1970: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

50 Years, 100 Albums: Chapter 2

In the months before I turned 50, inspired by Stephin Merritt’s Magnetic Fields album 50 Song Memoir, I had the conceit of writing about 100 albums that have been significant to me over a half-century of life, two for each year between 1970 and 2019. This is the next chapter in that project. The first chapter is here.

Musical ecstasy is the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience. In my early adolescence, the The Rolling Stone Record Guide was my Bible.

Before the book fell into my hands sometime around 1979, my childhood musical interests began and ended with The Beatles. I was aware of a handful of songs popular with kids at school — “Rock Lobster” was a big hit with the pre-teen crowd — but I was completely ignorant of punk, and as a white, non-queer resident of the Detroit suburbs I had absorbed the general opinion that disco was an abomination. That was the year of the infamous Disco Demolition Night at old Comiskey Park, which I watched unfold live on television; it happened between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and my beloved Detroit Tigers. I scarcely listened to the radio except to hear Ernie Harwell narrate Tigers games on WJR. When I listened to records, with a few exceptions, it was all Beatles, all the time.

I was predisposed to agree with the Record Guide critics’ judgments because, regarding my favorite band, they agreed with mine. Led by critic Dave Marsh, they had applied Rolling Stone magazine’s five-star rating system to thousands of albums, including a rating for so-called “worthless” albums, represented by a square bullet. A five-star album was deemed “indispensible” for any self-respecting music collector. In the book’s telling, the great era of five-star albums was roughly 1964 to 1971, when a host of young geniuses, all white men from the U.S. or the U.K. inspired by Black American R&B, explored and perfected a radical new musical vocabulary. The Record Guide bestowed five stars onto no less than 14 Beatles albums, dubbing them the undisputed masters of the golden age.

Artists like The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Who weren’t far behind, and they became the first additions to my collection. All were well-liked by my Mom, whose credit cards and willingness to drive me to record stores made this buying spree possible, and she had a strong influence on my early choices. (This may explain why I didn’t pick up anything by The Beach Boys, despite the five-star rating given to their best-of collection Endless Summer; she’d been forced to hear the song “Good Vibrations” in her exercise class too many times and didn’t want it in the house.)

Mom put a high value on having good taste and had great faith in professional critics to identify the movies she should see and the TV shows she should watch. I followed Mom’s lead and looked to the list of five-star albums as a definitive critical verdict on the music I should be listening to. I began to hunt them down.

There were plenty of places to buy records in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Today every shopping center has a Starbucks and a Walgreen’s; back then, they all had chain record stores like Musicland or Camelot Music, which were good enough if you were looking for hot new releases or perennial bestsellers like Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon. As the Record Guide drove me deeper into artists’ catalogs for more obscure titles, I had to find a store that catered to serious collectors. In the Detroit suburbs, the place to go was Harmony House.

Shopping at Harmony House was a revelation I never quite got over, a cave of wonders. Faced with the physical evidence that far more music existed than I could ever hope to hear in my lifetime, I became covetous and handsy. I couldn’t stop flipping through the bins, picking up records and running my fingertips over the covers, imagining the music packed inside that needed only a needle to release it, genie-like, from the vinyl.

Even so, I was rarely an impulse buyer. Once, based on the Record Guide’s recommendations alone, Mom and I went to Harmony House to pick up The Doors’ self-titled first album and The Band’s self-titled second album, both of which had been given five stars. Mom had been excited about hearing The Doors and was disappointed when we got the album home because she wasn’t a fan of Ray Manzarek’s organ playing. (She felt justified when the second edition of the Record Guide downgraded The Doors’ albums by a couple of stars apiece, although she did come to love L.A. Woman.) I liked The Doors fine but was put off by the backwoods sound of The Band, whom Mom, conversely, liked quite a bit.

Afraid to commit to something I might not like, I started listening to the radio and cross-referencing what I heard with the Record Guide. I became a devotee of WLLZ, “Detroit’s Wheelz,” a new station that dominated Detroit rock radio in the early 1980s. If I liked a song I heard, I would check the artist’s ratings to see if my liking was justified.

