22 February 2011
Newsdesk
Eric Clapton’s Career-Defining Album Marks 40th Anniversary on 29th March 2011 Internationally With Deluxe Multi-format Edition Featuring New and Long-Unavailable Music, Never-Released Video and Never-Seen Photos, Plus Other Exciting Extras
In the world of rock there are icons, and then there are icons: recordings that truly tower in historical importance and continue to cast an enduring shadow of influence. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs sits atop that category, one of the most steadfastly revered musical treasures of its era. Its famous title track still hailed as an essential rock guitar anthem, the signature tune of rock’s leading guitar hero – Eric Clapton.
Recorded in 1970 by Derek and the Dominos, the short-lived group led by Clapton that also featured guitar legend Duane Allman and top American rhythm musicians of the day, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs music offers a timeless blend of rock, electric blues and Southern gospel influences that has shaped generations of roots-oriented musicians. It achieved gold album status within months of its release in late 1970, was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, and today remains a ubiquitous entry in various “Top 100” and “All-Time Greatest” polls, and “Must Hear” bucket lists.
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs: The 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is a multi format collection offering an appropriately comprehensive salute of this iconic album and the band that created it. To be released in March 2011, the set will feature the original double-disc album in both digital and vinyl formats, expanded to include newly remastered tracks, and a treasure trove of music and video performances.
Highlights of the DELUXE EDITION include new performances, Phil Spectre produced tracks and high-fidelity, 180-gram reproduction of the original vinyl. The SUPER DELUXE EDITION additionally includes 2-CD set of Derek and the Dominos: In Concert, recorded at the Fillmore East, a hardcover book containing never-seen photographs and a Pop-up 3-D artwork and a high quality Layla art print based on the oil painting that graced the original album cover – “La Fille Au Bouquet” by Emile Theodore Frandsen de Schomberg – which has achieved cultural significance in its own right. A downloadable edition of both formats will be available on iTunes.
Layla and Other Love Songs – the double-album that Derek and Dominos recorded over the next 6 weeks – encapsulates soulful music and a number of stories, each one leading to another: some amusing, some tragic, and all now indelibly part of rock’s enduring legends:
Arguably the most compelling back-story of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is the unrequited and not-so-secret love of Clapton for best friend’s wife, Patti Boyd – then married to George Harrison. The album was dedicated to Patti – whom Clapton had nicknamed after the unattainable princess “Layla” of the Persian narrative poem Layla and Majnun – and for whom he had written a number of original numbers that stand among his best-known and memorable compositions: “Bell Bottom Blues”, “I Am Yours” (with lyrics taken from Layla and Majnun) and of course – the classic “Layla.” (That Clapton later married Boyd only adds to the poignancy of the album’s enduring legacy.)
Derek and the Dominos existed for a brief period of eleven months during which they released only a single album. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs remains their glorious debut, their magnum opus, and their enduring farewell, all in one – while the title track has become a song that resonates just as strongly today as when it was first recorded in 1970. Rock journalist Dave Marsh wrote in Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll,“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.”
