Steve Sisolak, governor of Nevada, recently scolded citizens of his state. Why, only irresponsible behavior can account for a rise in “cases” there!
So he’s teling Nevadans that they have two weeks to get things under control.
He warned, “I’m not going to come back in two weeks and say I’m going to give you another chance.”
And then, three days later, Governor Sisolak himself tested positive for COVID-19.
Should we treat him like he’s 7 and scold him for his irresponsible behavior, the way he just did to his citizens?
The governor was forced to admit: “You can take all the precautions that are possible and you can still contract the virus. I don’t know how I got it.”
As Alex Berenson says, virus gonna virus.
The current state of lockdown “science” appears to be: we have no idea what we’re doing, but if something brings people pleasure we should probably limit or prohibit it, and if something causes great inconvenience or even pain, we should probably do that.
An anonymous professor who posts on Twitter about the virus just presented this graph for our consideration. It’s a plot of COVID deaths in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Those states have adopted very different approaches to the virus. And yet, somehow, they more or less track each other anyway:
Virus gonna virus.
Yesterday former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan posted the following:
“How did we catch it? I don’t know. We wore masks. We socially distanced. We avoided crowds. We haven’t had people in our house.”
Virus gonna virus.
We can either accept this, and take steps to protect those among us who are most at risk while others resume the one life they are given, or we can destroy our social fabric.
Meanwhile, we have families and friendships being torn apart over all this. You’re a bad person if you reject the propaganda. Why, you don’t care about saving lives! You’re “selfish”!
Joe Biden’s first speech as president elect is being hailed as a long-overdue call to overcome division. “President-elect Joe Biden seeks to unite nation with victory speech,” read the CNN headline the next day. The New York Times summed up: “Mr. Biden renewed his promise to be a president for all Americans in a polarized time.”
It is not just the left-leaning press taking at face value Biden’s calls to “put away the harsh rhetoric.” Conservative pundits are doing so as well. Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn called the speech “Lincolnesque.” Biden’s unity message was “exactly what the country needed to hear,” McGurn wrote. Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro found the speech so pollyannish in its call for reconciliation as to be risible.
And yet Biden’s actual remarks were anything but unifying. Among the “great battles of our time” that Biden has now been called to fight, he said, was the still unaccomplished goal of “root[ing] out systemic racism in this country.” That “systemic racism” is presumably underwritten by millions of white Americans who continue to prevent “racial justice,” in Biden’s words. They are the ones who represent what Biden called “our darkest impulses,” locked in “constant battle” with our “better angels.” It was time—finally—for those better angels to prevail, Biden said.
This indictment of white Americans was a constant theme during the Democratic presidential primaries. In an August 2019 press briefing, Biden claimed that racism was a “white man’s problem visited on people of color.” “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said. In a January 2019 speech, Biden announced: “We have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists.” On Friday, November 6, the day before the press declared Biden the president elect, he was still hammering the racism theme. He had a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism,” he announced, prefiguring his victory speech the next day.
Throughout the election season, the Democratic contenders and mainstream media paired denunciations of white Americans’ racism with the claim that Donald Trump was the racially divisive candidate. But in those now-iconic examples of Trump’s alleged racism, the president was referring to attitudes and behaviors that he deemed anti-social or anti-American. The few times Trump used explicit racial categories were dwarfed by the constant and unapologetically anti-white statements coming from the press, the Democratic field and academic opinion writers.
And yet they got away with it. Calling whites racist is not racially divisive; referring to “law and order” apparently is. This conundrum is possible because elite whites have internalized the idea of their own racism. Decades of ever more exacting civil rights legislation and litigation, billions of dollars of transfer payments and the deployment of racial preferences throughout business and academia matter little to this conceit. It is now simply assumed that whites will be accused of racism and that they will meekly hang their heads and pack themselves off to white privilege remediations. If the tables were turned, if there were routine denunciations of black racism, there would be an uproar.
Perhaps the targets of the racism accusation don’t take it personally. If the problem is “systemic,” then any given individual seems absolved from responsibility for the fact that racial justice in America allegedly remains so unrealized. After all, the very term “systemic racism” was coined to overcome the fact that it is hard to find actual individuals in positions of even moderate power who discriminate on the basis of race. The reality is the opposite. It is hard to find an institution today that does not go out of its way to prefer minority groups, if at all possible.
