Clapton and Whitlock co-wrote "I Looked Away", "Keep on Growing", " Anyday", " Bell Bottom Blues", " Tell the Truth" and "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad? But let us draw a veil over that sorry time and move forward to February 2011, when a friend of mine recommended "Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs". 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.

While for those of you who have got to know and love this album well over the years, then this stands as its definitve edition and is highly recommended. When Clapton learned of this he insisted on going to see their show, saying, "You mean that guy who plays on the back of ( Wilson Pickett's) 'Hey Jude'? Bobby Whitlock revealed in an interview that while they were staying at Emile Frandsen's house in France in August 1970, he took them to his father's studio just after they had made a mess by having an egg fight. In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Christgau dubbed it "Clapton's most carefully conceived recording", while admiring the album's "relaxed shuffle and simple rock and roll" and Clapton's "generally warm" singing. 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.Derek and the Dominos went on tour to support Layla and performances from the October–December 1970 US tour were released in January 1973 on In Concert. Bands just don't make records like this any more, and if you're one of those purchasing this album for the first time, then you're in for a treat. Concerned that the press and the public were unaware of Clapton's involvement, Atco and Polydor distributed badges reading "Derek is Eric". The album's front cover is credited as "Cover painting by Frandsen-De Schomberg with thanks to his son, Emile, for the abuse of his house". Eric Clapton immediately spotted a likeness between the blonde-haired woman it depicted and Pattie Boyd.

Nor does the new yellow box with stick-on guitar artwork match the black and gold embossed box with reproduction LP artwork on the lid of the 20th Anniversary Edition. In the same year, Rolling Stone ranked it number 117 on its list of " The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Clapton wrote later in his autobiography that he and Allman were inseparable during the sessions in Florida; he talked about Allman as the "musical brother I'd never had but wished I did". It is a beautiful package comprising as it does 4 CDs, including the full Fillmore East set, a DVD-Audio containing an unreleased 5.

I don't think it's exaggeration to say this is one of the greatest "supergroup" albums ever (if not the greatest) and rightly so.

The LP was re-released on 180g vinyl by Simply Vinyl in the 1990s and re-mastered and re-released on 180g vinyl by Universal Music in 2008. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. From April 1970, the two spent weeks writing a number of songs "just to have something to play", as Whitlock put it. Of these numbers, which have been newly mixed for this reissue by their original engineer Andy Johns, the stop-gap riffery of Willie Dixon's 'Evil' and the anthemic 'Got To Get Better In A Little While' are the highlights from these aborted sessions (Bobby Whitlock has laid down new vocal and keyboard tracks for the latter incidentally, though his voice seems unchanged over the last 40 years and it blends in well).Stage hands seated Clapton and company in front of the barricade separating the audience from the stage. Bobby Whitlock's version of the story is that the tape was rolling non-stop for the entire session, but that Dowd had taken a lavatory break leaving the faders on the mixer down. AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised Allman's slide guitar work for "push[ing] Clapton to new heights" and stated, "what really makes Layla such a powerful record is that Clapton, ignoring the traditions that occasionally painted him into a corner, simply tears through these songs with burning, intense emotion. The MFSL version was significantly cleaner than the first CD releases, but also removed some of " Wall of Sound"-like technique that was added during mastering for vinyl. As irregular as Clapton's career has been, there are however some albums that made him deserve his legendary status as one of the finest blues rock guitar players ever.

The last track on the album, "Thorn Tree in the Garden", was recorded with Whitlock, Clapton, Allman, Radle and Gordon sitting in a circle around a single microphone. Initially regarded as a critical and commercial disappointment, it failed to chart in Britain and peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the United States. The majority of the songs on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs were products of Clapton and Whitlock's collaboration, which produced six of the nine originals on the recording, with five covers making up the balance.

Highlights are the quietly worshipful I Am Yours, the funky, fast-rapping Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad? Also included were out-takes of some of the songs, and the previously unreleased tracks " Mean Old World", " It Hurts Me Too", and "Tender Love". I mean, you have an insane amount of talent in here: Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon and Carl Radle, tight as hell and delivering a collection of really inspired own compositions here (penned mainly by Clapton and Whitlock) like "I Looked Away", "Bell Bottom Blues", "Anyday", "Tell The Truth" or the title song (here displayed in its original electric and schizophrenic glory, rather than the semi-skimmed version in "Unplugged" that made it so widely known later in the nineties), plus a fistful of the finest blues standards covers thrown in for good measure, like Billy Myles' "Have You Ever Loved A Woman" (one of my favourite blues ever, here graced with a to-die-for guitar jam between Clapton and Allman) or Hendrix's "Little Wing". It almost makes us forget that it constitutes a rather narrow foundation stone for an increasingly massive edifice.