For most of us, three’s a crowd. But for Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry a complicated love life has led to many great songs.
Doomed love provides the backbone for the vast majority of songs in the rock and pop. But what about when relationships involve more than one person? Pattie Boyd has announced that she is to auction the letters from her relationships with Eric Clapton and George Harrison, claiming that she still finds them heartbreaking to read.
George Harrison, Pattie Boyd & Eric Clapton
It's one of the most famous classic rock songs of all time, a lovelorn ode to the wife of a good friend. "Layla" was written by guitar legend Eric Clapton while he was playing with Derek and the Dominos, a plea to Pattie Boyd, then wife of another musical icon: George Harrison. Truth be told, the Beatles guitarist and his wife were going through a rough patch, and the song was a perfect way for Clapton to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. "Layla" did its job, and Clapton would also be inspired by Boyd for the track "Wonderful Tonight," although the couple would eventually divorce by the late eighties.
Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards
Pallenberg and Jones quickly became an item. Or, as she later recalled, “I decided to kidnap Brian. Brian seemed sexually the most flexible.” By 1967 they were one of the hottest couples in London, but their drug use took a toll on the relationship. Jones was prone to jealous rages that often turned violent.
“For days afterwards, I’d have lumps and bruises all over me. In his tantrums he would throw things at me, whatever he could pick up lamps, clocks, chairs, a plate of food.
It was during this emotional maelstrom that Jones' bandmate Keith Richards moved into the South Kensington home he shared with Pallenberg. Richards also found himself drawn to the enigmatic model’s worldly nature. “She knew everything and she could say it in five languages,” he once marveled. “She scared the pants off me!”
That March, the threesome decided to make a trip to Morocco, where Jones had previously fallen in love with the music, food and laid back lifestyle. Unfortunately, on this trip, Richards fell in love Pallenberg. “We went by car, a Bentley with a driver, and Brian got sick and ended up in the hospital,” she remembered. “He had asthma. He was very sickly, fragile. So Keith and I drove on and left him there, and that was when we had a physical relationship.” Richards says the affair began in the backseat of his luxury car as it cruised through southern Europe. “I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid with Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things.”
Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood
The personal relationships within the band began to crumble. Buckingham and Nicks split up by 1976, as did bassist John McVie and his wife, keyboardist Christine McVie. Fleetwood had it comparitively easy by not being romantically entwined with anyone in the band, but his own marriage to Jenny Boyd (sister of Pattie, another entry on this list) was foundering.
In the midst of this personal turmoil—and a blizzard of cocaine—Fleetwood Mac recorded their 1977 blockbuster, Rumours. The thinly disguised references to their romantic tribulations turned the album into something of a musical soap opera, and it became one of the highest selling records of the decade.
As the band hit the road to promote Rumours, Fleetwood and Nicks began a furtive affair. "Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen," Nicks later told Uncut magazine. "Everybody was angry, because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children.
I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So it couldn't possibly work out. And it didn't. I just couldn't." Inevitably, their romance was doomed from the start. Fearing that it "would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac" if they continued, the pair agreed to stop seeing each other. Fleetwood eventually began a relationship with Nicks' best friend, Sara Recor, whom he married in 1988.
Grace Slick & The Jefferson Airplane
Some bands fight, others make love: The Jefferson Airplane did both. Their co-lead singers, Marty Balin and Grace Slick never quite got along, with the former once declaring, "whoever slept with Grace had the power in the band." Grace, for her part, embraced the open sexual politics of the 1960s with a vengeance, and had relationships with the band's drummer Spencer Dryden and bassist Jack Casady. Eventually, Slick would have a child with Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, China, and go on to work with various ex-band members with offshoot projects like Starship and Jefferson Starship, all the while remaining a counterculture icon and fashion plate.
Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love & Billy Corgan
Who said the nineties were all about feeling alienated and disaffected? The love that bloomed in the grunge scene between Hole songwriter Courtney Love and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain has been well documented, but perhaps less known is Love's boyfriend prior to hooking up with the future musical icon. Love had actually been dating Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan for a time. Some sources even say Courtney met Kurt for the first time after a Pumpkins show, but the details of their first meeting are fuzzy. Corgan reportedly didn't take to being dumped very well, however, and even allegedly turned down some high profile touring opportunities in order to lick his emotional wounds and avoid the new, happy couple.
David Crosby, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash
Full disclosure, we're going to be discussing a lot of classic rock relationships for this list, with many of our entries here being firmly ensconced within that period of free love and sexual freedom. Case in point? The relatively easy-going affairs folk icon Joni Mitchell had with CSNY members David Crosby and Graham Nash. Mitchell met Crosby not long after the latter left the formative psychedelic rockers The Byrds, and the pair were an item briefly prior to the formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash. Mitchell would date Crosby's bandmate Graham Nash for a significantly longer period of time, with both penning songs about each other and the time they spent living under the same roof. Not a lot of jealousy between the guys, it seems.
Crosby's attraction to Mitchell was more than just musical, and he soon fell in love with the beautiful and supremely talented singer. They spent a spell living together after she moved out to California, and his ballad “Guinnevere" was partially inspired by her ("It might be my best song," he told Rolling Stone in 2008). “It was very easy to love her, but turbulent," he remembered. "Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer.” According to Mitchell herself, they were "never an item," apart from a short affair soon after meeting in Florida.
Todd Rundgreen, Bebe Buell, Steven Tyler
Model Bebe Buell served as a muse to a number of iconic musicians in the '70s, including Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. But her longterm, hot-and-cold relationship with rock-pop wizard Todd Rundgren was disrupted by an affair with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler in the middle of the decade. She unexpectedly became pregnant with Tyler's baby, Liv, who was born in July 1977. Due to Tyler's extensive drug use, Buell claimed that the child was actually Rundgren's. Even after they parted ways in 1979, Rundgren carefully maintained the "white lie" that he was Liv's father.
When Liv was 8 years old, she met Tyler and noticed a strong physical resemblance between herself and his daughter, Mia. She mentioned this to Buell, who finally revealed the truth about her biological father. After changing her name to Liv Tyler, father and daughter began to forge a relationship. In 1993, she appeared In her father's music video for "Crazy" along with Alicia Silverstone.
