The songs on Layla appear in the order in which they were recorded, with Duane’s arrival on the fourth song, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a cover of a Jimmy Cox tune made popular by Bessie Smith.
“We only had the quartet, and we were trying to write songs, but it just wasn’t exciting,” Eric said. “Then, when these guys came in—especially just me and Duane—we’d just keep thinking of things to do, songs to do from the past, that would make it possible for us to duet. We’d come up with ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,’ ‘Key to the Highway,’ and ‘Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?’ All these things were really vehicles so we could jam, and that ended up making up quite a deal of the bulk of the album—just excuses to jam with one another.
“For a start, Duane would play in straight tuning a lot of the time, I mean, I couldn’t understand it. He would do—I really don’t know how to describe it—but he would hit this seventh thing all the time, which I actually didn’t approve of.… I mean every now and then we would argue about stuff like this because … I only believe that you should really play what had gone down before—which jived in a way with why I liked him, because I loved the fact that he was an improviser. He threw away tradition a lot of the time, but for me, that was really quite … sort of inappropriate! You know he was fantastically gifted.”
In addition to engineering the sessions, Galuten played piano on the album as well.
“For Eric it was so powerful to have somebody who was an equal on guitar, because there are not many people as good as Eric. They did not do multiple takes. It was not the kind of recording session where you say, ‘Let’s try the bridge again. Let’s work on this section.’ Most records don’t have that magic, spontaneous thing. When they were recording Layla, if the second take was still not great, they would just forget it and move on to another song.” They didn’t have to discuss what was needed; they played together until they found it. Richardson said that Duane became the de facto musical director on the session, and when someone would present an idea to Eric, he would say, “Run it by Duane.” Duane met Eric where he was, and in some way almost stood in for the lover he wanted but could not have. “I’d kind of fallen in love with Duane,” Eric said. “I mean I was even ignoring my own band, you know. We were just kind of having this musical affair in front of everybody.
“Duane was a very, very strong, driven, and aggressive man. I mean, he was very thin and wiry and not much to shout about in terms of being a tough guy or nothing, but he was very strong. There was a great deal of joy in our kind of dueling with one another because we came from almost a separate place. I mean, I was much more into Chicago stuff, and he was much more into the kind of southern, Georgian kind of country blues.”
Galuten recalled, “On ‘Key to the Highway,’ when Duane did his solo, he started out with something so sweet and simple and straight, then about halfway through, he switched pickups and jumped to something that was incredibly aggressive, and yet absolutely right, and I remember everybody on the session was just like ‘Oh my God!’ It blew us all away. And in the mix, when you hear it back, it’s pulled down. Tommy mixes it so it comes out kind of evenly, but at the time it was like he just owned the room.”
“Those are notes that aren’t on the instrument,” Tom Dowd commented in The Language of Music, a documentary about his life, “Those are notes that are off the top of the instrument. That’s what makes those people such magnificent guitar players. It’s in the tips of their fingers. It’s not in the knobs, it’s not how loud they play—it’s touch. It’s touch. And both of them have exquisite technique and touch.”
Duane played with delicate beauty on “I Am Yours,” then played ferocious lead on “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” He added a thundering lick to the beginning of the song “Layla,” transforming a relaxed ballad into a passionate, rocking plea with one of the most recognizable riffs in modern music. Yet in all the interviews Duane gave about the record, he evaded questions that tried to differentiate his playing from Eric’s. When asked what he played on Layla, he answered, “I played just enough.” He also said, “I played the Gibson and he played the Fender, and if you know the difference, you can hear who played what.” Duane valued his connection with Eric, and he wasn’t going to be pitted against him, even in the subtlest way.
