Guest Book

One last amazing postscript on Tom Dowd. As part ofmy research on a tribute to Tom I just interviewed Mark Moorman who has worked on a documentary film about Tom called "The Language of Music". It is an independent film that has taken 6 years to make. If everything stays on track they will present it to the Sundance Film Festival this January. Here is what is cool. For the film they interview Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers, whats left of Skynyrd, Les Paul, and many others. But the film closes out with a camera on a boom, sitting up overhead Tom, and it was all filmed on 16 m true film and not video, and the camera hovers overhead as Tom sits at a recording soundboard and mixes some music. But it isn't just any music. Tom Dowd made some phone calls to the right folks and had the 24 track original master tapes from the "Layla" recordings of 30 plus years ago flown in. The cameras roll as Tom takes the original masters of Layla and he mixes it all over again to show us how he came up with that amazing end product. Pretty sweet. Tom did not die a rich man. Even though it was Tom that hooked up Duane Allman with Eric Clapton, even though "Layla" and many other albums he worked on made millons of dollars, he was , at the end, simply a hired hand that got paid a flat fee for his work and sent on his way. But he was humble to the end. Tom Dowd finally won a lifetime Grammy this past year for his achievements and the Grammy people asked Eric Clapton to write the tribute. Below is what Clapton wrote; www.grammy.com/features/0208_tomdowd.html Derek Halsey