Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

The band's only studio album was recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami from late August 1970, with Tom Dowd as executive producer and Ron and Howard Albert, Chuck Kirkpatrick, Karl Richardson and Mack Emerman engineering. Clapton and Whitlock wrote six of the nine originals together, Whitlock added "Thorn Tree in the Garden", and Clapton brought "I Am Yours", from a poem by Nizami, and "Layla". Five covers fill out the rest: "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", Key to the Highway, Have You Ever Loved a Woman, Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing and Chuck Willis's "It's Too Late". Allman plays on 11 of the 14 songs.

The Albert brothers recorded everything and kept tape rolling, and a song usually went through only three or four full takes after hours of playing. Clapton and Allman sat side by side with small Champ amps on a closed piano, microphones were placed inside it and the whole thing was wrapped in quilts and gaffer tape. Clapton overdubbed his lead vocal for Layla over several nights. The sleeve carries no band name or title, only a painting, La Fille au Bouquet by Emile Theodore Frandsen de Schomberg, which Clapton insisted be used unadorned.

It was issued by Atco in the United States in November 1970 and by Polydor in Britain in December. It peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, returned to the US chart in 1972, 1974 and 1977, and was later certified Gold by the RIAA. It did not chart in Britain until its 2011 reissue, which reached number 68. Rolling Stone's 2020 entry singled out the interplay between Clapton and Allman on "Key to the Highway" and "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" as both harmonious and fiercely competitive. Anthony DeCurtis called the album a masterpiece, and the 2011 Super Deluxe Edition won a Grammy for Best Surround Sound Album.