Please excuse our appearance during construction.
I could come up with something here about how the changes will improve your life, but they probably won't. It's more like just a way to kill some time and make some nifty new logos and color changes. I did try to match everything up, though, and make it as gentle on the eyes as possible.
In the meantime, I'm posting my proposal from the last time I pitched a book for the 33 1/3 series. That pitch was for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Derek and the Dominoes' only studio album, an unquestioned classic of rock. Not a winner, though. I think perhaps I was trying to cover too much ground, and maybe all the stuff about bridging the gap between dry academic writing and popular biography just didn't come off right. The thing about writing, as I've learned in the year or so since I pitched last, is that a small idea can carry you really far.
Proposals for the next round are coming due on Valentine's Day, and I'm waffling over what to choose as an album and how to approach it. But I've still got two weeks. Until then, here's the first pitch:
Few albums come with as cohesive and overpowering a narrative as Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Eric Clapton’s unquenchable desire for George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd is at the heart of this story, but around it are woven other threads: a bid to slip the spotlight behind a pseudonym, the introduction of a crucial catalyst that creates a dynamic spark (Duane Allman) and the tragedies that followed in the project’s wake (its intial critical failure, Allman’s fatal motorcycle accident a year later, bassist Carl Radle’s death ten years on from alcohol poisoning and drummer Jim Gordon’s imprisonment for the murder of his mother a few years after that). Taken together, all these pieces form not just a story, but a bona fide myth, and as myths are wont to do, it makes convenient shorthand of a far more complicated and confusing story.
In looking at Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, I want to dissect the myth that surrounds it, fill in the gaps and holes and reassemble its story into something altogether more nuanced that will enhance any music fan’s appreciation of the album. The meat of my book will hew closely to a chronological look at the recording of the album during late August and early September of 1971, including in-depth looks at the additional material that’s since become available.
Ever since I began writing about music, I’ve wanted to create a bridge between the kind of dry, academic music analysis that dominates the dialogue when musicians talk to other musicians and the more natural writing in music books for the non-musician which, while an easier sell to the general public, often tend more toward biography than true musical appreciation. For example, it doesn’t help a non-musician to know that the shift in “Why Does Love Got to be So Sad” from verse to chorus is Duane Allman’s bread and butter when it comes to improvisation because it provides him the chance to modulate between pentatonic minor and major scales while throwing in a couple choice modal touches. But to simply say that the song’s alternation between frenetic desperation and bittersweet hope comes from Clapton’s lovelorn situation does little to illuminate what’s truly going on. Clapton wrote the song with keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Whitlock and their vocal interplay is a hugely important and overlooked component not just to this song but the album as whole. In the verses of “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad,” Clapton’s threadbare and straining voice is continually being smacked silly by Whitlock’s exhortations and outbursts while at the same time fending off the attacks of Allman’s guitar. For each line Clapton delivers, Allman counters with a jab of razor sharp, nickel-plated bite and with Clapton trapped between Whitlock’s steadily escalating cries and Allman’s buzzsaw, his desperation becomes palpable. When the chorus sweeps in to save the day, all these forces suddenly align, and what formerly seemed to be trapping Clapton’s vocal lifts it up, Whitlock pulling it up from above in harmony while Allman gently nudges it along. But instead of true resolution, the A major 7 tonality keeps it from feeling completely resolved. There’s nothing more solid than an octave in music, both notes ringing out in tune, but there’s something just a little forlorn about a major seventh, the top note slid off a bit from true, and so the back and forth proceeds for the whole song until it winds itself out into an exhausted and temporary peace by its end.
This kind of complicated interplay among the musicians courses through the entire album, and it’s one of the things that marks it as a genuine work of art, and not just another guitar wankfest. Allman’s each and every note resounds with taste and skill and it forces Clapton into the kind of concision and focus that’s matched only by his earlier work with the Bluesbreakers and never since. Couple that with having something real to say, and you’ve got a fertile field for improvisatory greatness.
It also turns out that the love story that inspired the album is considerably more complicated than most people realize. Clapton had already begun an affair with Boyd, despite her marriage to one of his best friends. Furthermore, he was in the middle of an ongoing fling with Pattie’s younger sister Paula, who served as a kind of surrogate for Pattie. Clapton, for all his emotive facility as a guitarist, has always been a private man, and in its way, this most personal of albums is no different. Clapton took inspiration from Persian writer Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and the Majnun to craft “I Am Yours” and, of course, “Layla.” There are few things more stereotypically male than a wailing guitar solo, and from within the safe confines of songs that drew from epic sources or seemed to eerily echo his own situation (“Have You Ever Loved a Woman?”, “It’s Too Late”), Clapton used another man’s words to woo another man’s wife and constructed an onanistic fantasy of pure and chaste love. Examining this central dichotomy of the artistic process—the creation of a work dedicated to the adoration of another requires holding the beloved at a distance—will form a central pillar of the more psychological side of the book.
I offer this project up as a chance to fully explore the central myth of a great album, to reintroduce it to those who love it as something new and more complex, and to introduce newcomers to its intricacies, its rewards, its ruddy brown and gold texture. Fans of Clapton are bound to take an interest, and my hope is that even people who never cared for him might find out that there’s much more to Layla than Clapton. It’s an exultingly messy, beautiful, desperate sprawl of a work that’s begging to have its full story told.
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