They repaired to the Thunderbird Hotel at Sunny Isles Beach at the end of their long days, which would start in the late afternoon and often continue into the early hours of morning. The hotel wasn’t anything special, but it was on the beach and close to Criteria. It was also infamous for providing its guests with anything they might desire. Both Eric and Duane were still reveling in the peace and comfort heroin could bring, not yet at its mercy. Eric said, “Duane was like your archetypal Johnny Reb. I mean, he was really out there, and for a thin guy he had this very strong, very charismatic persona. You know, a lot of drinking was involved, and we were just getting into a lot of heavy drug taking, too, so to see him getting into that with me was … well, it’s sad to look back on it. But Duane was very tough. The drugs when they took their toll, which was a little while later, kind of incapacitated us. I mean the Dominos broke up because of that—because we just couldn’t function—but at the time of Layla, they really hadn’t gotten a grip.”
Cocaine was such a part of the culture of Miami, it was a given. Fellow Domino Bobby Whitlock has said that it was so abundant and strong that Duane and Eric ended up flushing a quantity of it down the toilet at the hotel, trying to release themselves from the excess of it. (The night he came home from the sessions, Little Linda watched Duane sit at the kitchen table in the Big House prying the silver disks off his Concho belt. “What are you doing? Don’t take it apart; you’ll never get it back together,” she said. He smiled up at her like a little kid and slid a little bindle of powder from behind the silver decoration and held it up to her between two fingers with a wink.)
At the end of their time together, Duane agreed to return to Miami for overdubs, and Eric asked him if he would come out on the road with the band. Duane agreed. He wrote to Donna with the news.
September 5, 1970
Ramada Inn
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Sunday
Dearest Spoon,
Thanks for the sweet secret message. Please try and have a little faith, honey, and everything will be alright.
Eric Clapton has asked me to join his band. I really don’t know what to do, but don’t mention a word of this to anyone at the house, or leave this letter where others might read it and do something foolish. It would mean about $5000 a week to us, as well as a home in England and a lot of things we’d like to have. We’ve cut a really super album together, and Eric plans a European as well as an American tour, and the receipts would be phenomenal on both. I’ll be getting 20% of all of it, so I plan to do both of those tours with him.
I’ll write more later when my thought is more stable. I’m really up in the air right now.
All my love to Gragri and everyone there.
Love Always,
Duanen
P.S. Shhh!
Eric offered two tours, one in Europe and one in the United States, a high wage, and friendship with an equal. Duane told Donna with a kind of awe that he had seen an entire trunk full of beautiful boots and shoes in Eric’s hotel room. He had fine silk shirts and velvet pants, the best of everything. Eric gave Duane a beautiful batik shirt, with abstract swirls that suggested peacocks in purple and deep blues on both sides of the placket. It was easily the most beautiful thing Duane had ever owned. In return, with humor, Duane gave Eric his red T-shirt that read “City Slicker.” He knew Eric was offering him another kind of life.
After the Layla sessions were completed, Clapton returned to England with a rare left-handed Fender Stratocaster, a gift for Jimi Hendrix. He wanted him to hear the Dominos’ recording of Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” a tribute he and Duane had recorded for him. They both greatly admired Hendrix, one of the few o
ther rock guitarists who could stand toe-to-toe with them. Thom Doucette had planned to introduce Jimi and Duane when Jimi returned from Europe. But on the morning of September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found unconscious in a Notting Hill apartment in London. He died that afternoon at the hospital, having apparently suffocated while under the heavy sedation of sleeping pills. Eric never had the chance to see him.
Duane had an incredible dream about Jimi not long after he passed away, and he bounded out of bed late at night to share it with Donna.
Duane walked into a men’s room in the lobby of a big hotel, like a Holiday Inn, and there was Jimi Hendrix, his wild corona of hair, his purple jacket covered in snaking gold cord and shiny buttons, a long red scarf around his neck. Duane had heard that Jimi died, and wondered if they were in Heaven and so he asked him, “Hey man, are you okay?”
But Jimi was excited and waved Duane over to the sink with a smile so big he could see every one of his teeth. “Man, come take a look at this! It’s a groove!”
