enabled many artists to reach their full potential. At Atlantic Records he oversaw the creations of masterpieces by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and a continuing list of artists in every conceivable genre of music. He was a happy and calm man, with a contagious smile and natural elegance. A technical innovator, he is credited as the first to record popular music in stereo. He invented faders, the sliding switches on recording consoles that could be raised and lowered smoothly. This single idea enabled him to play the soundboard as an instrument itself, using his ear to guide the mix. He had the mind and soul of an artist, and his ability to communicate with musicians and put them at ease was unparalleled.
Tom had great respect for Duane’s talent and his ear, and he understood the range of influences the Allman Brothers were drawing from. He loved the band, and when they gave him a gold pendant of their mushroom logo, Tom wore it every day for the rest of his life. Duane and Tom had become close during their many shared Atlantic sessions, including Idlewild South, the Brothers’ second album, which had been completed just before the Dominos arrived at Criteria. When Tom mentioned that Eric was on his way, Duane asked if he could come by the sessions. Duane had long admired and respected Clapton. The Yardbirds were one of his first inspirations; the Allman Joys covered their songs. Duane and Gregg had driven for hours to see Cream play when they lived in Los Angeles.
Tom invited Eric to see the Allman Brothers play; he was eager to introduce them. Eric had called Tom years before to ask who played the guitar solo on the back end of Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” Tom had a feeling Duane would push Eric and the Dominos in a new direction. Karl Richardson, an engineer on the sessions, remembered that Clapton had trepidations at the prospect of playing with Duane; he said he wasn’t sure he could match him. Karl said, “He seemed scared to death.”
Albhy Galuten, another engineer and keyboard player on the sessions, had a somewhat different take. “Eric was nervous that he might let Duane down by not being a good enough guitar player to pull his own weight. He wasn’t nervous about what people would think, but he wanted to be up to snuff as a musician. After seeing the band play, you can see why he would be nervous.”
It was a beautiful late August night for an outdoor concert in front of the Miami Beach Convention Center, and Tom had led Eric and the other members of the Dominos to a cordoned-off spot just in front of the stage where they had an excellent view of Duane. When he spotted Eric, Duane froze for a moment. Eric was moved by the power of the music. “There was like the perfect kind of weather,” Eric said. “It was dark, it was balmy and hot and there was a strong breeze. They all had really, really long hair—right down to their waists almost; it was blowing back in the wind, and it was so picturesque. The music was unbelievable, because they were doing all of that harmony playing … it was fantastically worked out and very strong.”
Tom couldn’t wait to get them back to Criteria.
The Brothers and the Dominos went back to the studio after the show and they all stayed to jam. Only Jaimoe chose not to play. “I went in there, and I really wasn’t knocked out about anything they were doing. I went back out to the Winnebago and did what we always did—listened to Sonny Williams, or Coltrane or Miles, or somebody. I was out there just smoking and listening to tapes. What we were doing was a hell of a lot more interesting than what Eric Clapton was doing in there.” It was clear to him, too, that Duane was the only one Eric wanted. “He wanted Duane to play on his record and, shit, why not?” Jaimoe didn’t perceive Clapton as a threat to the Brothers, but the rest of the band worried. Eric could offer Duane the wider world, and not someday soon, but right away.
The Dominos had been at work in the studio for about ten days and had completed three songs. “We didn’t have very much material. I started recording anything I could think of,” Eric remembered. “It almost started from the night of the concert, because they all came back to the studio after the show. We started right then and there and it was just … I think the best way to describe it is that up until the point that we connected with them, we were really firing blanks. We’d been in the studio for a couple of weeks and we were getting nothing done because really it was just about me trying to kind of stimulate myself with the guitar.”
Duane walked into the studio, sat down with his guitar, and learned the fragmented beginnings of the songs Eric had written. His focus and precision impressed the most experienced producer in modern music and astounded the young engineers. Eric asked Duane to come back and play on the album. Duane agreed, and when he returned, he walked in with a whole new energy, clapping his hands together and saying, “Let’s get this thing done.”
