This is driving me slowly insane. At my age I should know what this tune is, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t. I have tried everything I can possibly think of to identify this very recognizable song, to no avail. The other night I heard it on the radio, so I quickly grabbed my pocket recorder and grabbed a minute and a half of it. I re-upped my membership just to post this. I was going to be a tightwad and just wait for the free posting to start, but this is just tormenting me. Please—what is this goddamn song? Sorry about the crappy audio quality—you might want to turn your speakers down a bit before you listen to it.
It’s the end of Layla.
Layla - Derek & The Dominos
Another bit of trivia (so this doesn’t turn into Rio by Duran Duran).
Duane Allman was sitting in on the recording sessions for Layla. That’s him playing that high wailing slide guitar on the instrumental at the end.
Here’s the entire song.
And that thing at the very end that sounds like a bird chirping? Allman actually was able to produce that sound from his guitar. Amazing.
OK, now that I feel like a colossal dumbass, answer this: do the classic rock stations ever split off the instrumental portion and play it as a standalone track, or have I just heard Layla 10,000 times and never realized that I was listening to one long song?
I’ve never heard the instrumental ending as a stand-alone song on a classic rock station in Chicago, and that’s all I listened to through high school.
I had a feeling that that was going to be the answer… :smack:
Eric Clapton’s ears must have burned for years from people who called the drawn-out ending of that song “self-indulgent” (I swear I’ve heard those words a thousand times regarding “Layla”), but I prefer to think that Eric was actually indulging his (at that time) favorite guitarist, Duane Allman. And really, why not? It’s a pleasant enough tune, and Duane was just a monster talent.
I’ve never gotten any impression about Eric but that he’s just a genuinely good guy.
I’ve definitely heard the first part as a stand-alone,without the ending instrumental, but never the reverse, FWIW.
Joe
Clapton’s second version of Layla, from his Unplugged album, was a big hit and omitted the coda.
It’s a quite nice bit of music; I might call it uplifting. I played a hippie wedding one time where we were asked to play it as the bride walked down the aisle. It worked surprisingly well.
Trivia: it was actually composed by drummer Jim Gordon. Gordon was an incredibly in-demand session drummer. Check out the Wikipedia entry for his astonishing discography, and his tragic fate.
Also isn’t that little Stevie Winwood playing piano on the outro?
Nope - it’s Bobby Whitlock, who was my next-door neighbor once upon a time.
Is there any video of him doing it? I don’t play guitar, but I’d still be interested to see what he does to get it.
Never heard the coda played separate either, but it is a separate stand alone track on the Goodfellas soundtrack, so its possible some DJ has played it by itself, somewhere. Also, was the original 45 split onto two sides, or did they cram it all on one?
Duane played some of the meanest slide all all time, that’s just him playing the slide waaaaay up on the guitar, like right over the pickups to the sounds are super high pitched.
This site says:
Right, but to clarify, the piano piece at the end was an earlier composition by Gordon that they decided would fit into the rest of the song, which was written by Clapton.
That low-fi version of the song reminds me that when it first came out I didn’t have the album and heard the song mostly over crappy radios and diner jukeboxes. It was in a diner that I made the comment to my friends that I thought it was strange that the song was called “Layla” when that name was never used in the lyrics. They pointed out, not so gently, that what I had already heard as “hey girl” was in fact Clapton screeching “Layla.” Mondegreens go that far back in rock history, folks.
The album was produced by Tom Dowd, a brilliant musician, arranger, producer and engineer. If you watch the essential documentary Tom Dowd: The Language of Music, you will hear how Tom got Duane involved based on his relationship with “the Brothers,” how Clapton felt about working with Duane, etc. And yeah, Dowd plays with the tape masters a bit, isolating Duane’s way-up-the-guitar slide parts and Clapton’s complementary parts. The doc starts with the piano part isolated for a few measures, then Dowd stopping it and saying “wait, we can do that better!”
It’s apropos to this discussion and to learning more about this piece of work, but the documentary - and Tom Dowd as a man - stand out for far, far more. Watch it.
I believe the original radio edit of Layla cut off the entire coda. Fortunately I’ve never actually heard that version.
There is very little available video of Duane, unfortunately (and some of what exists has no sound!), and I don’t think of it it shows him doing this move. But: assuming you play right-handed as he did, you can make bird calls by pulling the slide off your left hand, hold it in your right hand and tap it to the strings high on the body of your guitar. It requires a light touch or else it comes out flat and squawky and not like a bird at all.
Correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m saying this from memory of both the song and guitar playing but…
Plucking the frets, I think, possibly whilst close to a mike.
Yeah, Marley’s more correct. (I’ve never actually played an electric, I admit.)