But while the “systemic racism” conceit may seem to take individuals out of the equation, they are in fact essential to the idea. The character of our institutions does not arise in a vacuum; those institutions are sustained by individuals. And in any case, the connection between the system and the individuals within it is made often and explicitly enough (“White people…were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump…. Many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists”; the fact that 71 million people voted for Donald Trump despite his “racism” should be a “cause for profound and pervasive grief“).
The Trump vote in part represented a rebellion against this double standard: accusing whites of racial sins they no longer commit is not “divisive,” but criticizing actual behavior like rioting or drive-by shootings is. That rebellion was inarticulate and inchoate, and has been sidelined for now. The operating principle of the next administration will be America’s systemic racism, a “dark impulse” that will require ever more robust government measures to counteract. And if history is any guide, there will be little pushback.
Did you enjoy the days at home from mid-March to May? The 22 million lost jobs, the shuttered storefronts, the neighborhood shops out of business, the kids unable to attend school, and the near economic depression? Well, congratulations, a reprise may be coming your way if Joe Biden heeds his Covid-19 advisory team.
We’ve told you about Ezekiel Emanuel, the advisory committee member who wanted new lockdowns during the summer flare-up in the Sunbelt states. Lucky for the country that his only power then was appearing on MSNBC.
Then there’s Michael Osterholm, also a member of the Biden Covid committee, who now wants a new nationwide lockdown for as many as six weeks. Dr. Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. CNBC quoted him as suggesting that we are about to enter “Covid hell” and the government should lock everyone up as we await a vaccine.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” Dr. Osterholm said, according to Yahoo Finance. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
Lockdowns are the good doctor’s household remedy. In August he and Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari argued for harsher lockdowns. “The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” the duo wrote in the New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
Did they learn anything from the spring and events since? Lockdowns don’t crush the virus. They merely delay its spread until the lockdowns end. Targeted restrictions on people and businesses may be needed in an emergency in some locations to prevent hospitals from being overrun—though even then the government can surge medical resources, as is now happening in El Paso.
The costs of severe lockdowns are horrendous. The U.S. is still recovering from the spring catastrophe when the jobless rate surged in two months to 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression. Tens of thousands of businesses closed and many will never reopen.
The human cost is even worse. A quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds have reported suicidal thoughts and increased substance abuse. Half of them reported symptoms consistent with a depressive disorder, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey in June. Some 13% of Americans said they started or increased substance use to cope with the pandemic.
Dr. Osterholm seems to think all of this harm can be alleviated if the government writes another giant check. But the feds have already appropriated nearly $3 trillion, the Federal Reserve is adding hundreds of billions, and the federal debt is now 100% of GDP and rising. Will $3 trillion more do it, or will we need $10 trillion?
***
This awful advice arrives as the economy continues to recover from the first shutdowns. Third-quarter growth was a record 33.1% and the fourth quarter has started strong. Continuing jobless claims fell again in Thursday’s weekly report by another 436,000, and new claims by 48,000. The U.S. has recovered more than half of the jobs it lost, and the jobless rate has fallen to 6.9%. Where would we be now if we’d have taken Dr. Osterholm’s advice in August, or Dr. Emanuel’s in June?
Covid cases are accelerating, to a worrying degree in some places. Hospitalizations are rising, and deaths will follow, though many fewer per infection than in the spring thanks to clinical advances in treating the disease. But we should have learned by now that the best response to these surges is to protect the vulnerable, maintain social-distance protocols and wear masks when in close quarters indoors while getting on as much as possible with normal life, education and commerce.
The Biden team would have more credibility on lockdowns if they and Mr. Biden were more consistent in their Covid admonitions. But they stayed silent about last weekend’s public celebrations over Mr. Biden’s declaration of victory, and we don’t recall their warnings during the summer racial-justice protests. No wonder so many Americans ignore Covid warnings when they see this double standard.
The problem with Mr. Biden’s advisory committee is that its members are part of the conformist Covid clerisy who think that lockdowns dictated from on high are good for the little people. He ought to diversify his advice by calling in the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration on the alternative policy of “focused protection.”
