J. J. Cale
J.J. Cale | |
---|---|
Red Dirt, Tulsa sound | |
Occupation(s) | Musician, songwriter, producer |
Instrument(s) | Guitar, vocals |
Years active | 1958–2013 |
Labels | Shelter, Mercury, PolyGram, Virgin, Rounder, Silvertone |
Website | jjcale |
John Weldon "J. J." Cale[1] (December 5, 1938 – July 26, 2013) was an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Though he avoided the limelight,[2] his influence as a musical artist has been acknowledged by figures such as Neil Young, Mark Knopfler, Waylon Jennings, and Eric Clapton, who described him as one of the most important artists in rock history.[3] He is one of the originators of the Tulsa sound, a loose genre drawing on blues, rockabilly, country, and jazz.
In 2008, Cale and Clapton received a
Life and career
Early years
Cale was born on December 5, 1938, in
Early musical career
Along with a number of other young Tulsa musicians, Cale moved to Los Angeles in late 1964, where he found employment as a
Rise to fame
In 1970, it came to his attention that Eric Clapton had recorded Cale's "After Midnight" on his debut album. Cale, who was languishing in obscurity at the time, had no knowledge of Clapton's recording until it became a radio hit in 1970. He recalled to Mojo magazine that when he heard Clapton's version playing on his radio, "I was dirt poor, not making enough to eat and I wasn't a young man. I was in my thirties, so I was very happy. It was nice to make some money."[11] Cale's version of "After Midnight" differs greatly from Clapton's frenetic version, which is itself based on Cale's own arrangement:
The history on that deal was, the original "After Midnight" I recorded was on Liberty Records on a 45-rpm, and it was fast. That was about 1967-68, maybe 69. I can't remember exactly. But that was the original "After Midnight", and that is what Clapton heard. If you listen to Eric Clapton's record, what he did was imitate that. No one heard that first version I made of it. I tried to give the thing away, until he cut it and made it popular. So, when I recorded the Naturally album Denny Cordell, who ran Shelter Records at the time, and I had already finished the album, he said, "John, why don't you put 'After Midnight' on there because that is what people recognize you for?" I said, "Well, I've already got that on Liberty Records, and Eric Clapton's already cut it, so if I'm going to do it again I'm going to do it slow.[12]
It was suggested to Cale that he should take advantage of this publicity and cut a record of his own. His first album,
Really was produced by Audie Ashworth, who would go on to produce Cale until 1983. Cale's second album further developed the "Tulsa sound" that he would become known for: a swampy mix of folk, jazz, shuffling country blues, and rock 'n' roll. Although his songs have a relaxed, casual feel, Cale, who often used drum machines and layered his vocals, carefully crafted his albums, explaining to Lydia Hutchinson in 2013, "I was an engineer, and I loved manipulating the sound. I love the technical side of recording. I had a recording studio back in the days when no one had a home studio. You had to rent a studio that belonged to a big conglomerate."[15] Cale often acted as his own producer / engineer / session player. His vocals, sometimes whispery, would be buried in the mix. He attributed his unique sound to being a recording mixer and engineer, saying, "Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound."[16]
Although Cale would not have the success with his music that others would, the royalties from artists recording his songs would allow him to record and tour as it suited him. He scored another windfall when Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded "Call Me the Breeze" for their 1974 LP Second Helping. As he put it in an interview with Russell Hall, "I knew if I became too well known, my life would change drastically. On the other hand, getting some money doesn't change things too much, except you no longer have to go to work."[17] His third album Okie contains some of Cale's most recorded songs. In the same year of its release, Captain Beefheart recorded "I Got the Same Old Blues" (shortened to "Same Old Blues") for his Bluejeans & Moonbeams LP, one of the few non-originals to ever appear on a Beefheart album. The song would also be recorded by Eric Clapton, Bobby Bland, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bryan Ferry. "Cajun Moon" was recorded by Herbie Mann on his 1976 album Surprises with vocals by Cissy Houston, by Poco on their album Cowboys & Englishmen, and by Randy Crawford on Naked and True (1995).
