source: Unknown

Something about the muses of some of the greatest musicians of the past 50 years has fascinated me for a long time, and it seems there's always another to discover and read about. I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole this weekend, reading (again) about Bebe Buell, Geraldine Edwards, Pennie Trumbull, Cynthia Lennon, and Pattie Boyd.

It's hard to understand, from a distance, what it is about some of these women that drew famous, capricious men to them like moths to a flame, but I wasn't there, and these were very different times, times I am very curious about. Surely things were simpler back then, but in what ways?

Until yesterday, I had never known of the George Harrison-Pattie Boyd-Eric Clapton love triangle, if you want to call it that. Having heard about it from Pattie and Eric's perspectives give so much more meaning to songs I've heard time and time before, like Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight."

(For those who don't know, George Harrison courted a young Pattie Boyd after they met on the set of "A Hard Day's Night." They were married in January of 1966. Soon, Eric Clapton and George Harrison became friends, and Eric Clapton soon became "obsessed" with Boyd. A supposedly clandestine but otherwise innocuous flirtation developed between them for several years as George and Pattie's marriage began to lose steam. At a party, Clapton told Harrison that he had fallen in love with George's wife. Clapton gave Pattie an ultimatum -- go away with him or he'd begin using heroin. Boyd chose to stay with her husband, and Clapton fell into a self-induced heroin exile for a number of years, before being coaxed out of it by his musician friends. In 1974, Boyd decided to leave Harrison for Clapton. They married in 1979 and divorced in 1988, with Boyd stating his alcoholism and infidelity as grounds for divorce.)

source: Harry Benson / Hulton Archive

source: born-late.blogspot.com

Here are three wonderful songs inspired by 1960s model and actress (and now photographer) Pattie Boyd. One wonders what she did to transfix these men and how things have changed since those days ... or if they have at all. Is the past just romanticized?