Everyone knows George Harrison and Eric Clapton were close. Their friendship became known to all when it was revealed that Harrison had asked Clapton to play lead guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," using Lucy, the Cherry Red Gibson Les Paul he had gifted to Harrison.
But what's also well known is that their bond was strained when, in the late 1960s, Clapton fell in love with Harrison's wife, the former model and photographer Pattie Boyd.
Boyd was weeks from her 20th birthday when she began dating Harrison, and her beauty and charm were arresting. Clapton harbored a deep and unrequited love for her, which in turn fueled the burning rock track "Layla," recorded by his band Derek and the Dominos in 1970.
But that band’s demise, coupled with his inability to lure Boyd away from Harrison — as well as the death of his friend and former Dominos guitar partner Duane Allman — turned his world inside out.
“When [the Dominos] broke up, I went into that dark place,” he revealed. “I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore.”
Clapton indulged in heroin and largely stayed away from making music for the next two years. But when he finally re-emerged in 1974, he renewed his attempts to win Boyd’s affections. By then she was warming to him, not only thanks to "Layla" but also because her husband was preoccupied with his music and meditation.
To his credit, Harrison had tolerated Clapton's flirtations with his wife for years. In 1970, he had discovered them together one evening at the home of manager Robert Stigwood.
“George came over and demanded, ‘What’s going on?’” she recounted to Rolling Stone. “To my horror, Eric said, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife,’” she continued.
“I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: ‘Well, are you going with him or coming with me?’”
But by 1974, Harrison decided he'd had enough. He challenged Clapton to a duel — not with pistols but with electric guitars, at Harrison’s Friar Park home.
“George handed him a guitar and an amp — as an 18th-century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword — and for two hours, without a word, they dueled,” Boyd recalled in a 2007 interview. “At the end, nothing was said, but the general feeling was that Eric had won.
“He hadn’t allowed himself to get riled or go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar playing was unbeatable.”
Boyd doesn’t say what effect the head-cutting duel had on her feelings for Clapton, but it seems to have helped him win her hand.
In the end, Clapton got his prize. He and Boyd married on March 27, 1979, in Tucson, Arizona. Remarkably, the following May 19, when the couple threw a reception for friends in England who had been unable to attend the wedding, Harrison showed up, as did former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
Clapton and Boyd split in 1987 and officially divorced in 1989. On reflection, Boyd says his love for her was driven in part by his competition with Harrison.
“Eric just wanted what George had,” she concluded
Earlier this year, a vintage Gibson acoustic guitar owned by the two musicians — and fittingly named Pattie — sold on Reverb for just shy of $1 million.
