“Done by mistake”: The song Eric Clapton thought was nothing special
It’s never easy to find a hit single amongst a pile of demos. Let’s face it: understanding the inner workings of what gets in the charts is less of a needle in the haystack than it is a needle in an ocean, but sometimes there’s that magic moment where everything seems to fall into place for a certain artist. Although Eric Clapton was fortunate enough to make multiple hits during his lifetime, he admitted that he did initially see the power of ‘Layla’ when he first performed it.
In fact, most of what ‘Slowhand’ was doing in the early 1970s was all in the service of emotional recovery. Outside of losing the camaraderie with Cream, his infatuation with George Harrison’s wife, Patti, was bound to get uglier and uglier as the years went on. He had to get out his emotions somewhere, so why not just lash out in song?
Then again, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs isn’t necessarily an album known for being edgy or harsh by any stretch. Clapton’s work with Delaney and Bonnie showed that he knew how to sweeten up his arrangements, but underneath the surface, he’s still just as despondent as ever when he starts crying out for his unrequited love.
But out of everything that he had worked on, ‘Layla’ was not the kind of tune that he would have considered putting out as a single. All of the pain from those months without her is palpable in the tune, but given the fact that the album was full of tunes like ‘Bell Bottom Blues’, putting out a song that has two distinct parts and various key changes for no reason was always going to be a bit of a gamble.
Even when cutting the track, Clapton had to be talked into seeing the tune’s appeal, saying, “The greatest things you do are always done by mistake. I had no idea what ‘Layla’ was going to be. It was just a ditty. When you get to the end of it, that’s when your enthusiasm starts building, and you know you’ve got something powerful…When I started doing that, it didn’t feel like anything special to me.”
The entire reason why the song gets that power isn’t because of Duane Allman guesting on guitar or even Clapton’s own licks. It comes from that regal-sounding piano part that plays the rest of the song out, which may as well have been a different chapter of the tune entirely when it was first laid down.
If we try to critically analyse this section of the tune, it’s practically a daydream of what could come to pass if all of Clapton’s desires finally came true. Since it’s in a different key, though, it almost feels like looking at a snapshot of something that will never come to pass as both Clapton and Allman continue to cry out in pain on their guitars.
The fact that he didn’t know what it was like until the end also says something about what kind of player Clapton was. He was still one of the greatest to ever play, but it’s more about just playing scales to touch people’s hearts. It’s about being an emotional craftsman, and ‘Layla’ is the finest example of him playing with his audience’s hearts.