Jimi bent down toward the silver faucet, turned it gently, and kept teasing and turning, and as he did, a beautiful guitar riff came floating out and bounced off the white tile walls around them. Duane stood with his hands on his hips, and watched Jimi play the pretty little rambling tune by twisting the faucet.
Duane pulled his Dobro into bed with Donna and started picking out the riff. The melody Jimi gave him was the seed of the song “Little Martha.”
Eric had a few American shows planned for the Dominos in December and Duane agreed to play as many as he could, given the Brothers’ touring schedule. Duane had missed a few Brothers gigs in order to record Layla, but he didn’t like doing that. He was going to have to decide very soon which band to commit to.
Tuffy Phillips is one of two remaining original roadies and he still lives in Macon. His van sits in his driveway decorated with dozens of bumper stickers honoring the military and telling Jane Fonda to fuck off. The skin of a bear, head and all, rides shotgun in the front seat. Tuffy wears wire-rimmed glasses with one eye covered by a rose-tinted lens with a small medallion glued in the center since he can’t see out of that eye anyway. He is covered in tattoos and wears blue jeans, pale from hundreds of washings. His black leather vest is decorated with patches and long twin braids hang down over his shoulders. He wears earrings made of the claw of some small critter, and silver rings of his own making on every finger, their silver harvested from melted-down coins and old wedding rings. He gives me a necklace with a mountain lion tooth he pried from a skull beside a road in Wyoming. He talks with a thin cigar in his mouth and a handgun resting in front of him on the coffee table. As tough as he is, he is one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever known.
“Duane came in and asked which one of us was going to drive with him to Tampa to play with Eric Clapton,” Tuffy said. “And everybody had an excuse why they couldn’t carry him there. I was the only one who had nothing to do, and so we went. I was the driver for the band. I didn’t know anything about taking care of Duane’s guitars, but he trusted me. Well, he broke a string that first night, and I took his guitar from him, and then Eric’s tech took it from me. He replaced the string and quick, cut the tops of the strings off at the headstock, and you know that’s not what Duane liked. He liked to leave his strings long and curled up. He gave me such a look when I handed it back to him, like he could have killed me. Later, I told him it wasn’t me that’d done it. Duane made a thousand dollars there, and he gave me five hundred of it. He told me I better not share one dollar of it with any of the guys. He said, they didn’t earn it, but he told me to make sure they knew about it!”
After playing his second show with the Dominos the next night in Syracuse, New York, Eric approached Duane about his offer. “I said, ‘You know, we really need you in the band now—I don’t really want to go on as a quartet. Would you join us?’ He said, ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ and at that point, he went straight back to the Allman Brothers.”
Joe Dan Petty picked up Duane at the airport, and he strutted up, pulled out a roll of bills, and said, “JD! I got Big Daddy bucks!” Once they were in the car, Duane said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Clapton’s got nothing on Dickey Betts.”
I wish my father could have known that Layla would be considered one of the landmark recordings in rock-and-roll history.
One of the most important and valued experiences of my father’s life gave rise to a challenging and disillusioning experience in mine. True to the nature of the business at the time, the arrangement for compensating Duane for his work on Layla was handled very loosely, with a couple of phone calls rather than a negotiation or a signed contract. Duane was initially paid a couple of hundred dollars, a day rate for a studio musician, until it was clear Eric wanted him to stay and play on the entire album. At that point Phil Walden called Criteria and told Duane to stay out of the studio until a deal could be struck. Money was never a big consideration for Duane, and waiting for the deal to be made irritated him enough that he called Donna to complain about it. The lure of playing with a musician he greatly admired and respected was of the highest value to him, but within a few hours, a deal was struck to give Duane a small royalty.
When I turned eighteen, the responsibility for my father’s estate fell to me, and I took it very seriously. My learning curve was steep. My grandfather Gil, the executor of Duane’s estate until I came of age, noticed that royalty payments for Layla had stopped without explanation in 1983. My mother and I both wrote to Eric directly several times. When she went to see him play in 1972, after Duane’s death, he had told Donna to get in touch with him if we ever needed anything. Lawyers answered our letters. It took me nearly twenty years to settle the dispute through legal mediation, which resulted in the original deal being reinstated going forward. Eric Clapton himself never weighed in on the matter.