The songs on Layla appear in the order in which they were recorded, with Duane’s arrival on the fourth song, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a cover of a Jimmy Cox tune made popular by Bessie Smith.
“We only had the quartet, and we were trying to write songs, but it just wasn’t exciting,” Eric said. “Then, when these guys came in—especially just me and Duane—we’d just keep thinking of things to do, songs to do from the past, that would make it possible for us to duet. We’d come up with ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,’ ‘Key to the Highway,’ and ‘Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?’ All these things were really vehicles so we could jam, and that ended up making up quite a deal of the bulk of the album—just excuses to jam with one another.
“For a start, Duane would play in straight tuning a lot of the time, I mean, I couldn’t understand it. He would do—I really don’t know how to describe it—but he would hit this seventh thing all the time, which I actually didn’t approve of.… I mean every now and then we would argue about stuff like this because … I only believe that you should really play what had gone down before—which jived in a way with why I liked him, because I loved the fact that he was an improviser. He threw away tradition a lot of the time, but for me, that was really quite … sort of inappropriate! You know he was fantastically gifted.”
In addition to engineering the sessions, Galuten played piano on the album as well.
“For Eric it was so powerful to have somebody who was an equal on guitar, because there are not many people as good as Eric. They did not do multiple takes. It was not the kind of recording session where you say, ‘Let’s try the bridge again. Let’s work on this section.’ Most records don’t have that magic, spontaneous thing. When they were recording Layla, if the second take was still not great, they would just forget it and move on to another song.” They didn’t have to discuss what was needed; they played together until they found it. Richardson said that Duane became the de facto musical director on the session, and when someone would present an idea to Eric, he would say, “Run it by Duane.” Duane met Eric where he was, and in some way almost stood in for the lover he wanted but could not have. “I’d kind of fallen in love with Duane,” Eric said. “I mean I was even ignoring my own band, you know. We were just kind of having this musical affair in front of everybody.
“Duane was a very, very strong, driven, and aggressive man. I mean, he was very thin and wiry and not much to shout about in terms of being a tough guy or nothing, but he was very strong. There was a great deal of joy in our kind of dueling with one another because we came from almost a separate place. I mean, I was much more into Chicago stuff, and he was much more into the kind of southern, Georgian kind of country blues.”
Galuten recalled, “On ‘Key to the Highway,’ when Duane did his solo, he started out with something so sweet and simple and straight, then about halfway through, he switched pickups and jumped to something that was incredibly aggressive, and yet absolutely right, and I remember everybody on the session was just like ‘Oh my God!’ It blew us all away. And in the mix, when you hear it back, it’s pulled down. Tommy mixes it so it comes out kind of evenly, but at the time it was like he just owned the room.”
“Those are notes that aren’t on the instrument,” Tom Dowd commented in The Language of Music, a documentary about his life, “Those are notes that are off the top of the instrument. That’s what makes those people such magnificent guitar players. It’s in the tips of their fingers. It’s not in the knobs, it’s not how loud they play—it’s touch. It’s touch. And both of them have exquisite technique and touch.”
Duane played with delicate beauty on “I Am Yours,” then played ferocious lead on “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” He added a thundering lick to the beginning of the song “Layla,” transforming a relaxed ballad into a passionate, rocking plea with one of the most recognizable riffs in modern music. Yet in all the interviews Duane gave about the record, he evaded questions that tried to differentiate his playing from Eric’s. When asked what he played on Layla, he answered, “I played just enough.” He also said, “I played the Gibson and he played the Fender, and if you know the difference, you can hear who played what.” Duane valued his connection with Eric, and he wasn’t going to be pitted against him, even in the subtlest way.
They repaired to the Thunderbird Hotel at Sunny Isles Beach at the end of their long days, which would start in the late afternoon and often continue into the early hours of morning. The hotel wasn’t anything special, but it was on the beach and close to Criteria. It was also infamous for providing its guests with anything they might desire. Both Eric and Duane were still reveling in the peace and comfort heroin could bring, not yet at its mercy. Eric said, “Duane was like your archetypal Johnny Reb. I mean, he was really out there, and for a thin guy he had this very strong, very charismatic persona. You know, a lot of drinking was involved, and we were just getting into a lot of heavy drug taking, too, so to see him getting into that with me was … well, it’s sad to look back on it. But Duane was very tough. The drugs when they took their toll, which was a little while later, kind of incapacitated us. I mean the Dominos broke up because of that—because we just couldn’t function—but at the time of Layla, they really hadn’t gotten a grip.”
