Background
The short-lived collaboration which created Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Derek and the Dominos, grew out of Clapton's frustration with the hype associated with the supergroups Cream and the short-lived Blind Faith. After their dissolution, he joined Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, whom he had come to know while they were the opening act for Blind Faith on a British tour.
After that band also split up, a Friends alumnus, Bobby Whitlock, joined up with Clapton; the two spent some months writing a number of songs "just to have something to play", as Whitlock put it. These songs would later make up the bulk of the material on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
After a tour with Joe Cocker, some more of the personnel from Delaney and Bonnie joined up with Clapton. He attempted to avoid the limelight under cover of the anonymous Derek and the Dominos, booking a British tour of small clubs. The group's name had reportedly resulted from a gaffe made by the announcer at their first concert, who mispronounced the band's provisional name, "Eric & The Dynamos," as "Derek & The Dominos". In fact, Clapton chose the name because he did not want his name and celebrity to get in the way of maintaining a "band" image. When the tour was over, they headed for Criteria Studios in Miami to record an album.
At this point the album's future centerpiece "Layla" did not yet exist. Its source was rooted in Clapton's personal life; he had fallen in love with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend George Harrison. Not even heroin, which Clapton had then begun to use, could dull the pain. Dave Marsh, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, wrote that "there are few moments in the repertoire of recorded rock where a singer or writer has reached so deeply into himself that the effect of hearing them is akin to witnessing a murder, or a suicide... to me, 'Layla' is the greatest of them."
Read more about this topic: Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
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