Duane did not live long enough to receive either the accolades or fair compensation for Layla.
You can hear the fatigue and sadness in my father’s voice when his playing with Clapton comes up in a 1971 interview on a Houston radio station. He is asked if he had heard of plans for a follow-up Dominos album, and whether he would participate in it. “I haven’t heard from any of those guys since,” Duane said.
(photo credit 21.1)
In another hotel room late at night, blues harpist Thom Doucette and Duane sat on the edges of their beds, high and tired. Duane was on the telephone, his voice rising and falling, the edges hardening and sharpening. He forced air out of his lungs in a scoff, a sudden shout, sarcasm dripping as he swore and paced. Ace thought, I wouldn’t want to be Donna on the other end of that phone.
Duane slammed down the phone and stormed over to his guitar, grabbed it by the neck for a beat-down, and played with ferocious power. Doucette felt like he shouldn’t even be seeing it, it was so raw, but he watched and listened as Duane worked off his rage. His song shifted into lower gears until finally it was earth-bound and calm. The tune wound down into something gentle and kept rolling for a while. It took more than an hour.
The Brothers toured constantly in September and October of 1970, fueling themselves with a diverse range of substances. They moved together through the phases of high, higher, unconscious, and hungover like the daily cycles of sun and moon.
After they played at Vanderbilt University on October 30, Red Dog was ready to hit the road for a night drive from Nashville to Atlanta, eager to be home. Everybody was exhausted, and getting them packed and out was like herding cats, but he was determined. Duane was the lone straggler, and he wasn’t answering his door. They hadn’t been back at the hotel long enough for him to go anywhere, and Red Dog started to panic. When the hotel manager unlocked the door, they found Duane unconscious.
Everybody had been tugging little pieces off a ball of opium and eating them all night, and Duane had ingested too much. His lips had turned a pale shade of blue, his hands were cold, and his breathing was shallow. There were blisters on his fingers from his cigarette
burning down to the filter. An ambulance came. The tech told them not to get their hopes up too high; they would do what they could, but this guy was pretty far gone. Desperation rushed through everyone. They could not lose Duane. They could not even think about it.
They waited in the hospital for what felt like hours, until a doctor came to tell them Duane was conscious. He spent a couple of days recovering while the band and crew went on to Atlanta to play a gig at Emory University. Fans were not pleased with his unexplained absence and many asked for their money back.
Knowing the band was due home around Halloween and Big Linda’s birthday, the women had started planning a feast. Linda, Candy, and Donna were so keyed up with all the anxious preparations, they each took a Valium and stood for a moment, hugging with their foreheads touching to catch a deep breath before the men arrived. The engines of the Winnie and Black Hearted Woman, the equipment truck, could be heard all the way down Vineville Avenue, and waiting for the sound could make you crazy. Everyone walked in, but Duane wasn’t with them. When Kim came upstairs to put down his bag, Donna asked where Duane was. He said, “Didn’t you hear what happened? Duane overdosed. He was DOA at the hospital.”
“DOA?” Donna asked, her body going cold with shock.
“Dead on arrival, but he’s okay. He came through it. He’ll be home tomorrow.”
As Doucette drove Duane home from Tennessee, he said to him, “You don’t have to do this right away, man. Why don’t you take a little time?”
“No, I have to do it and I have to do it right now,” Duane answered.
He was talking through what he was going to say to Donna once he got home.
Everybody gathered at the house the next day for a celebratory meal. Donna was standing at the kitchen counter stirring a cracked egg into a bowl of Jiffy corn bread mix when Duane came in through the back door. He took her by her elbow and led her into the dining room at the back of the house, and before her welcoming smile had entirely faded from her face, she heard him say, “I’m leaving you. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore.”
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 29
