100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 I Looked Away

02 Bell Bottom Blues

03 Keep on Growing

04 Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out

05 I Am Yours

06 Anyday

07 Key to the Highway

08 Tell the Truth

09 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?

10 Have You Ever Loved a Woman

11 Little Wing

12 It’s Too Late

13 Layla

14 Thorn Tree in the Garden

You’ve probably heard the story of ‘Layla’, where guitarist Eric Clapton falls in love with his pal Beatle George Harrison’s wife Pattie. A book of Persian poetry from the 12th century gives Clapton the name for his song about this ménage a trios. However, the story would be nothing more than a footnote in Beatle biographies were it not for the fact that Clapton had assembled one of the best bands in the history of rock & roll and they execute this, and everything, with soulful blues rock majesty. And more striking perhaps is that while the best known, ‘Layla’ is not even the best track on the album.

‘What was appealing to me about that band was that they were serious American musicians with pedigree,’ Clapton recalled. ‘My criterion was Booker T. and the MGs. If we were just left in a room that band would just play grooves 24 hours a day. When we first got together they all came to live in my house, and we played all day. Never left the house. And played. And it was real. Proper music: soulful R&B and blues. But then, you know, we had to make a record [laughs]. Songs! Singing! All of that.’

The players who became the Dominos – bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon and Bobby Whitlock on piano, organ and guitar – had toured with Delaney and Bonnie, Mad Dogs and Englishmen and done sessions for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. They brought southern soul to Britain and married it with the best of British blues.

Whitlock arrived first and began writing with Clapton. In August 1970 they decamped to Criteria Studios in Miami to work with Tom Dowd, who had cut most of the legendary Atlantic R&B hits and the second Cream album.

With less than enough material for a single album, the Dominos started jamming and Dowd rolled tape non-stop. His main contribution to the album was to introduce the then little known Duane Allman to Clapton. Allman slotted right in. When they arrived in Florida they barely had an album’s worth of material but songs just kept flowing. A band was recording Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘Key to the Highway’ next door and the Dominos just decided to throw that song into the mix. There are inspired remakes of standards like ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’ and a gorgeous reading of Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’. The full force rush of ‘Keep On Growing’ is matched by the sublime delicacy of ‘Thorn Tree in the Garden’.

And Clapton and Whitlock’s originals were all strong and their voices blended as well as the guitars. Perhaps the album’s best track is ‘I Am Yours’ – a luminescent melody Clapton put to a poem by Nizami, the author of ‘The Story of Layla and Majnun’.

Finally there is the title track – a 7-minute epic built on six layers of guitars based on an Albert King riff (‘As the Years Go Passing By’). The duel between Clapton’s blues notes and Allman’s high slide guitar is monumental and furious. Just when the fury of the song seems burned out comes a delightful melancholy piano coda written by Jim Gordon. This final piano piece didn’t emerge until the album had been mixed and the band suggested adding the outro. And finally the album ends with Whitlock’s bittersweet ‘Thorn Tree in the Garden’.

Tom Dowd summed it up best: ‘When we were saying goodbye I said to the band “This is the best damn album I have been involved in since The Genius Of Ray Charles back in ’59”. It was a new kind of music with great artistry. It was inspiring.’