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| Gateway drugs take many forms. |
The Hit
Have you seen Goodfellas? If so, you’ve heard Derek & the Dominos, “Layla,” if only the outro. You know the part when Robert DeNiro’s character cleaned up after the Lufthansa heist because all those people started spending too loudly? The part where those two kids walk up to the pink Caddy? Or when they open the meat locker and that one guy, gangster who was kind of a goofball, is hanging in the refrigerated truck with sides of beef? Ring any bells?
Forget about it. Even it lasts over four minutes, the outro feels like a moment of Zen transcendence, of floating away after the twisting turmoil of the first half (or less) of the song, the tangled, tortured guitar, a man bellowing “Stella!” in a New Orleans monsoon, only in the form of a song.
The funny thing was, not many people heard that anguished shout in the dark when “Derek” first sang it. When Derek & the Dominos released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in 1970, a couple critics perked up but not enough to goose sales. It was “a critical and commercial flop” and, as one of the major players in producing the album later said, even “Layla” “died a death” upon release.
The funny thing is, it might not have if one of the aforementioned “major player” had any desire to announce himself.
The Rest of the Story
“We were a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it. Derek and the Dominos – the whole thing. So it couldn't last. I had to come out and admit that I was being me. I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else's wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write the song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn't real at all.”
“We were all hiding inside it” sounds a little rich once you put together the fact that it was mostly Eric “Derek” Clapton doing the hiding. Derek & the Dominos deliberately hid Clapton’s involvement with the band because he’d had enough of the “Clapton is God” mythology that he felt destroyed both Cream and Blind Faith, his short-lived project with Steve Winwood. That said, telling the whole story involves a little backing up. (Also, this oral history fits together the parts in the most clarifying way I’ve come across so far; whatever errors I make here are corrected there.)
Eric Clapton met his future all-American “Dominos” - Carl Radle (bass), Jim Gordon (drums) and, mostly significantly, Bobby Whitlock (keys/vocals) - when Blind Faith invited an act Delaney & Bonnie and Friends to open for them on their 1969 U.S. tour. Someone passed off a recording to Clapton before the tour and, per Whitlock from a very thorough Best Classic Bands interview, Delaney & Bonnie “were the most thrilling, red-hot rocking blue-eyed soul revue on the planet.” Whitlock joined them after coming up as a Stax Records session musician (he scored his first recordings with Isaac Hayes and David Porter; he’s the dude clapping his hands on Sam & Dave’s “I Thank You”), and he relocated to LA to become one of their “friends”; that’s where Radle and Gordon enter the picture as well. To give a hint of how desperate he’d become to get the hell out of the spotlight, Clapton later joined Delaney & Bonnie as just another member of the band.
Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett were a couple, as it happened, and an explosive one. Lots and lots of drugs fueled ego clashes that had their “friends” coming in and out of an ever-revolving door; careful as Whitlock is to credit Delaney with teaching him just about everything about playing live music, he reached his breaking point just like everyone else and left. And that’s where the story of Derek & the Dominos begins.
1970 saw Clapton hit a crossroads with a proliferation of intersections. For one, he’d developed a tortured (sorry to repeat, but there it is) infatuation with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his good friend and former Beatle, George Harrison. For her part, Boyd had reached her limit with both Harrison’s sexual dalliances and his own infatuation with Eastern mysticism, so she welcomed Clapton’s attentions, if only to a limit. (For the record, I never really nailed down how far the infidelity went, but I do think it was nowhere, at least at that time.) The other thing that happened: Whitlock’s mentor, Steve Cropper, suggested that he head over to England to visit Clapton, who’d holed up in his Surrey estate Hurtwood Edge. That visit led to the other future Dominos flying to London where they became the studio band for Harrison’s solo album, All Things Must Pass. Over time, Radle, Gordon and Whitlock lost their damn minds in the Surrey country-side, so Clapton scouted out a London address (33 Thurloe Place) as a temporary residence for them…and a place where he could meet Boyd. Last point here, Whitlock got the itch to start a project before Clapton did, because he’d committed to finishing work on All Things Must Pass. And yet it happened eventually, if slowly…
Derek & the Dominos made their stage debut in June of 1970, at a Dr. Spock charity concert (the good doctor had by that time amassed serious legal fees for political activism). Rumor has it that they didn’t even have a name when they took the stage, but other rumors said, 1) they did, and 2) Clapton loved the name “Derek & the Dominos” while all the American members of the act worried they’d be mistaken for a doo-wop act. The fact that show failed to generate a lot of attention and/or name-recognition made the next step in the band’s career possible - e.g., a series of shows at small venues all over England with a one-pound entry fee, each with a specific stipulation that whatever publicity occurred could not utter the words “Eric” or “Clapton.” Which made Clapton ecstatic (to finally link to Wikipedia, a major source for all this):
“…no one knew who we were, and I loved it. I loved the fact that we were this little quartet, playing in obscure places, sometimes to audiences of no more than fifty or sixty people.”
