The Eric Clapton-Duane Allman “Layla” Sessions

How Two Extraordinary Guitarists Banded for a Landmark Album

Slowhand and Skydog, 1970.

In the late 1960s, Duane Allman, leader of the Allman Brothers Band, emerged as one of rock’s foremost slide players. While learning slide, Allman had immersed himself in records by Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters. He settled on open E and standard as his favorite slide tunings, wore a Coricidin cold medicine bottle on the ring finger of his fretting hand, and typically picked the strings with his bare thumb, index, and ring fingers. On his band’s self-titled 1969 debut, Duane’s slide work on “Trouble No More” and “Dreams” caught the attention of rock guitar fans, as did his harmonica-influenced bottlenecking on “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” from the band’s second album, 1970’s Idlewild South.

During the Idlewild South sessions, producer Tom Dowd got a phone call asking him to produce Eric Clapton’s next album. “When I finished the call,” Dowd recalled, “I apologized to Duane and the band about the interruption and mentioned Eric’s name. Duane was all over me in about ten seconds. He ended up asking if I thought it would be okay for him to come by the studio while we were recording so that he could watch and possibly meet Eric. My thought was that it was okay, but I told him, ‘Let me check with Eric when he gets here.’”

On August 27, 1970, the Allman Brothers Band came to Miami Beach to play near Criteria Studio, where Clapton was just beginning to record Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. As Dowd detailed in the liner booklet for The Layla Sessions box set, “I told Eric that Duane would like to meet him, and Eric promptly looked at me and said, ‘You mean the chap who played on the end of Wilson Pickett’s recording of ‘Hey Jude’? And he started emulating Duane on guitar. He said, ‘I’m dying to see him play!’ I told him they were giving a concert Saturday night, and Eric announced, ‘There will be no session Saturday night. We are going to the concert.’ So without ever having met, these two artists were deeply aware of each other’s talent.”

Without the knowledge of the Allman Brothers, Clapton, his bandmates, and Tom Dowd headed to the concert. “They snuck us in,” Dowd remembered. “They had a barricade between where the public was and the riser for the band, sandbags and gobos up there to keep the people back. They got us in by the side of the stage and we crawled in on our hands and knees so we wouldn’t obscure the stage and propped ourselves against these sandbags, sitting on our butts with our hand holding our knees together. Duane was in the middle of a solo; he opens his eyes and looks down, does a dead stare, and stops playing. Dickey Betts is chugging along, sees Duane’s stopped playing, and figures he’d better cover, that Duane must have broken a string or something. Then Dickey looks down, sees Eric, and turns his back. That was how they first saw each other.”

Meeting backstage, Eric invited Duane and the rest of the band to join him in the studio. “I went down there to watch them make that record because I was interested in it,” Duane told interviewer Jon Tiven in the December 10, 1970, issue of New Haven Rock Press. “I thought, ‘Well, now, the cat’s got him a band.’ Because I’ve been an admirer of Eric Clapton for a long, long time. I’ve always dug his playing, he inspired me a lot, and I always just personally dug his playing. Figured I’d get a chance to meet him and watch this thing go down, you know, so I went down. So when I saw him he acted like he knew me, like I was an old friend: ‘Hey, man, how are you?’ you know. And he said, ‘As long as you’re here we want you to get on this record and make it with us. We need more guitar players anyway, so I did. I was real flattered and glad to be able to do it.”