The 1976 album Troubadour includes "Cocaine," a song that would be a major hit for Eric Clapton the following year. In the 2004 documentary To Tulsa and Back, Cale recalled, "I wrote 'Cocaine', and I'm a big fan of Mose Allison...So I had written the song in a Mose Allison bag, kind of cocktail jazz kind of swing...And Audie said, 'That's really a good song, John, but you oughta make that a little more rock and roll, a little more commercial.' I said, 'Great, man.' So I went back and recut it again as the thing you heard."[18] The song's meaning is ambiguous, although Eric Clapton describes it as an anti-drug song. He has called the song "quite cleverly anti-cocaine", noting:
It's no good to write a deliberate anti-drug song and hope that it will catch. Because the general thing is that people will be upset by that. It would disturb them to have someone else shoving something down their throat. So the best thing to do is offer something that seems ambiguous—that on study or on reflection actually can be seen to be "anti"—which the song "Cocaine" is actually an anti-cocaine song. If you study it or look at it with a little bit of thought ... from a distance ... or as it goes by ... it just sounds like a song about cocaine. But actually, it is quite cleverly anti-cocaine.[18]
By the time he recorded 5 in 1979, Cale had also met singer and guitarist
1980s
Cale moved to California in 1980 and became a recluse, living in a trailer without a telephone. In 2013, he reflected, "…I knew what fame entailed. I tried to back off from that. I had seen some of the people I was working with forced to be careful because people wouldn't leave them alone… What I'm saying, basically, is I was trying to get the fortune without having the fame."
His 1983 album #8 was poorly received, and he asked to be released from his contract with PolyGram. Lyrically speaking, with the exception of "Takin' Care of Business", the subject matter on #8 is unremittingly grim. The cynical "Money Talks" ("You'd be surprised the friends you can buy with small change…"), "Hard Times", "Unemployment" and "Livin' Here Too" deal with harsh economic woes and dissatisfaction with life in general, while the provocative "Reality" is about using drugs to escape many of the problems he chronicles on the album, singing "One toke of reefer, a little cocaine, one shot of morphine and things begin to change," and adding "When reality leaves, so do the blues." When later asked how he had spent the 1980s he replied: "Mowing the lawn and listening to Van Halen and rap."[20]
After making a name for himself in the seventies as a songwriter, Cale's own recording career came to a halt in the mid-1980s. Although he scored a handful of minor hits, Cale was indifferent to publicity, preferring to avoid the spotlight, so his albums never sold in high numbers.
1989's Travel-Log was the first solo album Cale produced himself without long-time producer Audie Ashworth, although Ashworth co-wrote the opening track "Shanghaid" with Cale. While the album has a travel theme, with titles like "Tijuana" and "New Orleans", Cale insisted he did not set out to make a concept album, and only recognized it after he picked the songs:
It's kind of ironic. When Andrew Lauder of Silvertone said he'd like to put out some tapes, I just got a bunch together and they put 'em out as an album. It wasn't till I got to listening to the album that I noticed that I'd written a bunch of tunes in the last four or five years about towns, and places, and travellin' around.[21]
In 1990 he explained in an interview, "In 1984 I was with a different record company, and it didn't seem to be working out too good, so I asked to get out of my contract, and that took a couple of years to shuffle the paper around. Then when I got through doin' that, I thought I'd take a little break from recording; maybe go in once or twice a year and record somethin' I'd written."[21]
1990s
The 1992 album Number 10 was Cale's second LP for Silvertone. Compared to his albums in the '70s and '80s, he employed fewer session players for this album, yet still achieved his signature sound. Notoriously wary of the spotlight, Cale quietly went about his own business his way, delivering his own unique blend of musical styles augmented by his laid-back vocal delivery. Ironically, in an era of
…me playing with the synthesizer, everybody hated. [Then producer/manager] Audie Ashworth did the first eight albums, and those were kind of semi-popular, for an obscure songwriter like me. Then I started doing these albums in California with all synthesizers and me being the engineer. I liked those, but the folks wanted a little warmer kind of thing.[23]
Produced by Cale, Guitar Man differs from the albums he made in the seventies and early eighties in that while those records featured numerous top shelf session players, Cale provided the instrumentation on Guitar Man himself, augmented by wife Christine Lakeland on guitar and background vocals and drummer James Cruce on the opener "Death in the Wilderness." In his AllMusic review of the LP, Thom Owens writes, "Although he has recorded Guitar Man as a one-man band effort, it sounds remarkably relaxed and laid-back, like it was made with a seasoned bar band." In assessing the album, rock writer Brian Wise of Rhythm Magazine commented, "'Lowdown' is typical Cale shuffle, 'Days Go By' gives a jazzy feel to a song about smoking a certain substance while the traditional 'Old Blue' reprises a song that many might first have heard with The Byrds version during the Gram Parsons era."[22] After Guitar Man, Cale would take a second hiatus and not release another album for eight years.