One song in particular stood out because had two distinct parts, a torrent of guitars and wailing vocals followed by a beautiful piano-driven instrumental coda. I never managed to catch the name of the song or who had recorded it, but one day I was scanning through the Record Guide for the thousandth time and came across the review for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominoes, released during the later golden age in the year of my birth. It had five stars and was described as one of the greatest displays of guitar wizardry of all time. I put two and two together and realized that the song on the radio I liked so much must be “Layla”. I had to have the album.

The next time we went to Harmony House, I rummaged through the D bin, flipping past an album that had a painting of a woman’s face on the cover.

“What about that one?” Mom asked, looking over my shoulder.

I flipped back. “I don’t think so,” I said, not seeing any indication of the band name or album title. Along with its bias towards ’60s artists, I’d absorbed the Record Guide’s preference for muscular, blues-based music played by men. This cover looked feminine and arty, nothing like a legendary blues guitar album.

“Look on the back,” Mom said. I turned it over and there was a photo of Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster amidst a scattering of dominoes.

“I guess that’s it,” I said.

“I thought it might be,” Mom said unnecessarily.

Once we got the record home and put it on the turntable, Mom and I agreed that the Record Guide had steered us right. She loved the covers of old blues tunes like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”. I loved the guitar pyrotechnics between Clapton and Duane Allman. It became one of the albums I played most often in those years.

As I parroted their reverence for the classic rock era, I also learned to hate what the Rolling Stone critics hated. By the mid-1970’s, as the story went, the forces of commercialism and the tyranny of radio formats had rendered most new music “generic,” “insipid,” and “wretched.” The book’s authors had a special loathing for heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Nazareth, and for soft-rock AM radio staples like The Carpenters and John Denver. Glam rock — David Bowie, T. Rex — was viewed with suspicion. Artists who worked in the classic rock tradition (Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger) received high marks, but the three AC/DC albums reviewed in the book all got “worthless” ratings. If an AC/DC song happened to come on the radio, I would make a show of repulsion, grimacing and uttering noises of disgust and turning down the volume until the DJ played something better.

As for newer music released after the book was published, I mostly affected a jaundiced attitude befitting an apprentice critic, although there were some songs in heavy rotation that I found irresistible: Billy Squier’s “Lonely Is the Night”, the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold”, Def Leppard’s “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak”, and Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” all lodged themselves in my eleven-year-old brain. When the second edition of the Record Guide was published late in 1981, the first thing I did was to look up those artists and others to validate my judgment. I was especially gratified to see Billy Squier’s album Don’t Say No get four stars, although I thought maybe it deserved five.

I brought the new edition of the Record Guide to school one day to show my friend, who was also named Steve. That school year, 1981–1982, was the first (and as it would turn out, the only) time I felt popular with people my own age. The other Steve and I had bonded over music, in particular our shared appreciation of The Beatles and The Who. He especially loved the rock opera Tommy and was writing one of his own about a baseball player who overcomes failure and self-doubt to achieve greatness.

Steve and I were part of a clique who called ourselves The Unknown, which we’d agreed would be our band name if we ever formed a band. There was another clique in the school led by a kid named Rob. The major point of conflict between our groups was our taste in music. Initially the debate revolved around the perennial question of whether the Stones or the Beatles were the greatest band ever.

Things got more serious when Rob made the scandalous assertion that AC/DC was better than The Beatles. In retrospect, what he probably said was that he’d rather listen to AC/DC than The Beatles, a subtle distinction that was lost on me in my visceral outrage. In further retrospect, Rob was probably trolling me for his friends’ amusement, as I had made my critic-approved loathing of AC/DC a matter of public knowledge.

Nowadays, when I hear the lyrics from the Arcade Fire song “Suburban War” — “Now the music divides us into tribes” — I always think of Rob. I couldn’t grasp how someone who took music seriously (as he certainly did) could have such a backward understanding of what was good. It was a kind of moral violation. To make things worse, there were signs that the girl I had a crush on might have a crush on him. I have Rob to thank for teaching me, in direct emotional terms, the meaning of the word “nemesis.”

I generally avoided Rob after the AC/DC incident. Then he invited me to his birthday party.

I didn’t want to go at first. I’m not sure I ever did want to go. I’d been working hard all year to navigate the social landscape at school, with a surprising (to me) degree of success; but I sensed somehow that the dynamics would be different at Rob’s house, and I worried that the popularity I’d somehow attained could be in jeopardy if I made a serious misstep at the party.

