Derek and The Dominos formed after working on George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass. After that, they played a lot of different small clubs all over Europe. They made the album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida. It’s there where Clapton met Duane Allman and a little later invited him to join them. Duane ended up turning Eric down because he believed in the Allman Brothers and he built them from the ground up. Eric was one of his guitar guys so it had to be a hard choice for him.
Clapton first heard about Allman when listening to Wilson Pickett’s version of Hey Jude for the first time and heard his guitar playing at the end of the song. He called up either Ahmet Ertegun or Tom Dowd and asked who was that guitar player? Eric has said that he has never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record. In 1970, Eric Clapton was experiencing emotional anguish over George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd. He recounts writing the song for Boyd after she asked him to get her a pair of bell-bottom jeans while he visited the US.
Clapton repackaged this album and the first thing he did was to ask his attorneys…what is Bobby Whitlock going to get out of this? Bobby played keyboards and wrote a lot of the songs with Eric. The attorneys told Eric he would get nothing because he sold all of his rights. He was down at one time and had to sell everything. Eric and his attorneys went to the publishing company and bought back all of Bobby’s rights and handed it over to him without Whitlock even knowing.
Bobby Whitlock: Well, unbeknownst to me, Eric and Michael took their attorneys in to the respective Warner/Chappel and Universal and all the other companies and bought back my rights to my income and restored them and gave them back to me. Out of the blue. So all of my royalties have come back. And now it’s even more so, because it hasn’t been a month-and-a-half ago that I wrote him to explain how ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ came about, and I sent it to Eric and to Michael. Someone had come online and says something about, ‘Is this true that ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ was written about a pair of trousers?’ And I said, Yeah, well, it was that and this girl in France that Eric was seeing for a little while while we were there. I’d forgotten about Pattie [Boyd – subject of ‘Layla’] asking him about those pants.
Bobby Whitlock: “Eric met this girl, she was like a Persian princess or something, and she wore bell bottoms. She was all hung up on him – he gave her a slide that Duane (Allman) had given him and he wrapped it in leather and she wore it around her neck. She didn’t speak a word of English and they had to date through an interpreter. That relationship did not last but a week. He started the song over there, then when we got back to England, we finished it up in his TV room in Hurtwood Edge.” From: https://powerpop.blog/2024/02/04/derek-and-the-dominos-bell-bottom-blues/
