THE CURSE OF
IT FEATURES in nearly every shortlist of greatest rock songs, a hit instantly associated with the world’s best-known living guitarist. Next month it will be 50 years since Eric Clapton and a group of musicians calling themselves Derek and the Dominos entered a Miami studio to begin recording an album called Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
Since then, the title track has become familiar to millions for the first part of the song’s guitar riff and Clapton’s anguished plea not to be rejected by the woman he worships.
Then there is another entirely contrasting two-thirds of the seven minutes and eight seconds of Layla, comprising a piano melody accompanied by a wistful slide guitar.
That section is also the reason the recording’s label credits two songwriters.
The first – Clapton – now 75, has fought drink and drug addictions, and endured the grief of losing his four-year-old son Conor after he plunged from the open window of a 53rd floor New York apartment block in 1991.
He later met current wife Melia (32 years his junior) and, worth an estimated £175million, lives with her and their three daughters, aged 19 to 15, in Hurtwood Edge, his Italianate mansion in Surrey. Clapton also has a 35-year-daughter from a previous relationship, who made him a grandfather for the first time seven years ago.
Layla’s other credited writer, Jim Gordon, also turns 75 on Tuesday. But he will spend that milestone at the State Medical Facility in Vacaville, California, as he has ever since he drove to his mother’s house in June 1983 and murdered her with a hammer and butcher’s knife.
While tragedy has cursed both their lives, today it is impossible to imagine their worlds colliding. So how did they come together to create Layla?
The song was inspired by a friend’s gift to Clapton of the copy of a 12th century poem called The Story Of
Layla and Majnun, based on an Arabic story of a young man driven to madness by unrequited love.
Clapton saw reflected in it his own devotion to
Pattie Boyd, the wife of his then best friend
George Harrison. She and the Beatle married after meeting on the film set of A Hard Day’s Night, but by the end of the 1960s their marriage was in trouble.
“When you heard Layla, you knew right away what it was all about,” the Dominos’ keyboard player Bobby
Whitlock recalled. “It was understood Eric was totally in love with Pattie, but no one said anything.”
The Dominos formed at the start of the 1970s, after
Clapton’s previous stints in bands including the Yardbirds,
Cream, and Blind Faith, and included Jim Gordon, the most sought after session drummer in the business.
Gordon worked with the Beach Boys,
John Lennon and
Alice Cooper, and featured on Nancy
Sinatra’s These Boots
Are Made Forwalkin’,
Glen Campbell’s
Wichita Lineman and
Carly Simon’s You’re So
Vain. Los Angeles producer Perry Botkin said: “I would put off recording dates just to make sure I could get him.
He was absolutely incredible.”
At 6ft 4in, with “curly blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile that would light up the world”. Gordon also came to the attention of singer Rita Coolidge.they became a couple, and wrote a song together after she heard Gordon picking out a tune on a piano, to which she added chords and lyrics.
In her autobiography, Delta Lady, Coolidge says they made a demo tape which they played to Clapton and left with him, hoping he might cover it.
A year later while in a recording studio, she heard a familiar tune, and realised their piano section now formed the second half of the newly released Layla. Unlike Gordon, there was no writing credit for her. “I was infuriated,” she recalls. However, when she tried to contact Clapton, Coolidge was confronted instead by his manager, the late impresario Robert Stigwood, who told her: “What are you gonna do? You’re a girl. You don’t have money to fight this.” He proved to be right.
By then, Coolidge and Gordon had split up after he knocked her unconscious in an unprovoked attack on tour.
At the time it was put down to Gordon’s prodigious cocaine and whisky intake, but his increasingly violent mood swings hid a darker secret.
GORDON had started hearing voices – mainly his 72-year-old mother Osa’s – telling him to starve himself and stop playing the drums. After many troubled episodes over the next few years, it culminated in that drive to her Los Angeles home to kill her. Gordon was sentenced to 16 years to life, but since being diagnosed with schizophrenia, has remained in a psychiatric prison. In an interview he gave in 1985, he said of his mother: “I had no interest in killing her... I had no choice.”
His family successfully pleaded against him gaining parole at his most recent hearing. In 2005 it was reported he was still receiving monthly royalty cheques of thousands of dollars for Layla and other recordings.
Clapton did eventually win Pattie Boyd’s heart and wrote another song, Wonderful Tonight, for her in 1977. When they married in 1979, George Harrison was among the wedding party guests.
But the marriage did not prove wonderful, breaking up after nine years. Clapton later admitted he had been abusive towards Boyd, describing himself at the time as a “fullblown” alcoholic.
Biographer Philip Norman said: “It was really the death of Conor that made him determined that he would never drink again.”
The album Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs flopped, and Derek and the Dominos broke up soon afterwards.
The song only became a hit when released as a single in 1972. But it remains the one all Clapton fans want to hear – and generates a massive roar of approval whenever he tears into that opening riff in concert.
Whether Jim Gordon in his incarceration ever still hears the song is not known.