Nevertheless, I did come around to the idea that I should go. The other members of the Unknown were going; it would be odd if I didn’t.

That left me with the problem of choosing a birthday present. There was no question that it should be a record, but which one? He liked terrible music, but which terrible music? Mom and I went to Harmony House and I wandered the aisles and flipped randomly through the bins, a sour ball of anxiety in my stomach, while Mom made suggestions that I dismissed out of hand.

“You said he likes guitars,” Mom said. “What about Derek and the Dominoes?”

“No,” I said without thinking about it.

Then I thought about it. One day at lunchtime, I’d seen Rob and his buddies Eddie and Bob gathered around a radio trying to find something good to listen to. While I’d watched, they’d landed on a station that was playing “Layla”, the wild part just before the coda where Clapton’s and Allman’s guitars twine together like agonized screams. All three boys had immediately started banging their heads and playing air guitar.

Maybe, I thought. I went over to the D bin and found a copy of Layla.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, you like it,” Mom said, “and it’s a good thing to share the things you like with other people.”

Something about what she’d said didn’t sit right. But my anxiety wasn’t getting any better, and I didn’t want to worry about it anymore. We bought Layla, and I went to the party.

I don’t remember much about the party itself except that I think when it came time to open the presents, we were in a basement rec room where there was a stereo system. This was fitting because everyone had brought Rob new records. He crowed as he opened each one: Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Deep Purple’s Machine Head. All of them, I noted silently, had gotten two or three stars at most in the Record Guide.

Then he opened my gift. An artsy painting of a woman appeared from beneath the wrapping paper.

“What … is this,” Rob said, distinctly not crowing. He turned it over. “Oh,” he said. “Eric Clapton. Thanks.” He moved on to the next present.

My cheeks burned. I wanted to explain: this is one of the greatest guitar albums of all time. This is great. But some part of me knew that if I started talking, I’d only dig myself in deeper, I’d commit the faux pas I’d feared, I’d torch my popularity. My tongue, mercifully, stayed tied.

When all the presents had been opened, Rob put Paranoid on the turntable and cued it up to play “Iron Man”. He put the volume up louder than I’d ever heard anything. The drums thudded in my gut, the detuned guitar made my teeth feel like they were melting. Ozzy Osbourne’s distorted voice declared, “I AM IRON MAN,” and the dopamine rush hit my brain. I looked around the room, and everyone was beaming, and I was beaming too, giddy with the sound.

For the duration of that song, at least, I was able to let go of the social shame I’d felt minutes before. It wasn’t that I suddenly thought Black Sabbath was good; it was that for a short time it didn’t matter to me what good was. What mattered was the rush, the feeling we were having in the moment.

The insight, I’m sorry to say, didn’t linger. I went back to being an insufferable snob, and on some level I still am (though I do have both Paranoid and AC/DC’s Back in Black in my digital music collection). Rob remained my nemesis for the rest of the school year, and in fact I had even more reason to view him as such when I found the copy of Layla I’d given him weeks later at school under a tall stack of records, still sealed in its plastic wrap.

One thing I did take away from the experience was the determination that Mom’s advice had been wrong. Sharing something I liked was not enough. I should have worked harder to understand what Rob would like. Everyone else at the party had managed to do it. It shouldn’t have been that hard, after all. Rob was quite open about what he liked and what he didn’t. His birthday was not the time or the place for me to impose my taste-making upon him.

Much of the person I’ve become is rooted in moments of social shame, some of which remain raw and unprocessed and make me want to dash my head against the wall. The Layla incident is not one of those. I’ve rerun it end to end many times over the years and now it plays in my mind with a soft ambient hiss, the once-sharp grooves worn down. Nevertheless, my feelings about Layla as an album have been forever bound with the emotions that surged through me that day in Rob’s rec room — both the embarrassment and the ecstatic rush. When I’m in the car alone and “Bell Bottom Blues” or “Key to the Highway” or “Layla” comes around on the shuffle, I turn it up as loud as I dare so I can feel the music with my whole body. Its gob-smacking greatness is self-evident. I don’t need a critic to tell me so.