When Duane Met God
Duane Allman and Eric Clapton
Today at Long Live the ABB, an essay on Layla and other Assorted Love Songs, the sole studio album of Derek & the Dominos, released November 9, 1970
I wrote this for my friend Will Bart and his band Johnny in the Basement’s Derek & the Dominos tribute gig.1 He printed up an old skool playbill for the gig, which I’ve posted here.
[Partially excerpted from my book Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East.2]
Clapton is God
Clapton is God began appearing as graffiti around London in 1965.
The guitarist was never comfortable with the moniker. Despite his stardom, at his core he was a blues devotee. He left the Yardbirds over their move away from blues to pop. He recorded a groundbreaking album with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. He hit mega stardom with Cream, whose jam-heavy approach opened doors for many bands—the Allman Brothers Band among them.
But fame bothered him. He was always a bluesman at heart.
Cream disbanded in August 1968 and in 1969, he formed the short-lived supergroup Blind Faith with Steve Winwood, Ric Grech, and Cream drummer Ginger Baker.
Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett bridged southern musicians and the blues-obsessed British Invasion.
Clapton first met the couple in 1969, when Delaney & Bonnie and Friends opened for Blind Faith. The tour is also where he encountered his future Derek and the Dominos bandmates Carl Radle, Jim Gordon, and Bobby Whitlock.
In spring 1970, members of Delaney & Bonnie backed Clapton on his self-titled debut solo album, George Harrison on All Things Must Pass, and Joe Cocker on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour.
Clapton found Blind Faith dissatisfying. He reveled in Delaney & Bonnie’s musical mélange; he often joined them for their opening sets.
“Their approach to music was so infectious. They would pull out their guitars on the bus and play songs all day as they traveled. I took to traveling with them and playing with them. I was irresistibly drawn to it.”
Here’s video of Clapton and Harrison backing Delaney & Bonnie on “Comin’ Home” in December 1969
Derek and the Dominos
The story of Duane’s involvement with Derek and the Dominos and the role he played on its epic Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is well-documented.3 By all accounts, Duane’s playing and infectious personality brought a renewed vigor to the project and to Clapton in particular. Whether or not Duane was a full-fledged member of Clapton’s band during the sessions is immaterial; he was offered a permanent role shortly afterward and declined.
Layla remains among rock’s most famous one-off collaborations. “I was mesmerized by him,” Clapton wrote. “Duane and I became inseparable and between the two of us we injected the substance into the Layla sessions that had been missing up to that point.”
Tom Dowd, who produced the sessions, recounted the guitarists’ intense mutual attraction. “They were switching guitars, fingerings, it was like a marriage made in heaven.”
Recalled Whitlock, “They had the same authority, and they dug from the same well, Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bill Broonzy. Something deeper was happening right away with Eric and Duane, who were like two long-lost brothers. Those two guys started bouncing back-and-forth on each other and it was an amazing experience.”
“We fell in love. And that was it. The album took off from there,” Clapton said. “Because of Duane’s input, it became a double album. Because of the interest in playing between his style and my style, we could actually have played any blues or any standard and it would have taken off. [Robert Johnson] was where we connected. We didn’t really talk about the modern players much at all. It was really the roots that we were meeting on.”
“The best damn record we’ve made since The Genius of Ray Charles.”
When the ten-day Layla sessions concluded, Dowd called it “the best damn record we’ve [Atlantic] made since The Genius of Ray Charles.”
The album was far from an instant classic.
“For a year, it didn’t sell,” Dowd noted. “I was embarrassed. I thought this was insane— we’d spent that much money and I’d had such a good time doing it, and the guys were playing so incredibly well—it’s pitiful that with all that love and energy and everything that went into creating it, it wasn’t getting the recognition it deserved.”
Layla finally broke through in 1972 when the title track appeared on two compilations: Clapton’s The History of Eric Clapton. Capricorn’s posthumous Duane Allman: An Anthology helped further boost sales.
Atlantic rereleased “Layla” as a single and it reached the top 10 in both the United States and Britain.
It has remained among the most popular tracks of the rock era.
Layla gave Duane the opportunity to play with one of his heroes and he shined brightly in the moment. “That’s my lick,” Duane told Johnny Sandlin of the opening notes of the title track that he’d copped from the melody of the first line of Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By.”4
“I can play with the big boys now!”
“Duane was like a proud papa,” John Wyker recalled. “Nobody could blame him at all for all the chest beating he was doing after a session like that. He had arrived and he knew it! We all knew it.”
Clapton’s offer
Clapton asked Duane to join the Dominos. The opportunity was enticing, and he was genuinely torn.
“I really don’t know what to do,” he wrote his wife, Donna Allman. “It would mean about $5,000 a week to us, as well as a home in England and a lot of things we’d like to have. . . . I’m really up in the air right now.”
🍄Butch urged Duane to stick with the Allman Brothers.
“Duane, look at what we’ve got going—and it’s yours. Are you ready to give this up to join someone else’s thing?”
🍄Before he made his final decision, Duane appeared twice live with the Dominos.
“I was thinking about trying to make the whole tour. But it was ten weeks long and I had my own fish to fry.”
🍄Duane put together the ABB exactly how he wanted it said Jaimoe.
“Playing those dates with Eric helped him realize that. He figured out what I already knew.
Shit, Eric Clapton should be opening for us.
That was the kind of attitude we all had.
I just simply thought Duane had more going playing with us than with Eric.”
Clapton loved Duane
“The musical brother I’ve never had but wished I did. More so than Jimi, who was essentially a loner, while Duane was a family man, a brother.
Unfortunately for me, he already had a family.”
About that photo…
The one I posted above with the old lady and the dog peeing on the wall? Turns out it’s staged, though they did spray paint the graffiti on a wall in Islington, London 1965.
Here’s an outtake from the photo shoot. Clearly the dog didn’t think much of Eric Clapton.
It streams on Bandcamp. Check it out:
Here’s a Kindle preview of Play All Night.
See Galadrielle Allman Please Be with Me (2014);
One Way Out (2014); Scott Freeman Midnight Riders (1995); Randy Poe Skydog (2006); Tom Nolan The Allman Brothers Band: A Biography in Words and PicturesThere’s a lot of confusion about this. Think the first seven notes of “Layla” then listen to Albert King’s first vocal line—“There is nothing I can do”—I have it queued up for you:
Enjoyed the read. I’ll have to get your book. After I read this I threw Derek & the Dominos Live on the turntable. So thanks for that!
I saw Derek and the Dominos at their 3rd gig the NEXT NIGHT. It was great but Duane wasn’t there. Southern boy Duane thought about going to Detroit in December where it was still snowing and said Nah.