Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs Atco SD-2-704
Released 1970
I Looked Away
Bell Bottom Blues
Keep On Growing
Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out
I Am Yours
Anyday
Key To The Highway
Tell The Truth
Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?
Have You Ever Loved A Woman
Little Wing
It's Too Late
Layla
Thorn Tree In The Garden
“I’d heard the tapes of Music From Big Pink by The Band and I thought, this is what I want to play not extended solos and maestro bullshit but just good funky songs.” (Eric Clapton)
Can we get the usual crap out of the way?
I've heard Layla discussed in one of three ways, ever: in terms of Clapton's love life; his shared heroin addiction with Duane Allman; and of course, guitar heroics. Great albums are not about the personal lives or failures of the artists - not really. And if all Layla had going for it was shit-hot guitar playing (which it admittedly has in spades), its legend would be barely earned. Layla has much more going for it than hot licks.
The funny and fascinating thing about it is, Layla is cut from a very similar cloth as Clapton's later solo albums. In a way. I mean, its a gumbo of blues, soul, mid-tempo rock. Not much different from from what he would pursue throughout the 70's until his conversion to an MOR rocker in the Reagan years.
Except, Layla is entirely different. And the key is not so much in the band's hot chops, but in the pure firepower they bring to every moment. Only five of the songs are even remotely fast, and those are basically uptempo shuffles. A couple of ballads, a couple extended (very) slow blues workouts, and a few midtempo shuffles. That's it. In the wrong hands, this could have been an exercise in 70's mellow blech-rock. It was in the right hands.
Because Clapton/Whitlock/Gordon/Radle attack the music with the same kind of fervor as any punk band. On the fast ones, you can hear them racing, falling over each other, sounding like they're teetering on the edge of chaos, but never falling over. On the slow ones, you can hear them burn. That same intensity, directed into a slow rumble, guitars aching. And Allman? He sails and sings with the strings over it all, a bird in flight.- you can hear the last notes of his song as the title track fades. Meanwhile, Clapton sings like a madman. Never a distinctive or particularly strong vocalist, he makes up for it by just plain cutting loose. This is as much a singer's album as a guitar hero's. He pushes the limits of his range, then past it, wailing "I'm such a loooooooooooooonely man," begging, voices stretched and pushed again and again - "I don't wanna faaaaade away", 'believe in meeeee, like I believe in yoooooo", the frantic whooping over the last verses of "Layla." Clapton and Whitlock's voices mesh, clash, veer off, come back, wrestle with one another, egg each other on. It's a Big Pink style approach (see quote above), but backed by harder hitting music than the former Hawks would care to muster.
The music is marked by a uncontrollable joy - even on the slowest, saddest songs you can hear the band just plain getting off on the music, each other, their shared creation. Layla wasn't cut live in the studio - but it sounds like it. The songs themselves are plainspoken. Simple lyrics, sparse imagery. Nothing flashy. Declarations of love, desire, longing. One aspect of its greatness is that Layla, stripped of pretensions, gets better with age. The simple beauty and truth of it rings much louder when you, the listener, know the joys of love, the pain of loss. To gladly crawl across the floor for her. To get down on your knees. To see her smile, any day.
Poor Clapton. He never let himself get this close to the edge again. Perhaps it scared him, what he saw there. Perhaps it was just too painful. He settled for pleasant rather than risk transcendent. The loss was ours, and his.