On current trend Mr. Biden will inherit a recovering economy and a pipeline of better Covid therapies and likely vaccines. His job will be to extend this progress, not to send the country back into the despond of April. If he does return to lockdowns, he’ll own the economic and public-health consequences.
Since a new Billboard Hot 100 list came out today, this was the number one single six days later, when John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy traveled to Dallas.
The number one album today in 1968 was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland”:
Michigan’s report cards continue to regress this season.
While the Wolverines struggled against Michigan State and Indiana the previous two weeks, Saturday’s 49-11 loss against Wisconsin feels like the nadir of the season and possibly Jim Harbaugh’s tenure at Michigan.
Here are our grades for the Wolverines against the Badgers.
Quarterback
Joe Milton’s first two pass attempts were both intercepted, putting the Wolverines in a hole earlier. While he may earn a pass on the first one after it deflected off tight end Nick Eubank’s hands, there is no excuse for the second one. He also missed a wide-open Blake Corum on a wheel route in the second quarter that would be been a sure touchdown that could have gave Michigan some life. He finished 9 of 19 passing for just 98 yards before being pulled in the third quarter. Redshirt freshman Cade McNamara was brilliant on his first drive, delivering three dime throws on a 75-yard touchdown drive, but he completed just 1 of 4 passes after that for zero yards. It appears the Wolverines might have a quarterback battle on their hands. Grade: F
Offensive line
Michigan is badly missing its starting tackles Jalen Mayfield and Ryan Hayes. The Wolverines just aren’t getting any push up front, contributing to the team’s stagnant offense. Grade: F.
Running backs
Michigan was held to under 50 yards rushing for a second straight game and is getting no explosive plays from the group right now. Hassan Haskins, Michigan’s leading rusher heading into Saturday, received just one carry for 6 yards. True freshman Blake Corum gained just 5 yards on seven attempts, while Zach Charbbonet had three carries for 21 years, including a team-best 14-yarder. Averaging 2.5 yards a carry isn’t going to get it done. Grade: F.
Wide receivers/tight ends
The group isn’t getting enough separation down field to give the quarterbacks some help. Michigan needs someone outside of Ronnie Bell to emerge as a consistent threat. Bell was the only pass-catcher with more than two receptions Saturday. Grade: F.
Defensive line
The Wolverines were missing starting ends Aidan Hutchinson and Kwity Paye Saturday, and it showed. They moved Carlo Kemp outside and rotated several players along the line, but they couldn’t find a combination that was effective. Kemp did record the team’s first sack in three games, but Michigan didn’t register any quarterback hurries against the Badgers. They also were gashed for 341 yards on the ground. Grade: F.
Linebackers
Michigan had no answer for Wisconsin’s jet sweeps as linebackers struggled from sideline to sideline. Wide receiver Danny Davis even rushed for 65 yards and a score on seven carries. And the Badgers’ dominant rushing attack was without two of their top running backs. Michigan only had two tackles for loss, with one coming from linebacker Cam McGrone. Grade: F
Secondary
With its run game working, Wisconsin didn’t need to attack Michigan’s inexperienced secondary down field. Graham Mertz only went to the air 22 times, completing 12 passes for 127 yards and two scores. Michigan’s defensive backs weren’t at fault for either of the two passing touchdowns, so that’s minor progress. The team also had just one pass interference penalty Saturday, which was called on redshirt freshman cornerback D.J. Turner, who replaced the injured Gemon Green for a few plays in the second quarter. Grade: C-
Special teams
Quinn Nordin nailed a 46-yard field goal on his only attempt and he is now 2 for 2 this season. The team also had a few solid kick returns. Giles Jackson had two for 66 yards, including a 43-yarder, while Corum had two for 49, including a 32-yarder. However, Christian Turner had a costly roughing the kicker penalty on a Wisconsin punt attempt. Michigan was about to get the ball back late in the third quarter after just scoring to make it a 35-11 game. Grade: B-.
Coaching
The Wolverines have regressed every week this season, reaching a new low Saturday. Their 28-0 halftime deficit was their largest ever at Michigan Stadium as they were dominated on both sides of the ball. The confidence and energy from the players just isn’t there on a consistent basis, and part of that falls on the coaching staff. Grade: F
The losses are snowballing for Michigan, which had a jumble of mistakes against Wisconsin as the Wolverines continue to reach new depths.
