So, I’ve just had my mind blown over Height Five Seven, and I intend to steal as much content as I possibly can for anyone who’s reading over here.

Just to give some context and to prep you for everything that we’re going to explore here let’s take a song with an amazing guitar part that might not be played by who you expect.

For those of you who don’t know, the solo on that track was played by Eric Clapton, apparently added when Harrison wasn’t completely satisfied by the first recording. Now, I’ll bet that’s not much of a surprise for most folks out there. As far as I can tell it’s pretty common knowledge, but still kind of an interesting tidbit. Oh and then there’s this.

(I will continue to watch that video and insert it into any post I can for as long as I can)

A little more surprising (though still not mind blowing) is that Harrison put down some guitar for Clapton on Cream’s song Badge.

Now there’s some guitar work at about the 1:40 mark that sounds an awful lot like George, but he’s only credited with rhythm guitar and has apparently explicitly denied playing that part. If he had, I would’ve been a little bit more stunned. Still, this gets points for being a collaboration that I hadn’t heard about up to this point.

But the piece that literally had me cursing at my monitor is a little nugget about Layla from Height Five Seven.

Apparently, that’s Duane Allman over the piano coda. A little more research turns up the fact that he wrote the riff for the main “rockin’” portion of the song, and that Allman played on two of six (6!) guitar tracks.

That’s nuts.

I had no idea that Allman had anything to do with that recording, but the degree to which he was involved is especially entertaining. I don’t know why it’s always so gratifying to learn these things, but it is.

Bonus: from the same source, who knew that this was Bobby Womack on bass?

Double bonus: here’s Billy Preston rockin’ out with the Beatles.

In all seriousness, I’ll plug Height Five Seven one more time. You should go check it out. I spent entirely too much time over there, which is the reason I’m writing this post at 4am.