Such remarks are heresy to the Allman fan club, but there are reports of an unreleased out-take of Layla that was abandoned because of “tuning issues”. If Eric had been playing them it would have been different.” Both the slide parts he put on to the coda are out of tune. “ Layla would have been just as great without Duane on it,” he says. While he credits him with some inspirational performances – “The majesty of those opening chords on Little Wing is all Duane for sure” – he has a problem with some of his other contributions. Whitlock’s appreciation of Allman’s playing with Derek And The Dominos is more measured. Not once did either of them have to say: ‘Could you play that again, please?’. "One of them would play something and the other would react instantaneously. “There had to be some kind of telepathy going on, because I’ve never seen spontaneous inspiration happen at that rate and level. “There’s an Eric rhythm part, three tracks of Eric playing harmony and the main riff, one of Duane playing that beautiful bottleneck, and one of Duane and Eric locked up, playing counter melodies,” he said. Tom Dowd recalled layering six guitar parts on the track. Some people even maintain that it was Allman who introduced the opening riff into the song, although Whitlock disagrees. What Allman did was to change the song’s dynamic by speeding up the opening riff. Nevertheless, the fact that Layla gave the record its title and is the climax to the double album suggests that Clapton regarded it as a special song, even before Allman added his masterstroke. “It wasn’t like, ‘We’ll do this one first and then this one, and we’ll leave Layla for last’,” he explains. Layla was recorded towards the end of the album sessions, and Whitlock says the album was recorded pretty much in the order you hear it.
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Within days, Duane Allman was playing at the album sessions, transforming the atmosphere as he and Clapton brought the best out of each other. Afterwards, Clapton invited the band back to the studio, where they jammed for the next 18 hours. According to Dowd, the sessions had been sluggish before he took Clapton to an Allman Brothers concert. And then Duane stirred ’em up.”ĭuane Allman, guitarist with the Allman Brothers, was introduced to Clapton by producer Tom Dowd soon after sessions began on the Layla album at Criteria Studios in Miami. “Eric brought that seven-note lick with him to the recording sessions. We’d gone through it before,” says Whitlock. The opening riff was also there – taken from Albert King’s As The Years Go Passing By – but the song was much slower than it finally appeared.