In late 1970, singer Rita Coolidge, who had graduated from Florida State University three years earlier, was having her promotional photos taken for her upcoming, self-titled debut album on A&M Records. The photographer turned on the radio and that’s when she heard Layla by Derek and the Dominos for the first time.
When the song, which would go on to become a classic-rock standard, got to the signature piano coda, Coolidge was gobsmacked.
“I realized it was (my song) Time,” Coolidge, 70, said during a recent phone interview with the Tallahassee Democrat.
Time was a tune that she and her former boyfriend, drummer Jim Gordon, had written together and turned into a demo for Eric Clapton, the leader of Derek and the Dominos. Gordon went on to become the drummer for the Dominos.
“I wrote the bridge and all of the melody,” Coolidge said. “He (Gordon) was not much of a songwriter. ... And he wasn’t a great piano player.”
Later, when Coolidge checked the songwriting credits for Layla, she saw that Clapton and Gordon were the only names listed. Clapton wrote the first half of the song about his unrequited love for George Harrison’s wife and Gordon chipped in the Time melody for the second half.
“I called Robert Stigwood, who was Eric’s manager,” Coolidge said. “I said, ‘I left this demo for him and I’m one of the writers for the coda on Layla. I just wanted my name on it. He said, ‘What are you going to do? Go up against Stiggy?’ And he had a huge management company. He was such a (...long pause...) bad guy. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.”
The Grammy Award-winning Coolidge is finally having her full say about Layla — and much more — in her new book Delta Lady: A Memoir, which was published this week. She will read passages from Delta Lady during her visit to the second annual Word of South festival on Saturday.
“I really wanted it (the memoir) to be about the music,” Coolidge said. “It was very cathartic (to write).”
In the book, Coolidge fondly revisits her college days as an art education student in Tallahassee, where she began her musical career.
"I was in a band called RC and the Moonpies . . . you know, RC, like the drink," Coolidge said during her last visit to the Capital City in 2007. "We played rock 'n' roll — Long Tall Texan and songs like that. We played at Sigma Chi frat houses in Tallahassee and Gainesville, or wherever there was a Sigma Chi house that would have us."
After graduation from FSU, Coolidge worked singing jingles at Pepper Records in Memphis before heading to Southern California. Her career got a big boost when she went on the road as a backup singer with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell during the legendary Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour. She appeared singing the hit Superstar in the music documentary of the same name. Russell was inspired to write Delta Lady for Coolidge.
In 1973, during a plane ride from the West Coast to Memphis, Coolidge met a fellow passenger by the name of Kris Kristofferson, the writer of the hit song Me & Bobby McGee. The two set off sparks, got married and became one of the most photographed celebrity couples of the mid-‘70s. Coolidge and Kristofferson appeared as the co-headliners for the FSU Homecoming Pow Wow concert in 1977, the same year she scored a No. 2 pop hit with (Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.
“I just remember it as being amazing to go back to Tallahassee (in ‘77),” Coolidge said. “Instead of playing at the Le Roc Lounge in the Hotel Duval, we were actually in the stadium and there were 10,000 people there. I was overwhelmed with the difference that 10 years made.”
A few years later, Coolidge became part of the James Bond legacy in 1983 by singing the theme song All Time High for the spy flick Octopussy. Even though she and Kristofferson divorced in the early ‘80s, the two remain friends.
Meanwhile, Gordon became mentally disturbed and murdered his mother with a hammer and a butcher knife in 1983. He is still confined to a psychiatric prison in California.
In 2011, Bobby Whitlock, who played keyboards and sang with Derek and the Dominos, backed up Coolidge’s songwriting claims to Layla during an interview with Goldmine magazine.
“(Jim Gordon) is co-thief,” Whitlock said in Goldmine. “Eric wrote the song; (Gordon) didn’t write that melody. That is the melody to a song that Rita Coolidge had written called Time. Booker T and Priscilla (Jones, Coolidge’s sister) had recorded it. (Gordon) ripped off the melody of a song from his girlfriend, Rita Coolidge, and didn’t give her any credit.”
Whitlock also said he is not the primary piano player during the coda: “That’s mostly Jim Gordon. I added support piano on there, because Jim can’t play with any feeling, so I played a part and they added it to it.”
