How Eric Clapton got "Bell Bottom Blues" and wooed away George Harrison's "Layla"

Derek and the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970) — one long love letter to Pattie Boyd, the muse to two rock-and-roll legends

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One of my alumni classmates recently reminisced about his first dance in high school being to the song “Bell Bottom Blues” by Derek and the Dominos, and said that when he hears it, it always makes him smile. I promised to do a post on it, and what a story I found when I looked into the history of this hit song and the album in which it also appeared.

In a nutshell, it’s the story of a beautiful, vivacious, and in-demand young model in Swinging Sixties London who gets hired to play a schoolgirl in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, meets Beatle George Harrison on the film set and almost two years later marries him, and over the course of their marriage becomes the muse behind several of his songs, including the Beatles masterpiece “Something.”

While married to George, she provokes obsessive desire in his friend, fellow rock ’n’ roller Eric Clapton, but refuses to leave George to marry Eric despite persistent and intense pressure from Eric to do so. Undeterred in his desire and at musical loose ends, in the spring of 1970 Eric forms a new group that comes to be called Derek and the Dominos and pens a series of songs inspired by his unrequited love for George’s wife. In late summer, the band hightails it to Criteria Studios in Miami, where, aided and abetted by Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers, they party down and eventually record the new compositions and other blues rock songs for what would be the band’s one and only album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Returning to London, Eric brings her a gift — some pairs of Landlubber bell bottom jeans she’d asked him to bring back from the U.S. Unbeknownst to her at the time, he had also written a love song for the album called “Bell Bottom Blues.” Let’s listen to that before we go on with the story:

Unbeknownst to Eric, while he’s been away touring and recording with Derek and the Dominos, his friend George has been neglecting his wife in pursuit of Eastern spirituality and of other women as he emulates Krishna, the Hindu deity who is always meditating and consorting with young maidens and concubines. To add insult to injury, George has also invited a group of Hare Krishnas to live at their new home, Friar Park, without consulting her, and these have displaced her from the kitchen and prevented her from concocting elaborate meals, a new passion that has replaced the modeling career he no longer wanted her to engage in.

Back in London and sensing her vulnerability, Eric spirits her to the Dominos’ flat while they’re out and plays her a recording of the title song from their new album. Called simply “Layla,” the song had been inspired by The Story of Layla and Majnun by Persian author Nizami. Eric had identified with Majnun, a man desperately in love with an unavailable woman. He plays the song for her several times as he watches for her reaction. Does she ‘get’ that she’s his Layla?

I know you’re dying to know what happens next, but first let’s look at what happened to these two songs and the album, because that’s an equally bizarre story.

Derek and the Dominos was a bit of a strange beast, as far as bands go. According to his autobiography, Eric had been touring as the guitarist for Blind Faith, a supergroup he had recently formed with Steve Winwood from Traffic, Ginger Baker from Cream, and Ric Grech from Family, but found that he was neglecting his duties to the group as he became enamored with their support act, the southern R&B and rock/soul group Delaney and Bonnie. During the tour Delaney warned Eric that he needed to use the gift that God had given him and step up to the plate as a singer and band leader, which he wasn’t doing with Blind Faith. The supergroup broke up after the tour and Eric took Delaney’s advice to heart, mulling over the idea of going solo while he did some work with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band and toured and cut an album as part of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends (Eric being the key Friend).

Once the recording ended, the group’s bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jimmy Gordon, and keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock came to England to hang out with Eric and “jam and jam and jam” and write songs, with George Harrison often dropping in to join them. Eric said he considered Jimmy the greatest rock drummer in the world and Carl and Jimmy together the most powerful rhythm section he’d ever played with. Bobby Whitlock would end up co-writing six songs with Eric, as well as penning one of his own, which would all go on their eventual album. Eric called this “one of the most extraordinary periods of my life” from both a musical and creative standpoint. The group played as session musicians on George Harrison’s first solo album, All Things Must Pass, and toured around small clubs in the UK incognito as Derek and the Dominos, a name given to them on the spur of the moment, when being announced by their supporting act, that ‘stuck.’

Fast forward to Miami, where the band are having a rip-roaring time enjoying the sun and doing a lot of drugs (smack, coke, PCP) when they happen to go watch the Allman Brothers perform at the Coconut Grove. Eric is “mesmerized” by Duane Allman on guitar and the two of them become inseparable, with Duane joining the band in the studio to record their album and playing lead and slide guitar on 11 of the 14 tracks. For Eric this line-up is his dream band, and when Derek and the Dominos continues its UK tour, his heart is no longer in it now that Duane, the “musical brother I never had,” has returned to his own band.

Once their album comes out, it “die[s] a death” because no one knows who Derek and the Dominos are and Eric refuses to do any publicity to promote it. Finally, at the record company’s insistence, “Derek is Eric” badges are sent to the press and the band tours the US to promote the album. By the time the band returns to England, it has become dysfunctional from the massive quantities of drugs the guys are taking and falls apart during the making of a second album. Derek and the Dominos are no more.

But what about Eric’s unrequited love? Regardless of the harsh fact that the album had failed to please most critics or rouse the public, Eric is convinced that it will rouse her to leave George and become his, once she hears all the love songs that he’s written and recorded for her. It doesn’t quite work out as he hopes — at that time.