The Wolverines sunk quickly in the first half against Wisconsin, a team that had missed the last two games because of COVID-19 issues and played without a handful of starters Saturday night at Michigan Stadium, and could never climb its way from a deep, deep hole.
Just as was the case last year when the Badgers battered Michigan in the Big Ten opener, they took a 28-0 lead into halftime. Two of the Badgers’ touchdowns came off interceptions of first-year starting quarterback Joe Milton in their dominating 49-11 victory. Milton was intercepted on the Wolverines’ first offensive play of the game when it deflected off the hands of tight end Nick Eubanks.
Michigan is 1-3 for the first time since 1967 when Bump Elliott was coach, having lost three straight, to Michigan State, Indiana and Wisconsin, and is 0-2 at home in this abbreviated Big Ten-only season.
Jim Harbaugh, in his sixth season coaching the Wolverines, did not mince words after the game.
“We were thoroughly beaten in every phase and didn’t really do anything well,” Harbaugh said. “Did not play good, did not coach good. Not in a good place with the execution, not in a good place adjusting and what we were doing schematically. Not in a good place as a football team right now and that falls on me.
“And gotta get after really going back to basics and everything that we do and look at everything we’re doing. Everybody, everybody’s gotta do better and as I said, I’m at the front of the line with accountability.”
If you thought Saturday was the night Michigan football would turn its season around, you are in for a treat.
Joe Milton threw interceptions on his first two pass attempts, and Wisconsin ran rampant over Don Brown’s defense en route to a 28-0 halftime lead at a quiet Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.
It was so bad, “Rich Rod” was trending on Twitter, with fans wondering if the former Michigan coach who went 15-22 in three season would do a better job than Harbaugh.
The Wolverines’ first four possessions gained six yards, with the struggling Milton going 0-for-4 passing:
Wisconsin had outgained Michigan, 189-6, after its fourth touchdown.
Milton’s second pick was one of the most egregious you’ll see, when he appeared not to see the Wisconsin linebacker directly in the throwing lane and threw it right to him.
Defensively, Michigan had no answer for Wisconsin’s offense, which ran some misdirection plays to create space and used play-action to open up the defense.
The Badgers’ fourth touchdown was against a Michigan defense that had no effort as the seas parted for an easy 10-yard run for Nakia Watson, his second touchdown of the half.
“Just demoralizing,” ESPN color commentator Kirk Herbstreit said after the play. “I can’t believe this is the Big House and we’re watching Michigan right now down 28. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“It’s a good thing the Big House is the empty house. There would be deafening boos right now,” play-by-play man Chris Fowler said.
And when Michigan finally moved the ball on its fifth possession, Milton was stuffed on fourth-and-goal at the 1 on a quarterback keeper Wisconsin was ready for.
The Freep’s Rainer Sabin pours salt into the wounds:
Hours before Michigan arrived at the lowest point of Jim Harbaugh’s tenure as coach, one of the Wolverines’ old rivals provided an oblique diagnosis of their woes.
On a TV set thousands of miles away from Ann Arbor, former Ohio State coach and current Fox college football analyst Urban Meyer advised that a coach of a struggling team should assume its problems are caused by one of three phenomena: Trust issues among players, selfishness that undermines a collective effort or a dysfunctional environment that spawns entitlement instead of hard work.
As Wisconsin steamrolled Michigan football during a 49-11 rout on a frigid night in Ann Arbor, Harbaugh had to wonder whether a combination of those factors had torpedoed his football team — transforming it from one that was ranked in the preseason to an unsightly mess that is off to its worst start since 1967. The Wolverines, after all, looked discombobulated, lifeless and uncompetitive throughout a disastrous performance that left Harbaugh crestfallen.
“Not in a good place as a football team right now and that falls on me,” he said.
The week before, following a loss to Indiana that was devastating in a different way, Harbaugh tried to sell the idea that the Wolverines were nearing the point of playing well.
But by the end of Saturday night, he had scrapped that rationale and simply accepted the harsh reality.
“Every part is not close to where it should be,” he confessed. “Stopping the run. Stopping the pass. Running the football offensively. Throwing in the passing game. All things are thoroughly not where they need to be in terms of execution, so that starts with me. It starts with our coaches and also every person here.”
