Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is the only studio album by the Anglo-American blues rock band Derek and the Dominos. Released in November 1970, the double album is best known for its title track, "Layla", and is often regarded as Eric Clapton's greatest musical achievement. The other band members were Bobby Whitlock on keyboards and vocals, Jim Gordon on drums, Carl Radle on bass, and special guest performer Duane Allman on lead and slide guitar on 11 of the 14 songs.
In the United States, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It returned to the US albums chart again in 1972, 1974 and 1977, and has since been certified Platinum by the RIAA. Having failed to chart in Britain originally, it finally debuted on the UK Albums Chart in 2011, peaking at number 68.
In 2000, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2003, television network VH1 named Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs the 89th-greatest album of all time, and Rolling Stone ranked it number 117 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Critic Robert Christgau ranked Layla the third greatest album of the 1970s. In 2012, the Super Deluxe Edition of the record won a Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album.
Atco Records issued Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in November 1970 in the United States, with a UK release following in December, on Polydor. The album failed to chart in the United Kingdom, while in the US, it peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs chart. Despite this achievement, Layla was viewed as a commercial failure, according to authors Harry Shapiro and Jan Reid. Dowd later rued the difficulty of getting airplay for the songs on US radio, while Shapiro attributes its lack of success in Britain to minimal promotion by Polydor and what he terms "the unrelenting and monotonous Press litany of a post-Cream withdrawal syndrome". Concerned that the press and the public were unaware of Clapton's involvement, Atco and Polydor distributed badges reading "Derek is Eric".
Shapiro writes that Layla was also a "flop" critically, adding: "As with Eric's first solo album, the reviewers liked the guitars-on-fire-stuff … but regarded the [love songs] as little more than fluff." Writing in Melody Maker, Roy Hollingworth opined that the songs ranged "from the magnificent to a few lengths of complete boredom", and specified: "We have Hendrix's 'Little Wing' played with such spreading beauty that Jimi would surely have clapped till his hands bled, and then we have 'I Am Yours' … a bossa that novas in pitiful directions." While he identified portions of "pretty atrocious vocal work", Hollingworth considered Layla to be "far more musical" than Eric Clapton, and praised Clapton and Allman for "giv[ing] about every superb essay possible on the playing of the electric guitar". In a more favourable review for Rolling Stone, Ed Leimbacher noted the album's "filler" material but added that "what remains is what you hoped for from the conjunction of Eric's developing style, the Delaney and Bonnie styled rhythm section, and the strengths of 'Skydog' Allman's session abilities." Leimbacher found Clapton's singing "always at least adequate, and sometimes quite good" and concluded, "forget any indulgences and filler – it's still one hell of an album."
Track Listing
- I Looked Away
- Bell Bottom Blues
- Keep On Growing
- Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out
- I Am Yours
- Anyday
- Key to the Highway
- Tell the Truth
- Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad
- Have You Ever Loved a Woman
- Little Wing
- It's Too Late
- Layla
- Thorn Tree in the Garden
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