Later career
Between 1996 and 2003, Cale released no new music but admiration for his work and musicianship only grew among his fans and admirers. In his 2003 biography Shakey,
A few years ago, before Audie passed away, I said, "I've been making synthesizer records; ain't nobody likes 'em but me. I'll come to
Tulsa instead of Nashville. David Teegarden, of Teegarden & Van Winkle, is a drummer who has a studio, so I told him to get the guys in Tulsa that we used to play with when we were kids. I cut some there, and had some demos I did here at the house, and I sent them all to Bas [Hartong] and to Mike [Test].[25]
The album returns to the style and sound Cale became famous for – a mix of laid-back shuffles, jazzy chords, and bluesy rock and roll with layered vocals – but it also embraces technology, resulting in a cleaner sound than on Cale's earlier albums. Lyrically, Cale makes a rare foray into political songwriting with "The Problem," an indictment of then-President George W. Bush with lines like, "The man in charge, he don't know what he's doing, he don't know the world has changed." "Stone River" is an understated protest song about the water crisis in the West.
In 2004, Eric Clapton held the
What seemed to evolve out of the '60s and into the '70s and then, in another way, the '80s — heavy metal came out of all of this stuff — was, like, volume and proficiency and virtuosity. There didn't seem to be any reasonable limit to that; it was just crazy. I wanted to go in the other direction and try to find a way to make it minimal, but still have a great deal of substance. That was the essence of J.J.'s music to me, apart from the fact that he summed up so many of the different essences of American music: rock and jazz and folk, blues. He just seemed to have an understanding of it all.[26]
Clapton, who toured with Delaney & Bonnie in 1969, recalled in the 2005 documentary To Tulsa and Back, "Delaney Bramlett is the one that was responsible to get me singing. He was the one who turned me on to the Tulsa community. Bramlett produced my first solo album and "After Midnight" was on it, and those [Tulsa] players played on it...461 Ocean Boulevard was my kind of homage to J.J."
Death
Cale died at the age of 74 in San Diego, California, on July 26, 2013, following a heart attack.[27][28][29][30] Stay Around, a posthumous album made of previously unreleased material, was released on April 26, 2019.
Tributes
- In 2014, Eric Clapton & Friends released the tribute album The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale. On it, Cale's tunes are covered by Clapton with Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, John Mayer, Don White, Willie Nelson, Derek Trucks, Cale's wife Christine Lakeland, and others. In the video version of Call Me The Breeze for this album, Clapton declares of Cale, "He was a fantastic musician. And he was my hero."[31]
- Kevin Brown's 2015 album, Grit, contained a track called "The Ballad of J. J. Cale", in tribute to Brown's musical inspiration.[32]
- Hungarian alternative rock band Quimby's 2009 album, Lármagyűjtögető, contained a track called "Haverom a J. J. Cale" ("My Buddy J. J. Cale").[33][34]
Discography
- Naturally (1971)
- Really (1972)
- Okie (1974)
- Troubadour (1976)
- 5 (1979)
- Shades (1981)
- Grasshopper (1982)
- #8 (1983)
- Travel-Log (1989)
- Number 10 (1992)
- Closer to You (1994)
- Guitar Man (1996)
- To Tulsa and Back (2004)
- Roll On (2009)
- Stay Around (2019)
References
- ^ a b "Biography". JJ Cale official website. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
- ^ "I was always a background person. It took me a while to adjust to the fact that people were looking at me 'cause I always just wanted to be part of the show. I didn't want to be the show." To Tulsa and Back: On Tour with J.J. Cale (2005)
- ^ Martin Chilton (July 25, 2014). "Eric Clapton: JJ Cale got me through my darkest days". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved November 4, 2015.