Let’s hear the story of the rivalry between George and Eric firsthand from their shared muse — Pattie Boyd — as she looks back at those extraordinary times. I think you will get a sense of why she inspired these two modern-day troubadours to declare and extol their love for her in song, and you will hear the ending to this extraordinary story in her own words:

By my count, there have been a whopping 21 songs written for or about Pattie.

Besides the extraordinary “Something” from Abbey Road (1969), George Harrison wrote three songs about his relationship with her:

• “I Need You” from Help! (1965)

• “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul (1965)

• “For You Blue” from Let It Be (1970).

Eric Clapton wrote an astounding 17 songs about or for her, according to his autobiography (2007):

• all of the songs he wrote and co-wrote for the Derek and the Dominos album (1970), including “Layla,” “Bell Bottom Blues,” “I Looked Away,” “Keep On Growing,” “I Am Yours,” “Anyday,” “Tell the Truth,” and “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?”

• “Wonderful Tonight” from Slowhand (1977)

• “Golden Ring” from Backless (1978)

• “The Shape You’re In” (1983)

• “She’s Waiting,” “Just Like a Prisoner,” “Same Old Blues,” and “Behind the Sun” from Behind the Sun (1985)

• “Tearing Us Apart” from August (1987) - with Tina Turner

• “Old Love” from Journeyman (1989) - with Robert Cray

In her own autobiography called Wonderful Tonight (with Penny Junor, 2007), Pattie reflects on her relationships with George and Eric and puts paid to the glamor that people tend to ascribe to a muse such as herself:

Being the muse of two such extraordinarily creative musicians and having beautiful, powerful love songs written about me was enormously flattering but it put the most tremendous pressure on me to be the amazing person they must have thought I was — and secretly I knew I wasn’t. I felt I had to be flawless, serene, someone who understood every situation, who made no demands but was there to fulfill every fantasy; and that’s someone with not much of a voice. It’s not realistic: no one can live up to that kind of perfection. Now I feel I can be myself — but it took me quite a while to discover that and even longer to work out who I was exactly because the “me” in me had been hidden for so long.

Pattie also shares her understanding about Eric, that he had been a solitary boy who finally found a way to express himself when he was given a guitar at the age of 13, and who even as an adult found it difficult to articulate his feelings except through music.

We have to be thankful that he did, as the songs of the remarkably short-lived and yet ridiculously talented Derek and the Dominos are, in my personal opinion, quite wonderful, and their album eventually did get its due. Although it had by and large flopped critically and commercially at the time of its release, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice did give it an A+ rating — and Robert is actually on substack here. The album has been re-appraised since that time and is now widely considered to be a masterpiece, is arguably the best recording of Eric’s career, and is even viewed by some as the best blues rock album ever produced.

The song “Layla” is also, rightly, in the pantheon of rock songs, having been ranked 27th on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” (in 2004) and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

As for “Bell Bottom Blues,” it reached number 91 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, and today, in 2024, it’s still making my high school classmate smile whenever he hears it.

Some fun facts

• Eric released an acoustic version of “Layla” on his live Unplugged album in 1992. Unplugged became his bestselling album and the bestselling live album of all time, achieving diamond status, as well as winning three Grammy Awards. The acoustic version of “Layla” also went to the top of the charts, reaching number four on Pop Singles, number nine on Mainstream Rock, and number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100.

• The song “Wonderful Tonight” was actually a song Eric wrote in anger and frustration at how long it was taking Pattie to get ready for a party at the home of Paul and Linda McCartney. He told her she looked wonderful to get her to hurry up, and then went back downstairs, picked up his guitar, and came up with the song in about ten minutes. He only took the “ditty” seriously when he played it to Pattie and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones sometime later around a campfire at Ronnie’s house and Ronnie liked it. Released as a single, it became a hit in countries around the world.

• Bobby Whitlock and musician CoCo Carmel (his wife) put out a live album in 2003 covering the Dominos’ songs and George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” called Other Assorted Love Songs. In 2008 they put out the album Lovers with guest musicians, including Willie Nelson, which included the song “Dear Veronica” that Bobby and Eric had worked on together in the early 70s, as well as a cover of “Layla” that omitted the ending written by Jim Gordon.

• Pattie Boyd sold a collection of mementos from her famous past at a Christie’s auction in March 2024 for £2.8 million. The Layla painting that graced the cover of the Derek and the Dominos album, which Eric had given George in the late 70s and George then gifted to Pattie in the late 80s, went for just under £2 million. You can watch a video of Pattie sharing some of the items in the collection, including the painting and one of Eric’s love letters, here.

• Pattie and Eric got together in 1974 (when she left George), married in 1979, divorced in 1989, and both went on to marry other partners. Eric has three grown-up daughters.

• For another view on Pattie’s role as muse, you might enjoy this highly entertaining piece by Beatles biographer Philip Norman, called “A Muse of Fire.”

• I also highly recommend Pattie’s and Eric’s autobiographies, as both are remarkably honest and a fascinating record of the chaos, creativity, and substance abuse of those times. Bobby Whitlock has an autobiography as well that I have yet to read, but its honesty has also been extolled in reviews.

Questions for discussion in the comments

1. George Harrison vs. Eric Clapton — who wrote the best love song?

2. Which “Layla” version do you prefer — plugged or unplugged?

3. If you could be a muse for someone, who would you choose?

4. Name someone you would love to have as your exclusive muse.

5. Friar Park or Hurtwood — which house has the better name, and why?

6. Bell bottoms or straight leg?