“Obviously in awe”: The moment Eric Clapton recruited Duane Allman
Eric Clapton has never been a stranger to the idea of a supergroup. The Yardbirds had quickly ballooned into a breeding ground for guitar geniuses, and before he had even made a name for himself as a solo artist, he had already turned in time working with Cream and Blind Faith while also turning up whenever friends like Delaney and Bonnie or The Beatles needed a guitar part. But for any guitar nerd, hearing that Clapton had put together the makings of Derek and the Dominos was a match made in musical heaven.
Granted, the beginnings of the band actually start with another album, All Things Must Pass. With George Harrison now free from the Fab Four, he knew that he wanted to have the best musicians he could find with him to work on his solo record. So in between the pop songs on the record, many of the backing musicians included the makings of Derek and the Dominos, with ‘Slowhand’ meeting Bobby Whitlock and Jim Gordon at the sessions.
In the background, though, Clapton already had the inspiration that he was looking for with his new songs. The band was in place, but his unrequited love for Harrison’s wife, Patti, had grown far too strong for him to take, leading to him coming to the first Dominos sessions with old blues covers as well as tracks like ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ or ‘I Looked Away’.
If Clapton was going to be the frontman, he needed someone else by his side. He could play the guitar like a madman when he wanted to, but there was a certain element missing whenever he played, and when he heard Duane Allman play his slide guitar for the first time, he was already in love with his playing.
Despite the Allman Brothers Band being one of the greatest acts to come out of the American South at the time, Clapton hadn’t even heard of them when he started working on the record. He had always been a connoisseur of the blues first and foremost, and when listening to Duane play on Wilson Pickett’s cover of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, he knew that there was something about his playing that appealed to him.
However, it wasn’t until Clapton saw Duane in the flesh with the Allmans that everything changed, with engineer Karl Richardson saying, “It turns out they were both afraid of each other. Duane was obviously in awe of Clapton, and Clapton, who’d been listening to Duane, was likewise in awe. So the two of them, when they finally met, looked at each other and it was like, ‘Oh, I’m scared of you’ and ‘Yeah, I’m scared of you, too.’”
Although Duane was under the impression that he was coming in to play a couple of slide licks on the record, hearing him play got the wheels turning in Clapton’s head. He could have easily played his own guitar solos, but now that he had an equally brilliant guitarist next to him, that gave him the space to loosen up a little bit as a frontman when crying out in pain for his forbidden love.
As soon as Duane got done working on the song ‘Tell the Truth’, he said that Clapton was convinced to offer him a permanent job in the group, saying, “I was just going to play on one or two, and then as we kept on going, it kept developing. And Eric said, ‘Okay, man, we’re going to make us a record here and we’re going to have two guitar players instead of one.’ We worked our butts off on it. It’s just good music all the way through.” And with both of them trading licks back and forth, Layla stands up as one of the ultimate guitar player albums.
While neither of them were looking to outshine the other whenever they played, it’s easy to see Duane outpacing Clapton in a few places as well, as if ‘Slowhand’ demoted himself to rhythm guitarist on a handful of tracks. It’s not easy to compete with a musician that most people considered to be a god, but there had to be something divine going on between Duane’s fingers to get him on board.
