As fast friends and close collaborators, Eric Clapton and Duane Allman formed one of rock guitar’s most potent partnerships.
They may not have been in a band together per se, but that didn’t stop them from working together on one of Slowhand’s most iconic recordings.
At the turn of the 1960s, the Allman Brothers Band guitar hero was a Clapton fan. The feeling was mutual. Clapton said Allman’s turn on Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude was the greatest rock guitar playing he’d ever heard.
Allman wanted to meet Clapton. And so, when he caught wind that he was coming to town to record a new record, Allman requested a meeting through a mutual contact.
“I said to Tom Dowd [producer for both the Allman Brothers and Derek and the Dominos], ‘Man, you’ve got to call me when he comes to town,’” Allman told Good Times magazine in 1971, which was re-published in the November 1991 issue of Guitar World. “‘I want to hear him play, and I want to meet him.’
“He’s a good player and I’ve always admired him a lot – his style and everything he ever did,” Allman continued. “So Dowd told me, ‘He’s going to be in. Come down.’ So I got down there, and Eric knew who I was – he’d heard some of my records and stuff.”
The pair, clearly fans of one another, decided to work together then and there. This was no ordinary collaboration, though. Allman caught Clapton at a good time.
With his band Derek and the Dominos, Slowhand was about to set to work on what would become Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs – a magnus opus that would be widely regarded as one of Clapton's finest works.
“He said, ‘Okay, man. We’re going to make us a record here, and we’re going to have two guitar players instead of one,’” Allman remembered. “Then we made the Layla album.
“And we worked our butts off on it! It’s a good record! Everybody got behind it, with no [ego] trips or anything. It’s just good music all the way through. And it was a pleasure to do it.”
The impromptu partnership would become the beating heart of some of Layla’s… most iconic guitar moments. On tracks like I Am Yours and Nobody Knows You, Allman’s landmark slide guitar work injected the record with elevated dynamics and melody.
Little Wing, Tell the Truth and Key to the Highway showed Allman and Clapton’s potent chemistry. He even played a starring role on Layla, twinning with Clapton for the opening iconic riff. Not bad for an off-the-cuff collaboration.
The pair continued their partnership after the Layla sessions, sharing the stage across a handful of Derek and the Dominos gigs. Tragically, before they got a chance to enter the studio again together, Allman died in a motorcycle accident less than a year later, in October 1971.
It made Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs their final, and only, record together.
But Allman was eternalized in the Slowhand repertoire, with his slide playing in particular stealing the spotlight on Layla. His work proved to be a fruitful source of inspiration for Clapton.
“It’s all in the wrists,” Allman said of his technique at the time. “Eric is coming along on his slide. He’s doing okay. He ain’t no Duane Allman of the slide guitar, but he's doing all right!”
