195: LAYLA AND OTHER ASSORTED LOVE SONGS | DEREK AND THE DOMINOS
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is the sole studio album by the English–American blues rock band Derek and the Dominos, released in November 1970 as a double album. It is best known for its title track, "Layla", and is often regarded as Eric Clapton's greatest musical achievement. The other band members were Bobby Whitlock on keyboards and vocals, Jim Gordon on drums, Carl Radle on bass. Duane Allman played lead and slide guitar on 11 of the 14 songs.
Initially regarded as a critical and commercial disappointment, it failed to chart in Britain and peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the United States. It returned to the US albums chart again in 1972, 1974 and 1977, and has since been certified Platinum by the RIAA. The album finally debuted on the UK Albums Chart in 2011, peaking at number 68.
In 2000, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2003, television network VH1 named Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs the 89th-greatest album of all time, and Rolling Stone ranked it number 117 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[1] It was voted number 287 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). In 2012, the Super Deluxe Edition of Layla won a Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album.
Derek and the Dominos grew out of Eric Clapton's frustration with the hype associated with his previous bands, the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith.[citation needed] Following the latter's dissolution, he joined Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, whom he had come to know while they were the opening act on Blind Faith's US tour in the summer of 1969. After that band also split up, a Friends alumnus, Bobby Whitlock, joined up with Clapton in Surrey, England. From April 1970, the two spent weeks 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.[citation needed]
Having toured with Joe Cocker straight after leaving Delaney & Bonnie, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon reunited with Clapton and Whitlock in England. Clapton attempted to avoid the limelight under cover of the anonymous "Derek and the Dominos", with whom he played a tour of small clubs in Britain during the first three weeks of August. The group's name had reportedly resulted from a gaffe made by the announcer at their first concert, who mispronounced the band's provisional name, "Eric & The Dynamos". In fact, Clapton chose "Derek and the Dominos" because he did not want his name and celebrity to get in the way of maintaining a "band" image. When the tour was over, they headed for Criteria Studios in Miami to record an album.
The source of the album's eventual centrepiece, "Layla", was rooted in Clapton's infatuation with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend and Beatle lead guitarist George Harrison,[3] who had joined Clapton as a guitarist on Delaney & Bonnie's European tour in December 1969.[4] 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." Full article