Wood had "sort of a warped rock star wife swap" in which he had an affair with Boyd and Harrison had an affair with Wood's first wife, Krissie Findley. "Mystifies Me" was on Wood's solo record I've Got My Own Album to Do, while he was still a member of the band Faces, and was released one year before he joined the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger, along with George Harrison, helped with some of the writing and performing). RONNIE WOOD // "MYSTIFIES ME" (1974) AND "BREATHE ON ME" (1975) Boyd went home to Harrison, at least on that day. Boyd wrote that it was "the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard" and noted that Clapton had identified with Majnun and was determined to know how she felt.
Clapton secretly met with Boyd one afternoon in a South Kensington flat and played the song for her off of his tape machine.
A mutual friend gave copies to both Clapton and Boyd. The name "Layla" came from the fifth-century Arabian poem-turned-book The Story of Layla and Majnun, adapted by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. DEREK AND THE DOMINOS // "LAYLA" (1970)Ĭlapton used Derek and the Dominos' lone studio album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, as a more than 77-minute declaration of love to Pattie Boyd Harrison. Lennon used a shotgun shell as his slide when he played the lap steel guitar on this song. "'For You Blue' is a simple 12-bar song following all the normal 12-bar principles, except that it's happy-go-lucky!" Still, it's widely considered to be about Boyd. Harrison would, predictably, only have one sentence to say about his Let It Be contribution. In 1980, Harrison said that he had first written "Something" on the piano during the making of The Beatles (a.k.a. Her favorite version was George's, when he played it for her in their kitchen. However Harrison, according to Boyd, said "Something" was about her in a "matter-of-fact way." In her memoir, Wonderful Tonight, Boyd also revealed that Harrison's favorite cover of the song-of which there are hundreds- was James Brown's. Harrison grew as a songwriter between Help! and 1969's Abbey Road, during which his tunes were clearly about police ("Piggies"), the government ("Think For Yourself", "Taxman"), or generally about the human condition (of "I Want to Tell You," Harrison said that it was about "the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit."). "I Need You" was only the second song written by Harrison to make it onto a Beatles album, which in this case was 1965's Help! Notably, during the Februrecording session, Ringo Starr played on the back of an acoustic guitar while John Lennon played the snare drum on beats two and four throughout the track.
But the string of hits that Boyd inspired are still some of the most iconic songs in music history. Weston, as far as anyone knows, is neither a songwriter nor an instrumentalist. The couple divorced a decade later, and in 2015, Boyd married for a third time-to property developer Rod Weston, whom she had met in the late 1980s. Guitar deity Eric Clapton, one of Harrison's best friends, also fell madly in love with Boyd, and wrote much of Derek and the Dominos' 1970 album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, about Boyd and his forbidden love.īoyd and Harrison eventually divorced in 1977, but not before she had a brief fling with future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. In 1979, Clapton got his Layla when he and Boyd married, though even that didn't last. Harrison and Boyd married two years later, but the beloved Beatle wasn't the only iconic rock star who was vying for Boyd's attention, and putting pen to paper to craft songs about her.
Though she had just a single word of dialogue-" Prisoners?"-it was the role that changed her life, as it was on the set of that classic Beatles movie that she met George Harrison, and began a journey that would lead to her becoming one of the most important muses in rock and roll history. Pattie Boyd was working as a model and actress in the early 1960s when she was cast as a schoolgirl in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964).