Cocaine was such a part of the culture of Miami, it was a given. Fellow Domino Bobby Whitlock has said that it was so abundant and strong that Duane and Eric ended up flushing a quantity of it down the toilet at the hotel, trying to release themselves from the excess of it. (The night he came home from the sessions, Little Linda watched Duane sit at the kitchen table in the Big House prying the silver disks off his Concho belt. “What are you doing? Don’t take it apart; you’ll never get it back together,” she said. He smiled up at her like a little kid and slid a little bindle of powder from behind the silver decoration and held it up to her between two fingers with a wink.)
At the end of their time together, Duane agreed to return to Miami for overdubs, and Eric asked him if he would come out on the road with the band. Duane agreed. He wrote to Donna with the news.
September 5, 1970
Ramada Inn
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Sunday
Dearest Spoon,
Thanks for the sweet secret message. Please try and have a little faith, honey, and everything will be alright.
Eric Clapton has asked me to join his band. I really don’t know what to do, but don’t mention a word of this to anyone at the house, or leave this letter where others might read it and do something foolish. It would mean about $5000 a week to us, as well as a home in England and a lot of things we’d like to have. We’ve cut a really super album together, and Eric plans a European as well as an American tour, and the receipts would be phenomenal on both. I’ll be getting 20% of all of it, so I plan to do both of those tours with him.
I’ll write more later when my thought is more stable. I’m really up in the air right now.
All my love to Gragri and everyone there.
Love Always,
Duanen
P.S. Shhh!
Eric offered two tours, one in Europe and one in the United States, a high wage, and friendship with an equal. Duane told Donna with a kind of awe that he had seen an entire trunk full of beautiful boots and shoes in Eric’s hotel room. He had fine silk shirts and velvet pants, the best of everything. Eric gave Duane a beautiful batik shirt, with abstract swirls that suggested peacocks in purple and deep blues on both sides of the placket. It was easily the most beautiful thing Duane had ever owned. In return, with humor, Duane gave Eric his red T-shirt that read “City Slicker.” He knew Eric was offering him another kind of life.
After the Layla sessions were completed, Clapton returned to England with a rare left-handed Fender Stratocaster, a gift for Jimi Hendrix. He wanted him to hear the Dominos’ recording of Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” a tribute he and Duane had recorded for him. They both greatly admired Hendrix, one of the few other rock guitarists who could stand toe-to-toe with them. Thom Doucette had planned to introduce Jimi and Duane when Jimi returned from Europe. But on the morning of September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found unconscious in a Notting Hill apartment in London. He died that afternoon at the hospital, having apparently suffocated while under the heavy sedation of sleeping pills. Eric never had the chance to see him.
Duane had an incredible dream about Jimi not long after he passed away, and he bounded out of bed late at night to share it with Donna.
Duane walked into a men’s room in the lobby of a big hotel, like a Holiday Inn, and there was Jimi Hendrix, his wild corona of hair, his purple jacket covered in snaking gold cord and shiny buttons, a long red scarf around his neck. Duane had heard that Jimi died, and wondered if they were in Heaven and so he asked him, “Hey man, are you okay?”
But Jimi was excited and waved Duane over to the sink with a smile so big he could see every one of his teeth. “Man, come take a look at this! It’s a groove!”
Jimi bent down toward the silver faucet, turned it gently, and kept teasing and turning, and as he did, a beautiful guitar riff came floating out and bounced off the white tile walls around them. Duane stood with his hands on his hips, and watched Jimi play the pretty little rambling tune by twisting the faucet.
Duane pulled his Dobro into bed with Donna and started picking out the riff. The melody Jimi gave him was the seed of the song “Little Martha.”