With everyone involved having a dynamite time and believing in the project - Clapton gushes about them in that oral history - they decided to take the next step and record an album. Their choice of venues - Miami, Florida - wound up as a mixed blessing. The downside: lots of drugs, all varieties and on demand (“We were staying in this hotel on the beach, and whatever drug you wanted, you could get it at the newsstand. The girl would just take your orders.”). The plus side: after a(n) (drug-induced) unproductive week, someone took Clapton to see Duane Allman play and they hit it off both famously and productively. Allman’s talent on the slide guitar inspired the songwriting and filled in some blanks on the recording that got the album off the ground and let it fly…as noted above, to nowhere in particular.
A tour followed all the same…and so did the drugs. From Whitlock’s memory:
“We didn't have little bits of anything. There were no grams around, let's just put it like that. Tom couldn't believe it, the way we had these big bags laying out everywhere. I'm almost ashamed to tell it, but it's the truth. It was scary, what we were doing, but we were just young and dumb and didn't know. Cocaine and heroin, that's all and Johnny Walker.”
To put that through another translator, even Elton John couldn’t believe they could play as well as they did with…all that (Elton John also remarked on how much he learned about performing live from the experience). At any rate, the tour wrapped, too few people came out to see it, and everyone returned home at the end…along with the drugs.
The tail-end of this tale registers somewhere around brutal. Friend and rival to Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, died during the recording of Layla, etc., which is why “Little Wing” was included as a tribute. Duane Allman, who never committed to Derek & the Dominos despite Clapton’s invitation (he was too committed to the Allman Brothers), died in a motorcycle accident in October of 1971. After the attempt to record a second album collapsed under (probably) paranoia and acrimony, Clapton crawled inside a heroin-induced hiatus that lasted three years and it took Pete Townshend organizing something called the Peace Festival to get him out of it. Things ended even darker for Gordon: an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic on top of never getting out of his addictions, he killed his mother with a hammer in 1984 and has living in institutions since.
While I can’t call it a brighter note, Clapton finally married his “Layla,” i.e., Pattie Boyd, after she and Harrison split. Then again, and like Harrison, their marriage lasted just longer than a decade. All the same, she inspired (at least) five songs between two of the late 20th centuries most famous musicians - “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” by Clapton, and “If I Needed Someone,” “Something” (super-fan over here) and “For You Blue” by Harrison - a pretty good haul for a lifetime, no matter how one arrives at it (by which I mean, good on ya, Pattie!).
About the Sampler
As alluded to in all the above, Derek & the Dominos only recorded the one album, so that’s the sampler for this post. I think the most useful thing I can do by way of introductions is to give a nod to the album’s covers (abetted by Allman) and their original artists - e.g., “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” (Jimmy Cox original; also, holy shit old); “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” (by Billy Myles, recorded by Freddie King); and “Keys to the Highway” (by Big Bill Broonzy). With zero intention of crapping on “Layla” - if nothing else, the fact that the long outro came from Gordon and Whitlock and Clapton kept it because he felt the song needed an ending - I like just about everything else on the album more, as demonstrated by “Anyday” and “Bell Bottom Blues” slipping onto my January 2021 playlist, even accidentally. Seriously, if you have a chance to hear the Layla Sessions, I wholly recommend doing it more than once. I’m not a blues-rock guy and I’ve never once hesitated to sit through that album one more time.
The one question left unanswered in all the above: when did “Layla” actually become popular? Atlantic Records released it on The History of Eric Clapton in 1972 - which would have put the release somewhere near mid-heroin fog. It hit No. 10 in the States and No. 7 in the UK. And that’s either the most or the least crazy thing about Derek & the Dominos.
