Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is not even close to being a perfect record. A double-album is, by definition, imperfect in my world, but Layla is especially egregious in this respect, overstuffed as it is with wanking boogie jams and boring blues covers. And yet, the album has a vibe that makes its best music unforgettable. Clapton’s playing has never been as impassioned, and I think there are several reasons for this. The presence of Duane Allman, for starters, undoubtedly created a friendly but intense rivalry in the studio. Regardless of his fondness for Borther Duane, Clapton would not want to be upstaged. As a result, songs like Keep on Growing, Anyday, and Why Does Love Got to be So Sad? crackle with frenetic intensity as the dueling guitars dance intricate little circles around one another. The other players on the record are also perfectly complementary, especially Bobby Whitlock with his soulful vocals and Jim Gordon, the longtime studio veteran, on drums. …It’s fun, too, to think about how druggy and debauched the scene must’ve been at Criteria Studios in Miami. The good stuff on Layla is arguably the best stuff Clapton’s ever done, and it’s also the last worthwhile thing he was involved in. The scene at Criteria surely constituted a kind of Faustian pact, i.e. make music for the ages now on the condition that the experience will leave you completely tapped out for the rest of your creative life…
But all of this is secondary to the main driver of the music on Layla, Clapton’s romantic obsession with his best friend’s wife, Pattie Boyd Harrison. Layla is a testament to what love can do to you if you’re not careful. There are a handful of guitar breaks on the record – especially on I Looked Away, Bell Bottom Blues, and the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing – where the passion and yearning seem to ooze from every bendy note. It’s almost painful to in a way because we’re hearing someone’s suffering, beautiful as it might be. The great ones sublimate in a way most of us can’t grasp...
…I had Layla when I was a kid and liked it ok, but I only began to relate to it on an emotional level during the summer after my sophomore year in college. I got a job working in the mailroom at Rolling Stone magazine in New York. Over the course of my three months there, I became insanely fixated on one of the magazine’s copy editors. She was so cute with her short blonde hair, and unlike a lot of the others at the magazine who looked down their noses at the lowly mailroom workers, she was actually nice to me. I thought about her all the time, and I’d go out of my way to pick up mail at her desk and drop off deliveries, the silly things some us do when we have crushes… One day after work, a whole bunch of us – editors, clerks, writers, publicists – went to Central Park to hang out. The magazine’s offices were right across the street at 58th and 5th.
We walked to the Great Lawn in the steamy heat of the New York summer. I was young and had no responsibilities, really, other than showing up for my unskilled mailroom job every day. There were always a lot of drugs circulating at the magazine. I’d smoke a joint with my co-workers in the morning, then supercharge at lunch, and maybe re-charge again at around 3 o’clock. I avoided the cocaine that was so readily available because I feared that I’d snort it and then have a heart attack and die, like Len Bias. But I took mushrooms fairly regularly that summer and loved how trippy they were… At the Great Lawn we all sat on a rock near the south west corner of the expanse. I don’t think they’d refurbished the lawn yet because I remember it being very dusty. A joint came my way and I took a hit, and then another hit, and another, and another… I soon discovered that the pot was speedy and made me feel uncomfortably self-conscious. Somebody asked me a question and I couldn’t answer, not because the question baffled me but rather because my mouth had somehow been cemented shut. I started to freak out. What if I had had some kind of stroke, or some sort of weird brain damage, and I’d never be able to speak again? My mind raced in a gazillion different directions, none of them soothing. But I managed to keep it together enough to at least sit there and not make a fool out of myself… Just as I began to calm down, I looked out into the distance and saw two people coming towards us. When they came into focus, I realized it was the cute copy editor and one of the writers at the magazine, a real arrogant prick who was always mean to me for no reason. The two of them were holding hands. All the blood rushed to my face in a hot wave of dread and grief. When they sat down on the rock with us, she practically sat in that motherfucker’s lap, and it wasn’t long before the two of them started sucking face, an obnoxiously in-your-face PDA. “Get a room!” somebody joked. I always remember hearing those words for some reason: Get a room. Jokes can sting even if you’re not the target of them. It still hurts me when I remember it now. I’ve never felt so low in my life. I’d been thinking I’d ask this girl out on a date. Now I realized what a deluded fool I’d been. She’d only been nice to me because she was a nice person who stood out from all the not-nice people I had to deal with on a daily basis in my role as a piss boy…
That night, I got home at around midnight. Somewhere along the way, my motor skills returned and I could speak again. I went to my room, closed the door behind me, and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. And then I looked at my collection of cassette tapes. Music has always been there to pick me up when I’m down. I’d just recently read an article in Rolling Stone about Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. The magazine had named it one of the 100 best albums of the last 20 years. I rewound the tape to the beginning, and listened through a set of headphones. She took my hand… The music spoke to me on a profound level. Rarely in my life has heartache felt so good and so right. The copy editor belonged to somebody else now. But in that moment, Eric Clapton felt like my big brother... He understood me, I felt, which was a pretty nice consolation prize...
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