Why is it that loving and losing seems to be a birthright claimed solely by the young?
Why is it that with the insouciance of youth, we seem to think that no one has loved like we have loved. Or suffered the losses we suffered.
That none before us, nor after us, will have loved as splendidly as we have. That none have would bleed for love, die for it as we would.
Everything, everything is in the moment, and we must hurry, for nothing is as heedless, imperious, indomitable as youth.
But we forget that loving and losing is a birthright that has been claimed before us. And will be claimed again and again and again.
Perhaps we cannot fathom how passion could possibly lurk behind a visage lined and and no longer young. Perhaps we think love flees upon first sight of wrinkles and infirmities. We find it hard to imagine the young as anything but young, and the old as….decrepit and beyond being consumed by passion?
That one of the greatest love songs of our time was written by a man many would now judge to be a father, if not a grandfather in years is…unexpected?
Eric Clapton’s Layla was a paean to the desperate love he felt for Patty Boyd, wife of his friend and collaborator, Beatles guitarist George Harrison.
It, in turn, was inspired by a love even longer in the making. In the 12th century, Persian poet Nezami chronicled the obsessive love shared by, and the tragic end befalling the lovers Leyli and Madjnun.
Thus, in 1970, Layla was born.
This song that I rarely go a week without playing, I thought was dedicated to the beloved (if somewhat capricious) light of his life.
Instead, it is a desperate outpouring of longing for another man’s wife. And not just any other man, but a man whom he counted as a friend, a colleague and a contemporary. And depending on whom you choose to believe, Clapton either pined after Boyd for a decade or more in the periphery of her presence, or coveted her openly with the assent of her husband and his friend.
And, when he finally claimed and married the woman whom Layla was written for, their ending was perhaps a little more prosaic, but no less tragic then that of Leyli and Madjnun. Because he had and held his Layla not for long before he left her. For another woman. For the escape of the bottle. For the allure offered by drugs. And for yet another woman. And another and another.
So here I was, thinking that Clapton had sweetly written and dedicated this song to his one and only love, his first love, his Layla. Instead, the provenance of this song is steeped in (roiling) passion, (foiled) desire, (probable) adultery and (temporarily) unrequited longing.
I cannot seem to reconcile this Clapton to the one I thought I knew. The Clapton who just turned 61. The Clapton who wept as he performed Tears In Heaven, yet another song that chronicled yet another point in his life. The Clapton of wire-rimmed glasses and salt-and-pepper hair, looking for all the world like a fuddy-duddy academic, part of The Establishment. The Clapton with the scraggly beard and unaccountable fondness for cowboy shirts.
So just beneath one’s exterior, no matter how innocuous, does a creature of wicked passion lurk?
