Are you speaking more to the song's placement or the quality of the song compared to the rest of the album?

I like the song and think it fits the album, there are songs on the album I like less. It's fine but Whitlock doesn't have a great voice. I actually think the whole album is bizarrely sequenced and rarely sit down and listen to it start to finish.

I feel like, as the album became more of a whole artistic concept in the late 1960s (rather than a means to compile more songs), there was a tendency to add a melancholy or oddball coda to albums - like "Her Majesty" on Abbey Road. We talk about the "Layla" coda as its own climax, but they never could have imagined how epic that song would become. Maybe they didn't know what else to do with "Thorn Tree" among so many intense songs, or maybe they were just throwing Whitlock a bone. But yeah, live, TTB probably just couldn't follow "Layla" with and acoustic diddy.

PCB, I think my pal's original question had both of the ideas that you mention combined into one: How did this song make it onto an album that is chock full of stronger stuff, and why have the album end on a lesser note?

Your response makes sense to me. Folks might not have had the awareness back then of album sequence mattering as much, or of the high level of scrutiny we would end up applying to albums we consider classic.

I couldn't disagree more. i think it's brilliant and the perfect ending to the album. It's an album about unrequited love. Clapton always mixes softer with harder material. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It's a beautiful performance of a song that ... I don't know how else to say this, but it always sounded to me like it might be about a boner? I don't know what else that first verse is supposed to mean and that's what explains the metaphor he's using. As for why TTB didn't play it recently - I think they felt it would've been an anticlimax. It's hard to play a very quiet song like that in concert, even more so at a giant festival show where it would've come at the end of a big concert with a 14-piece band.

From Songfacts:

Whitlock: "I was living at The Plantation in the valley - you remember the shootout at The Plantation in the Leon Russell song. I was living there with Indian Head Davis and Chuck Blackwell and Jimmy Constantine - there were about 13 of us in this house in Sherman Oaks in the valley. I had a little dog and a little cat. One guy told me to get rid of my dog and cat because there wasn't room. I took my cat out to Delaney's house in Hawthorn, and when I got back my little dog was gone. This one guy in the house had taken my dog and done away with it. That was my only friend - this was the first time I had been anywhere outside of Macon, Georgia or the Memphis area. All of this was new to me, and I have an animal thing. I wanted to punch him out, and I thought, 'No, you can't do that,' so I went to my bedroom and sat down. I was thinking about a snake in the grass and some other ideas and I thought, 'He's the thorn tree in my garden.' I had this beautiful garden built in my consciousness where I was safe and secure with my little dog and my cat, and there's this thorn tree - that would be the guy who had my little dog put away. I wrote the song and it just came out of me. I hadn't even put it on paper, and I went out of my bedroom and knocked on his door. I said, 'Come here, I want to play you something.' We sat down at the table in the kitchen and I played him that song. He said, 'Wow, Bobby, that's beautiful.' I said, 'You're the thorn tree. There's going to come a day when I have the opportunity to record this song, and the whole world will know about it. You'll know what you did to me for the rest of your life.' I didn't realize it was going to go on the end of one of the biggest-selling records of all time. That was the furthest thing from my mind."

Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs is a double album. It was already mixed when they went back to tag the piano part on the end of the song "Layla." As they were listening back, the producer, Tom Dowd, realized they had room for one more song. Clapton suggested this, so they recorded it and used it as the last song on the album.

Whitlock told Songfacts: "Eric and Duane and Jim and Carl and myself all got around one microphone. Tom Dowd came out and placed us just so; everybody was a certain distance in and out, and we did it just like that. I was sitting on a bar stool - Eric was to my left, Duane was directly across from me, Carl was to my right and Jim was between Duane and Eric with a little bell. Carl was playing a pedal bass, Duane was on dobro and Eric was playing acoustic guitar with a pick next to me. I was picking with my fingers."

Before he died of Leukemia, Tom Dowd did an interview in Producer magazine where he called this "The Perfect Stereo Recording."

The theme of the album is unrequited love. Says Whitlock, "It's all about love anyway. There is no love of this and not that. There's no measure of it. Whether it's a dog, your mother, dad, brother, sister, your companion, your horse or your neighbor, it is that one thing. It doesn't have a distinction. There's no barrier, it's just one thing that encompasses everything if you stop and think about it."

In 2002, Whitlock and his wife Kim played acoustic versions of this and other songs from the album at shows in the Northeast United States. They got a great response and realized there was a demand for these songs, since they hadn't been played in about 30 years. They formed The Domino Label and released a live album from one of these shows called Other Assorted Love Songs.

Yes in the 1960's most albums were not concept albums filled with material and sequencing of the tracks to paint an entire picture and emotional story similar to a movie or a classical piece by say Mozart.

A hit single or two or three singles is why the album sold well and often some of the songs were mediocre and kinda filler. We need something to have 8 or 9 tracks so let's puts this on it kinda thing.

We know Key To The Highway was an after thought. Tom Dowd arranged from Clapton to see the Allman Brothers and supposedly when Duane noticed Clapton watching from down front, he froze and quit playing for a few moments. Later at the studio in Miami they began jamming with Duane on Key To The Highway and Dowd liked what he was hearing so had the tape machine turned on so that is why the song fades up. They didn't get the start of the jam on tape.

It was never a concept album like say Sergeant Pepper's by the Beatles was it?

But it IS a CLASSIC. Kudos to TTB for doing it. Trying to redo that album or any classic album is risky and likely to fall short much like a remake of Gone With The Wind or Double Indemnity or Good, The Bad and Ugly would be .

I've seen Whitlock's story about the dog before, or another version of it. I'm not saying it isn't true, but I'll say that I have trouble seeing how it relates to the words of the song. Maybe the dog is the girl he misses? I don't know. I do have the sense he's one of those guys who embellishes his history. The bit about him playing the song for the guy who killed his dog and then telling him about it feels like a stretch, but obviously I wasn't there.

Later at the studio in Miami they began jamming with Duane on Key To The Highway and Dowd liked what he was hearing so had the tape machine turned on so that is why the song fades up. They didn't get the start of the jam on tape.

The story goes that Sam the Sham was recording the song in Criteria Studios in the room next to the Dominos and they could hear him through the wall. The band started playing the song spontaneously and Dowd had his crew start recording it because it turned out to be a barn burner. Here's Sam's version:

I do have the sense he's one of those guys who embellishes his history.

I agree, Whitlock strikes me as a bit insecure. He's gone on record ripping Duane as a guitarist (both on the album and saying he couldn't keep up with the Dominos on stage), which just comes off like he was butt-hurt for Duane stealing his thunder on Layla. Definitely some jealousy there, since I bet more casual fans know the name Jim Gordon than they do Bobby Whitlock. He's also active on facebook and seems pretty dramatic - announces he's leaving a group or FB completely upon the slightest offense.