"On My Knees" -- "Layla" and Love

The seven-note guitar riff blazes from your speakers, then an intense, intoxicating cry of unrequited love opens with a pleading query:

“What'll you do when you get lonely
And nobody's waiting by your side?”

The music becomes an immediate indelible sound of your memory. The iconic recording is, of course, “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos, written by Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon and released in 1971. The song has remained a rock classic ever since. It's a long-lasting love song … well, sort of.

The legend behind the song is familiar to most rock aficionados. “Layla” is about George Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd. Yes, that is the same “George Harrison” of the Beatles. Eric Clapton was seeing Pattie Harrison and deeply in love with her when he wrote the song. Many people knew about the affair. Bobby Whitlock, who was in the Derek and the Doninos and good friends with both Harrison and Clapton, said …

"I was there when they were supposedly sneaking around. You don't sneak very well when you're a world figure. He was all hot on Pattie and I was dating her sister. They had this thing going on that supposedly was behind George's back. Well, George didn't really care. He (George) said, 'You can have her.'”

Eric Clapton said he initially wrote the song as a ballad for Pattie. It was his attempt to persuade her to stop “holding off” and move in with him. Ironically, Eric was living with Pattie’s younger sister, Paula, at the time. When Paula heard the song Layla, she immediately moved out and felt that Eric had used her, to get to her sister, Pattie.

Clapton is said to have based the lyrics for “Layla” on a book by a 12th-century Persian poet called Nizami about a man who is in love with an unobtainable woman. He identified with the character Majnun, who was in love with Layla bint Mahdi idn Sa’d – a name much too long for a popular song title.

Pattie's version of the story is that one day, after Eric had been trying to persuade her to leave George and come with him, Eric played her a taped version of “Layla.” Later that same night at a party, Eric blurted out to George Harrison that he was in love with his wife. In an article published in The Guardian on December 13, 2008, Pattie said:

"I wasn't so happy when Eric wrote 'Layla,' while I was still married to George. I felt I was being exposed. I was amazed and thrilled at the song – it was so passionate and devastatingly dramatic – but I wanted to hang on to my marriage. Eric made this public declaration of love. I resisted his attentions for a long time - I didn't want to leave my husband. But obviously when things got so excruciatingly bad for George and me it was the end of our relationship. We both had to move on.”

Pattie and Clapton began living together in 1974 and married in 1979. Clapton and Harrison remained good friends, with George playing at their wedding along with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Clapton left her for actress Lory Del Santo (with whom he had his son, Conor) in 1985.

What about the recording? That memorable riff was taken from Albert King’s “As The Years Go Passing By.” “Eric took the song to Criteria Studios in Miami with him in 1970. We’d gone through it before,” says Whitlock. “Eric brought that seven-note lick with him to the recording sessions. And then Duane Allman stirred ’em up.”

The Allman Brothers played a show in Miami on August 26, 1970. Duane called to see if he could stop by after the gig, and Clapton decided to bring his band to the show. Duane froze up when he saw Clapton near the stage, but the admiration was mutual, and Clapton arranged for Duane to keep coming by and help with the album.

And then guitars were everywhere in the mix. Tom Dowd, recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records, recalled layering six guitar parts on the track. “There’s an Eric rhythm part, three tracks of Eric playing harmony and the main riff, one of Duane playing that beautiful bottleneck, and one of Duane and Eric locked up, playing counter melodies,” he said. “There had to be some kind 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 would react instantaneously. Not once did either of them have to say: ‘Could you play that again, please?’. It was like two hands in a glove.”

That piano? In its varied, long composition, the song is not without criticism. Jim Gordon’s piano coda, added three weeks after the song had been recorded, irritates Whitlock. “It taints the integrity,” he sighs. “It has nothing to do with the rest of the song. It just sounds like a mess. It’s like Guitar Wars – you’ve got three or four guitars and everybody’s going all over the place.” Whitlock also claims that Gordon stole the piano part from Rita Coolidge, his then girlfriend. It certainly sounds similar to the Coolidge-penned “Time,” released by Booker T. and Rita’s sister Priscilla in 1973.

“Layla” eventually became a hit in December 1972, two years after its first release. (An edited version was released as a single in 1971. It ran 2:43 and flopped on the charts. The full, 7:10 version was released a year.) By then, the Dominos had imploded, and Clapton all but retreated from the world for three years, doing nothing much beyond sitting around at home, taking heroin and building model airplanes.

Fate? Within a year of its recording, Duane Allman was dead, followed by bassist Carl Radle, whose kidneys gave up in 1980. After murdering his mother in 1983, drummer Jim Gordon was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent two decades in a mental hospital.

“I tried to give you consolation
When your old man had let you down
Like a fool, I fell in love with you
You turned my whole world upside down”

Legacy

In 1970, Jamrock Entertainment listed "Layla" as the best song of the year. Acclaimed Music rated the original version as the best song of 1970 and the 12th most popular song of the 1970s. In 1972, "Layla" was one of the most performed songs of the year. The acoustic version won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.

With its re-release in 1982, the Rock song cemented its reputation as a global Rock hit track.It is featured on a number of "greatest ever" lists. The song was chosen by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of their "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” and Rolling Stone ranked the song at number 27 on their list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” The Recording Industry Association of America ranked "Layla" at number 118 on their Songs of the Century on March 7, 2001. As of 2011, "Layla" had attained more than six million broadcasts on television and the radio or performances on other records and during live concerts.

More “Layla” Trivia

Vocalist Rita Coolidge claims that she is responsible for penning part of "Layla" but had received no credit. She claims that Clapton had taken the chords and melody that she performed for him at Olympic Studios in London, England in 1970, and alleges he had taken them when she heard them on the radio.

Pattie Boyd worked in London, New York, and Paris, side by side with the world’s top models. Boyd appeared in the UK and Italian editions of Vogue magazine, as well as in several commercials. Her turning point came in 1964 when she was cast in a very small part in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, where she met George Harrison. Pattie was immediately attracted to him, and she explains that he was incredibly good-looking but rather shy.

Regular drug and alcohol abuse, as well as Clapton’s many affairs, provoked Boyd to leave him in 1987 and later divorce him in 1989. In a recent interview, when Boyd was asked to answer who her greatest love was, she said, “That is so difficult, but I would say (Harrison). He will always stay with me.”

Pattie Boyd married for the third time in 2015. She wed a property developer named Rod Weston she’d known for a long time.“It’s almost our silver anniversary, so we thought we had better get on with it,” her husband declared jokingly.

At the end of the song, Dwayne Allman produced the "crying bird" sound with his guitar while Clapton played acoustic. It was a tribute to Charlie Parker, a jazz legend known as "bird."

The piano at the end has become a cultural touchstone. It was used to great effect at the end of the movie Goodfellas, and radio stations almost always play the version with the piano.

Duane Allman’s only child, Galadrielle Allman, sued his record company for at least $1 million in 1999, charging that her late father’s estate is owed royalties for his work on the ``Layla″ recordings. Allman said a contract between her father and record producers called for him to get 2 percent of retail sales of any recordings that came out of the sessions. Ms. Allman says PolyGram was supposed to continue payments after 1981 but did not.

The 1957 Les Paul that Duane Allman played on the Derek and the Dominos 1970 hit “Layla” went for $1.25 million at an auction in Macon, Georgia (2019).