The guitar icon Eric Clapton wanted to steal: “I was heartbroken”
Every artist is going to want some kind of challenge whenever they play live. It’s easy just to spend the better part of an hour showing your stuff on a record and making the kind of insane runs that people expect out of you, but where does that leave room for you to expand your craft and deliver something that no one expected you to do? It usually takes another musician to help bring legends out of their shell, and given how well they worked together, Eric Clapton was convinced that Duane Allman needed to join him permanently.
For any guitarist, though, someone like Clapton offering you a job in their band would be a definite yes – if you could put aside his horrendously offensive outbursts. Yet, the man hadn’t picked up the moniker of a guitar god for nothing, and being able to play second fiddle to him would be a golden opportunity to learn how one of the greatest guitarists of all time worked.
At the same time, Clapton didn’t exactly have the greatest track record when talking with Allman about joining Derek and the Dominoes. He had already changed rock with Cream, but their inability to keep a band together, along with the one album by Blind Faith, made Clapton look like a guitar legend who would only be limited to side projects rather than a full band.
If Clapton was going to become known for more than just his guitar, he needed to go out on his own, and Layla (and Other Assorted Love Songs) was his first time making a true passion project. Despite Clapton almost having his name on the album, Allman definitely outshines him on a handful of tracks, bringing a sense of beauty behind Clapton’s cut-throat leads on songs like the title track.
It might have been just a passing fancy, but Clapton thought working with Allman was too good to pass up, telling Guitarist, “I knew that sooner or later he was going back to The Allmans, but I wanted to steal him! I tried, and he actually came on a few gigs, too. But then he had to say, almost like a woman, ‘Well, you know, I am actually married to this band, and I can’t stay with you’. I was really quite heartbroken”.
Despite Allman dying far too long after a tragic motorcycle accident, Clapton was actually better suited to fly on his own during his solo career. If you listen to what he was doing on albums like 461 Ocean Boulevard, he approaches his sound in a completely different way, trading in the raucous lead lines of his early days to the clean sounds of a Fender Stratocaster.
Then again, some of the emotion in his work may be indebted to Allman as well. If you listen to some of the melodic phrasing that he puts into his later records like ‘Cocaine’, you can hear faint wisps of what Allman was doing on records like Live at Fillmore East, almost treating his lead guitar phrases like they’re a second vocal line in the band alongside Dickey Betts.
While Layla was all about Clapton pining for someone he couldn’t have, the fallout of the record meant losing yet another musical soulmate. It wasn’t his call to make, but Clapton probably would have given a lot to jam with Allman once again.