Have you seen Goodfellas? If so, you’ve heard Derek & the Dominos, “Layla,” if only the outro. You know the part when Robert DeNiro’s character cleaned up after the Lufthansa heist because all those people started spending too loudly? The part where those two kids walk up to the pink Caddy? Or when they open the meat locker and that one guy, gangster who was kind of a goofball, is hanging in the refrigerated truck with sides of beef? Ring any bells?
Forget about it. Even it lasts over four minutes, the outro feels like a moment of Zen transcendence, of floating away after the twisting turmoil of the first half (or less) of the song, the tangled, tortured guitar, a man bellowing “Stella!” in a New Orleans monsoon, only in the form of a song.
The funny thing was, not many people heard that anguished shout in the dark when “Derek” first sang it. When Derek & the Dominos released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in 1970, a couple critics perked up but not enough to goose sales. It was “a critical and commercial flop” and, as one of the major players in producing the album later said, even “Layla” “died a death” upon release.
The funny thing is, it might not have if one of the aforementioned “major player” had any desire to announce himself.
The Rest of the Story
“We were a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it. Derek and the Dominos – the whole thing. So it couldn't last. I had to come out and admit that I was being me. I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else's wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write the song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn't real at all.”
“We were all hiding inside it” sounds a little rich once you put together the fact that it was mostly Eric “Derek” Clapton doing the hiding. Derek & the Dominos deliberately hid Clapton’s involvement with the band because he’d had enough of the “Clapton is God” mythology that he felt destroyed both Cream and Blind Faith, his short-lived project with Steve Winwood. That said, telling the whole story involves a little backing up. (Also, this oral history fits together the parts in the most clarifying way I’ve come across so far; whatever errors I make here are corrected there.)
Eric Clapton met his future all-American “Dominos” - Carl Radle (bass), Jim Gordon (drums) and, mostly significantly, Bobby Whitlock (keys/vocals) - when Blind Faith invited an act Delaney & Bonnie and Friends to open for them on their 1969 U.S. tour. Someone passed off a recording to Clapton before the tour and, per Whitlock from a very thorough Best Classic Bands interview, Delaney & Bonnie “were the most thrilling, red-hot rocking blue-eyed soul revue on the planet.” Whitlock joined them after coming up as a Stax Records session musician (he scored his first recordings with Isaac Hayes and David Porter; he’s the dude clapping his hands on Sam & Dave’s “I Thank You”), and he relocated to LA to become one of their “friends”; that’s where Radle and Gordon enter the picture as well. To give a hint of how desperate he’d become to get the hell out of the spotlight, Clapton later joined Delaney & Bonnie as just another member of the band.
Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett were a couple, as it happened, and an explosive one. Lots and lots of drugs fueled ego clashes that had their “friends” coming in and out of an ever-revolving door; careful as Whitlock is to credit Delaney with teaching him just about everything about playing live music, he reached his breaking point just like everyone else and left. And that’s where the story of Derek & the Dominos begins.
1970 saw Clapton hit a crossroads with a proliferation of intersections. For one, he’d developed a tortured (sorry to repeat, but there it is) infatuation with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his good friend and former Beatle, George Harrison. For her part, Boyd had reached her limit with both Harrison’s sexual dalliances and his own infatuation with Eastern mysticism, so she welcomed Clapton’s attentions, if only to a limit. (For the record, I never really nailed down how far the infidelity went, but I do think it was nowhere, at least at that time.) The other thing that happened: Whitlock’s mentor, Steve Cropper, suggested that he head over to England to visit Clapton, who’d holed up in his Surrey estate Hurtwood Edge. That visit led to the other future Dominos flying to London where they became the studio band for Harrison’s solo album, All Things Must Pass. Over time, Radle, Gordon and Whitlock lost their damn minds in the Surrey country-side, so Clapton scouted out a London address (33 Thurloe Place) as a temporary residence for them…and a place where he could meet Boyd. Last point here, Whitlock got the itch to start a project before Clapton did, because he’d committed to finishing work on All Things Must Pass. And yet it happened eventually, if slowly…
Derek & the Dominos made their stage debut in June of 1970, at a Dr. Spock charity concert (the good doctor had by that time amassed serious legal fees for political activism). Rumor has it that they didn’t even have a name when they took the stage, but other rumors said, 1) they did, and 2) Clapton loved the name “Derek & the Dominos” while all the American members of the act worried they’d be mistaken for a doo-wop act. The fact that show failed to generate a lot of attention and/or name-recognition made the next step in the band’s career possible - e.g., a series of shows at small venues all over England with a one-pound entry fee, each with a specific stipulation that whatever publicity occurred could not utter the words “Eric” or “Clapton.” Which made Clapton ecstatic (to finally link to Wikipedia, a major source for all this):
“…no one knew who we were, and I loved it. I loved the fact that we were this little quartet, playing in obscure places, sometimes to audiences of no more than fifty or sixty people.”
