The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [107]
Why did you go to Miami to record ‘Layla’?
The attraction was Tom Dowd. I’d worked with him in Cream, and he was to me—and still is—the ideal recording man.
Yeah, he engineered all those great early Atlantic R&B and soul sessions and practically invented stereo.
Right. And he can guide you in a very constructive way. So we got there, we were doing a lot of dope and drinking a lot and just partying. It was great times. After about a week of jamming, I wanted to go hear the Allman Brothers, who were playing nearby, because I’d heard Duane Allman on Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude,” and he blew me away with that. After the concert I invited him back to the studio, and he stayed. We fell in love, and the album took off from there.
The first time I ran into you was during those sessions at Criteria Recording Studios. There was a lot of dope around, especially heroin, and when I showed up, everyone was just spread out on the carpet, nodded out. Then you appeared in the doorway in an old brown leather jacket, with your hair slicked back like a greaser’s, looking like you hadn’t slept in days. You just looked around at the wreckage and said, to nobody in particular, “The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled.” And then you split.
Yeah. We were staying in this hotel on the beach, and whatever drug you wanted, you could get it at the newsstand; the girl would just take your orders. We were on the up and the down, the girl and the boy, and the drink was usually Ripple or Gallo. Very heavy stuff. I remember Ahmet [Ertegun, chairman of Atlantic Records] arriving at some point, taking me aside and crying, saying he’d been through this shit with Ray [Charles], and he knew where this was gonna end, and could I stop now. I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. This is no problem.” And, of course, he was dead right.
I guess you have to work that stuff out for yourself.
I don’t know about that. When I started using [heroin], George [Harrison] and Leon [Russell] asked me, “What are you doing? What is your intention?” And I said, “I want to make a journey through the dark, on my own, to find out what it’s like in there. And then come out the other end.” But that was easy for me to say, because I had a craft, music, that I could turn to. For people who don’t have that, there’s a lot of danger; if you haven’t got something to hold on to, you’re gone. It’s no good just saying, “Well, that person is gonna go through it, no matter what.” You’ve actually got to stop them and try to make them think.
The music you and Duane got into on ‘Layla’ was really special, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Did you tour after you finished recording?
Not with Duane, of course, but the Dominos did a very big tour of America. We copped a lot of dope in Miami—a lot of dope—and that went with us. Then I met up with this preacher from New York who was married to one of the Ronettes, and he asked if he could come along on part of the tour. The spiritual part of me was attracted to this man, but he immediately started giving me a very hard time about the dope. I felt very bad about this, and after the first week on the road I put everything I had in a sack and flushed it down the loo. Then, of course, I was going to the other guys, trying to score off them.
By the end of the tour, the band was getting very, very loaded, doing way too much. Then we went back to England, tried to make a second album, and it broke down halfway through because of the paranoia and the tension. And the band just . . . dissolved. I remember to this day being in my house, feeling totally lost