Eric had a few American shows planned for the Dominos in December and Duane agreed to play as many as he could, given the Brothers’ touring schedule. Duane had missed a few Brothers gigs in order to record Layla, but he didn’t like doing that. He was going to have to decide very soon which band to commit to.
Tuffy Phillips is one of two remaining original roadies and he still lives in Macon. His van sits in his driveway decorated with dozens of bumper stickers honoring the military and telling Jane Fonda to fuck off. The skin of a bear, head and all, rides shotgun in the front seat. Tuffy wears wire-rimmed glasses with one eye covered by a rose-tinted lens with a small medallion glued in the center since he can’t see out of that eye anyway. He is covered in tattoos and wears blue jeans, pale from hundreds of washings. His black leather vest is decorated with patches and long twin braids hang down over his shoulders. He wears earrings made of the claw of some small critter, and silver rings of his own making on every finger, their silver harvested from melted-down coins and old wedding rings. He gives me a necklace with a mountain lion tooth he pried from a skull beside a road in Wyoming. He talks with a thin cigar in his mouth and a handgun resting in front of him on the coffee table. As tough as he is, he is one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever known.
“Duane came in and asked which one of us was going to drive with him to Tampa to play with Eric Clapton,” Tuffy said. “And everybody had an excuse why they couldn’t carry him there. I was the only one who had nothing to do, and so we went. I was the driver for the band. I didn’t know anything about taking care of Duane’s guitars, but he trusted me. Well, he broke a string that first night, and I took his guitar from him, and then Eric’s tech took it from me. He replaced the string and quick, cut the tops of the strings off at the headstock, and you know that’s not what Duane liked. He liked to leave his strings long and curled up. He gave me such a look when I handed it back to him, like he could have killed me. Later, I told him it wasn’t me that’d done it. Duane made a thousand dollars there, and he gave me five hundred of it. He told me I better not share one dollar of it with any of the guys. He said, they didn’t earn it, but he told me to make sure they knew about it!”
After playing his second show with the Dominos the next night in Syracuse, New York, Eric approached Duane about his offer. “I said, ‘You know, we really need you in the band now—I don’t really want to go on as a quartet. Would you join us?’ He said, ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ and at that point, he went straight back to the Allman Brothers.”
Joe Dan Petty picked up Duane at the airport, and he strutted up, pulled out a roll of bills, and said, “JD! I got Big Daddy bucks!” Once they were in the car, Duane said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Clapton’s got nothing on Dickey Betts.”
I wish my father could have known that Layla would be considered one of the landmark recordings in rock-and-roll history.
One of the most important and valued experiences of my father’s life gave rise to a challenging and disillusioning experience in mine. True to the nature of the business at the time, the arrangement for compensating Duane for his work on Layla was handled very loosely, with a couple of phone calls rather than a negotiation or a signed contract. Duane was initially paid a couple of hundred dollars, a day rate for a studio musician, until it was clear Eric wanted him to stay and play on the entire album. At that point Phil Walden called Criteria and told Duane to stay out of the studio until a deal could be struck. Money was never a big consideration for Duane, and waiting for the deal to be made irritated him enough that he called Donna to complain about it. The lure of playing with a musician he greatly admired and respected was of the highest value to him, but within a few hours, a deal was struck to give Duane a small royalty.
When I turned eighteen, the responsibility for my father’s estate fell to me, and I took it very seriously. My learning curve was steep. My grandfather Gil, the executor of Duane’s estate until I came of age, noticed that royalty payments for Layla had stopped without explanation in 1983. My mother and I both wrote to Eric directly several times. When she went to see him play in 1972, after Duane’s death, he had told Donna to get in touch with him if we ever needed anything. Lawyers answered our letters. It took me nearly twenty years to settle the dispute through legal mediation, which resulted in the original deal being reinstated going forward. Eric Clapton himself never weighed in on the matter.
Duane did not live long enough to receive either the accolades or fair compensation for Layla.
You can hear the fatigue and sadness in my father’s voice when his playing with Clapton comes up in a 1971 interview on a Houston radio station. He is asked if he had heard of plans for a follow-up Dominos album, and whether he would participate in it. “I haven’t heard from any of those guys since,” Duane said.