Harbaugh promised there would be fixes and that everything would be evaluated. He told reporters Michigan would go “back to the basics” and “try to win by all means necessary.” Harbaugh vowed the Wolverines would reexamine the schemes, the players and the performance of all involved.
Yet Harbaugh acknowledged he doesn’t have a magic potion to cure the Wolverines.
The coach who returned to Ann Arbor with the reputation as a sorcerer of X’s-and-O’s seemed at a loss for answers.
Instead, he was the one asking questions.
“If someone is not executing it, why is that?” he wondered aloud. “Are we communicating? Are we coaching it well enough?”
It was strange to hear Harbaugh like this. For so long, he has been so self-assured — even cocky. In the face of previous defeats, he often exuded confidence and defiance as if he knew the pain was temporary and success was just around the corner.
But after he watched Wisconsin roll through Michigan’s front seven to gain 341 yards rushing, after he saw his starting quarterback Joe Milton throw interceptions on his first two pass attempts, after he witnessed the Wolverines trail the Badgers by four touchdowns at halftime for the second straight year, he simply appeared defeated.
He knows there is no easy solution because he admits that everything is on the table.
“Everything we do is going to aim at improvement,” he said. “Anything we can identify that we can do better.”
The problems, though, are systemic. A wave of transfers has depleted depth and diminished the talent pool. The approach to practice and preparation has been questioned by multiple people inside the program, including offensive coordinator Josh Gattis and receiver Giles Jackson. The coaching — from evaluation of the roster to the play-calling — has also invited skepticism. The culture of Harbaugh’s organization that has allowed complacency to seep in and unwarranted arrogance to mushroom is now under the microscope.
In essence, Harbaugh’s Wolverines have become the quintessential example of the broken team Meyer described on Fox’s pregame show.
The former Ohio State coach saw what had happened to Michigan before Harbaugh did.
Derek & the Dominos’ legendary 2-LP set, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, is being released as a 4-LP vinyl box set and 2-CD edition for its 50th anniversary. The title, originally released on November 9, 1970, has been expanded to include bonus material not previously available on vinyl. The new editions arrive Nov. 13 via UMe/Polydor. The original has been given the “Half-Speed Mastered” treatment by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
Derek & the Dominos’ legendary 2-LP set, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, is being released as a 4-LP vinyl box set and 2-CD edition for its 50th anniversary. The title, originally released on November 9, 1970, has been expanded to include bonus material not previously available on vinyl. The new editions arrive Nov. 13 via UMe/Polydor. The original has been given the “Half-Speed Mastered” treatment by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
From the September 22 announcement: The album is notably known for its title track, a classic rock evergreen, which features the dual wailing guitars of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman. Alongside this are a further two LPs of bonus material some of which has not previously been released on vinyl. All the bonus material across all of LP3 and LP4 is mastered normally (so is not half-speed mastered). The LP set also includes a 12×12 book of sleeve notes taken from the 40th Anniversary Edition.
In 1970, following the break-up of Blind Faith and Clapton’s departure from Delaney & Bonnie, Derek & the Dominos initially formed in the spring of that year. The group comprised Clapton on guitar and vocals alongside three other former members of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends: Bobby Whitlock on keyboards, Carl Radle on bass and Jim Gordon on drums. Derek & the Dominos played their first concert at London’s Lyceum Ballroom on June 14, 1970 as part of a U.K. summer tour. During late August to early October they recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, with the Allman Brothers’ guitarist Duane Allman sitting in, before returning to a tour of the U.K. and the U.S. until the end of the year. Shortly thereafter the group disbanded but their short time together offered up one of the rock canon’s most enduring albums of all time.
Clapton’s first work with the Beatles was …
The first noticeable thing the Dominos did was to play on George Harrison’s first solo album, “All Things Must Pass.”
All four Dominos attended an Allman Brothers Band concert in Miami Aug. 26, 1970. Afterward Clapton invited the band, including guitar player Duane Allman, back to his recording studio for an all-night jam session.
Allman then asked Clapton to watch their recording session. Clapton said if you’re going to watch, you’re going to play.