- ^ To Tulsa and Back: On Tour with J.J. Cale, 2005
- ^ Ibid
- ^ Long-time collaborator drummer Jim Karstein remarked, 'You'll cut tracks with him and you'll listen to it and you'll think, "Well, I don't know about that one" and then he'll take the tapes away and he puts his secret sauce on 'em, you know, that nobody but he knows what it is that he does in the dark of night and then he'll come back out and you'll go "Wow!". Ibid
- ^ Lewis, Randy (January 10, 2009). "Musicians will honor Whisky founder Elmer Valentine". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Friedman, Barry. "Three Who Knew John". Daily Kos. Retrieved August 9, 2013., long-time friend and drummer Jimmy Karstein reflects on the early LA days
- ^ "The Great Rock Bible is under construction". Thegreatrockbible.com. Archived from the original on October 23, 2020. Retrieved May 10, 2021.
- ^ Hoekstra, Dave (April 15, 1990). "Songwriter J. J. Cale prefers to remain in the background". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on June 3, 2013 – via HighBeam Research.
- ^ "After Midnight by Eric Clapton Songfacts". Songfacts.com. Retrieved September 4, 2013.
- ^ Halsey, Derek (October 2004). "JJ Cale". Swampland.com. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
- ^ Cromelin, Richard (February 24, 2009). "J.J. Cale rolls on". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ "J. J. Cale Biography". Sing 365.com. Archived from the original on January 18, 2013. Retrieved January 6, 2013.
- ^ Hutchinson, Lydia (July 2013). "JJ Cale interview". Performingsongwriter.com. Retrieved June 23, 2019.
- ^ "Obituary: JJ Cale was music's towering figure". Gulfnews.com. July 28, 2013. Retrieved August 11, 2013.
- ^ "Remembering J.J. Cale". performingsongwriter.com. July 29, 2013. Retrieved January 19, 2022.
- ^ a b The Best of Everything Show, with Dan Neer
- ^ Hutchinson, Lydia (July 2013). "JJ Cale interview". Performingsongwriter.com. Retrieved June 24, 2019.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "JJ Cale". The Telegraph. July 28, 2013. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved April 5, 2017.
- ^ a b Newton, Steve (March 27, 2016). "LAID-BACK LEGEND J.J. CALE TELLS ME "THERE'S NO HURRY"". Ear Of Newt. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
- ^ a b Wise, Brian (July 28, 2013). "Tribute – J.J. Cale in 1996". Addicted to Noise. Retrieved June 30, 2019.
- ^ [1][permanent dead link]
- ISBN 9781446414545.
- ^ Forte, Dan (2004). "J.J. Cale: Clapton Mentor". Ear Of Newt. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
{{cite web}}
: Check|url=
value (help) - ^ Westervelt, Eric (July 26, 2014). "Eric Clapton and J J Cale : Notes on a Friendship". NPR. Retrieved July 3, 2019.
- ^ Gripper, Ann (July 27, 2013). "JJ Cale dead at 74: Tributes paid to singer songwriter after his death from a heart attack". Daily Mirror. Retrieved April 9, 2015.
- ^ "JJ Cale passed away at 8:00 pm on Friday July 26 at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, CA". JJ Cale official website. Retrieved July 27, 2013.
- ^ Castillo, Mariano (July 27, 2013). "Writer of hits JJ Cale dead at 74". CNN. Retrieved July 27, 2013.
- ^ "Cale's agent confirms his death". The Rosebud Agency.
- ^ ""Call Me The Breeze" - Eric Clapton Videos". Ericclapton.com. Archived from the original on November 29, 2014. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
- ^ "Kevin Brown Trio - Kevin Brown Trio, Black Mountain Jazz, Kings Arms, Abergavenny, 25/10/2015. | Review". The Jazz Mann. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
- ^ "Quimby, Lemezek". Quimby. April 25, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2020.
- ^ "Songbook, Haverom a J. J. Cale" (in Hungarian). Songbook. Retrieved February 6, 2020.
External links
- Official website
- The Long Reach of J.J. Cale on MTV.com
- J. J. Cale at Discogs
- J. J. Cale at IMDb