Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

Background

The group which created Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs grew out of Clapton's frustration with the hype associated with the supergroups Cream, and then the short-lived Blind Faith. After their dissolution, he joined Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, whom he had come to know while they were the opening act for Blind Faith, for a British tour.

Related Topics:
Supergroup - Cream - Blind Faith - Delaney and Bonnie and Friends

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After that band also split up, a Delaney and Bonnie alumnus, Bobby Whitlock, joined up with Clapton; the two spent some months writing a number of songs "just to have something to play", as Whitlock put it. These songs would later make up the bulk of the material on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

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After a tour with Joe Cocker, some more of the personnel from Delaney and Bonnie joined up with Clapton; he attempted to avoid the limelight with the bland name Derek and the Dominos, and booked a British tour of small clubs. The group's name reportedly resulted from a gaffe made by the announcer at their first concert, who mispronounced the band's provisional name -- "Eric & The Dynamos" -- as "Derek & The Dominos".

Related Topics:
Joe Cocker - Derek and the Dominos

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After the tour, they headed for Criteria Studios in Miami to record an album - which turned out to be Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

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The other source for the album was the pain of Clapton's personal life: he had fallen hopelessly, desperately in love with Pattie Boyd, at that point the wife of his best friend George Harrison. Not even heroin, which Clapton had then begun to use, could dull the pain. Dave Marsh, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, wrote that "there are few moments in the repertoire of recorded rock where a singer or writer has reached so deeply into himself that the effect of hearing them is akin to witnessing a murder, or a suicide... to me, 'Layla' is the greatest of them."

Related Topics:
Pattie Boyd - George Harrison - Heroin

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