And play they did, starting with one of the most famous opens in rock history.
That guitar lesson prompted this funny comment (you decide if it’s based in reality):
I have an electric guitar and a crush on my friend Layla. I will do what I must…
Edit: I’m almost done learning the intro.I think I’m gonna play it on her birthday
Edit 2: She got a boyfriend before I even had the chance to play the song.But not everything is lost
Edit 3: They broke up! I’m not sure how to feel about that…. I’m taking some guitar classes too. I need to speed up my learning, school is getting hard.
“Layla” is one of the more interesting figures in rock history who wasn’t a performer — Pattie Boyd, who was married to Beatle George Harrison when Clapton met them. Harrison and Boyd met on the set of the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night.” Boyd acted — to be precise, one word: “Prisoners?”
She was the ex-wife of his friend George Harrison, and inspiration for the songs “Something,” “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight.”
Clapton and Harrison became close friends in the ’60s, at which time Clapton became infatuated with Boyd, who continually rebuffed his advances. But Clapton remained deeply in love with her. Many of the songs on Derek and the Dominos‘ 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (especially the scorching title track) were thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of his feelings for her. Unfortunately, the album didn’t have the effect Clapton intended, and he fell into a three-year, heroin-induced isolation.
Before I married Mrs. Presteblog I had several romantic breakups. As depressed as I was after some of them, I never fell into three-year heroin-induced isolation.
This does make me wonder what goes through Clapton’s mind every time he plays this, in the same way I kind of wonder what goes through the mind of James Pankow, trombone player for Chicago, who wrote “Ballet for a Girl from Buchannon” attempting (and failing) to get his ex-fiance back.
Back to Boyd and her entanglements:
Harrison and Boyd were splitting up by 1974, right around the time Clapton was kicking heroin. With Harrison’s blessing, she ran into Clapton’s arms. Five years later, they tied the knot.
That was after Boyd’s fling with guitarist Ron Wood of The Faces (with Rod Stewart) and eventually The Rolling Stones provided further musical inspiration.
Clapton 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. The name “Layla” came from the fifth-century Arabian poem-turned-book The Story of Layla and Majnun, adapted by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. A mutual friend gave copies to both Clapton and Boyd. It was about forbidden love. Clapton secretly met with Boyd one afternoon in a South Kensington flat and played the song for her off of his tape machine. 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. Boyd went home to Harrison, at least on that day.
Layla is actually a two-part song. Gordon is credited for writing the piano finish, although others credit Rita Coolidge, one of Delaney and Bonnie’s “Friends” before her solo career.
Yes, there is a song on the album that doesn’t appear to have been inspired by Boyd.
Back to Clapton and Boyd:
Two months into the marriage, the newlyweds held a reception for their friends in Clapton’s garden – the same place where Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun.” In attendance were Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
An impromptu jam session among the guests started, which was the closest there had been to a Beatles reunion until the Anthology project in the mid-’90s. John Lennon was not invited to the party due to his long-running immigration issues.
For all the two went through, however, the marriage didn’t last long. Clapton’s drinking problem and infidelity caused them to separate in 1984; they finally divorced in 1988. Pattie Boyd wrote about her marriages in the 2007 memoir Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me.
In a sense the whole story ends on sad notes …
… and not just because of their breakup, which of course inspired more music.
Allman was killed in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Ga., in 1971, shortly after the Allman Brothers released “At Fillmore East.”
Clapton called Allman “the musical brother I never had but wished I did.” (If you haven’t read Clapton’s autobiography, you should, particularly if it includes the CD.)
Gordon, meanwhile, performed on other albums …
… but then started hearing voices, and stopped sleeping or playing drums. Doctors misdiagnosed his mental illness as alcoholism. Then, on June 3, 1983 (my 18th birthday, for those who care), Gordon attacked his 72-year-old mother with a hammer and killed her with a butcher knife. Only then was Gordon diagnosed with schizophrenia. Gordon was convicted of murder and sentenced to 16 years to life imprisonment. He died in 2023.
Clapton, meanwhile, became a father. His son, Conor, was 4 when he fell out of an open window 53 stories to his death at his father’s New York apartment.
That horror inspired “Tears in Heaven” …
… from Clapton’s “Unplugged” album, which includes unplugged Layla:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 