With everyone involved having a dynamite time and believing in the project - Clapton gushes about them in that oral history - they decided to take the next step and record an album. Their choice of venues - Miami, Florida - wound up as a mixed blessing. The downside: lots of drugs, all varieties and on demand (“We were staying in this hotel on the beach, and whatever drug you wanted, you could get it at the newsstand. The girl would just take your orders.”). The plus side: after a(n) (drug-induced) unproductive week, someone took Clapton to see Duane Allman play and they hit it off both famously and productively. Allman’s talent on the slide guitar inspired the songwriting and filled in some blanks on the recording that got the album off the ground and let it fly…as noted above, to nowhere in particular.
A tour followed all the same…and so did the drugs. From Whitlock’s memory:
“We didn't have little bits of anything. There were no grams around, let's just put it like that. Tom couldn't believe it, the way we had these big bags laying out everywhere. I'm almost ashamed to tell it, but it's the truth. It was scary, what we were doing, but we were just young and dumb and didn't know. Cocaine and heroin, that's all and Johnny Walker.”
To put that through another translator, even Elton John couldn’t believe they could play as well as they did with…all that (Elton John also remarked on how much he learned about performing live from the experience). At any rate, the tour wrapped, too few people came out to see it, and everyone returned home at the end…along with the drugs.
The tail-end of this tale registers somewhere around brutal. Friend and rival to Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, died during the recording of Layla, etc., which is why “Little Wing” was included as a tribute. Duane Allman, who never committed to Derek & the Dominos despite Clapton’s invitation (he was too committed to the Allman Brothers), died in a motorcycle accident in October of 1971. After the attempt to record a second album collapsed under (probably) paranoia and acrimony, Clapton crawled inside a heroin-induced hiatus that lasted three years and it took Pete Townshend organizing something called the Peace Festival to get him out of it. Things ended even darker for Gordon: an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic on top of never getting out of his addictions, he killed his mother with a hammer in 1984 and has living in institutions since.
While I can’t call it a brighter note, Clapton finally married his “Layla,” i.e., Pattie Boyd, after she and Harrison split. Then again, and like Harrison, their marriage lasted just longer than a decade. All the same, she inspired (at least) five songs between two of the late 20th centuries most famous musicians - “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” by Clapton, and “If I Needed Someone,” “Something” (super-fan over here) and “For You Blue” by Harrison - a pretty good haul for a lifetime, no matter how one arrives at it (by which I mean, good on ya, Pattie!).
About the Sampler
As alluded to in all the above, Derek & the Dominos only recorded the one album, so that’s the sampler for this post. I think the most useful thing I can do by way of introductions is to give a nod to the album’s covers (abetted by Allman) and their original artists - e.g., “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” (Jimmy Cox original; also, holy shit old); “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” (by Billy Myles, recorded by Freddie King); and “Keys to the Highway” (by Big Bill Broonzy). With zero intention of crapping on “Layla” - if nothing else, the fact that the long outro came from Gordon and Whitlock and Clapton kept it because he felt the song needed an ending - I like just about everything else on the album more, as demonstrated by “Anyday” and “Bell Bottom Blues” slipping onto my January 2021 playlist, even accidentally. Seriously, if you have a chance to hear the Layla Sessions, I wholly recommend doing it more than once. I’m not a blues-rock guy and I’ve never once hesitated to sit through that album one more time.
The one question left unanswered in all the above: when did “Layla” actually become popular? Atlantic Records released it on The History of Eric Clapton in 1972 - which would have put the release somewhere near mid-heroin fog. It hit No. 10 in the States and No. 7 in the UK. And that’s either the most or the least crazy thing about Derek & the Dominos.
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