J J Cale

When I think back on it, the Stellenbosch Municipal Library was the source of a good deal of my musical education in the early to mid-Seventies, with albums like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, Neil Young’s Harvest. Crosby, Stills and Nash’s eponymous debut, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s first greatest hits collection, Jethro Tull’s MU (greatest hits), Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman, and other such early Seventies singer songwriter records, plus a lot of early jazz and some blues.

 

J J Cale’s third album, Okie (1974), was one of these records I borrowed from the library, and it was an enlightenment to me regarding an artist I knew very little about at the time. I might’ve heard Eric Clapton’s hit version of “After Midnight” by then, but I’m not sure how much, if anything, I knew about JJ Cale, who was by no means a mainstream pop artist that would’ve received much, if any, airplay on South African radio stations.   I do think, however, that I vaguely recognised the name as a significant musical artist for some reason and obviously whoever bought records for the library must’ve believed that Cale had sufficient artistic merit for inclusion in the library’s collection. They didn’t stock simple pop music.

 

Okie baffled me slightly because a lot of it was just to saccharine and simplistic to me with lyrics that often sound as if Cale made them up simply to fit his admittedly catchy tunes. I didn’t know whether it was rock, country, country rock, or what. There was little of the toughness that I like and prefer in my rock, especially Americana, and too much that sounded like AOR and the type of music that was so inoffensive and smooth it should’ve been on heavy rotation in South Africa.

 

At the time my favourite tracks were “Cajun Moon,” “Rock and Roll Records” and “Anyway the Wind Blows.”  Listening to the record for the first time since 1974, the last is by far the best track and “Cajun Moon” still has the best hook. Now, too, I can appreciate the supple rhythm section and subtle yet insistent grooves of Cale’s music though I’d still say that a collection of his best tunes is the album to own, and not so much all of the individual studio records.

 

At some point in the ‘80s I bought Troubadour (1876), the album with perhaps Cale’s best-known tune, especially in Eric Clapton’s version, “Cocaine.”   By this time, I knew much more about Cale’s music than I did in 1974, partly because I’d read about him a lot, in UK based rock weeklies, and partly because he was act Chris Prior favoured on his week night rock show on Radio 5, and I knew Lynyrd Skynyrd’s version of “Call Me the Breeze” from their One From the Road live album.  I think I might also have heard the rather astonishing studio take of “Call Me the Breeze” from Cale’s debut album, Naturally (1972.)

 

The latter version starts off with the immediately engaging metronomic stomp of a primitive drum machine over which Cale mumbles something, before the swinging riff kicks in. This must’ve been revolutionary for this kind of laidback country blues style music in 1972 and even today it’s a visceral thrill every time I hear it. Sadly, “Crazy Mama” is the only other track on that record those benefits from and is enhanced by a drum machine too.

 

Troubadour is much lighter and more jazzy than Okie and has the same merits of excellent, catchy tunes and swinging ensemble playing but it seems even more saccharine and most of it could fit in well with the lounge music craze of the late ‘90s. It works as background music and is particularly engaging other than as pleasant diversion.  “Cocaine” stands out by a country mile because it has the toughest riff (or my ears, derived from “Sunshine of Your Love”) and the most memorable hook. No wonder Clapton made a huge hit of it. Other than that, Troubadour is a minor record, in the general vein of the Cale style where too much of his songs sound like filler.

 

The documentary To Tulsa and Back, made when Cake was around 65, illuminates him and his career a little bit and the most significant take away is that he made the career he wanted without compromising too much or pandering too much to the large corporations that run the music business. He was fortunate that he wrote enough good songs that other artists wanted to record and had hits with, so that the pressure to follow a standard music career was alleviated or removed entirely, allowing him to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it.  Apparently, he regularly turned down major money gigs because he didn’t feel like doing them or because they made no sense to him, Presumably, his simple lifestyle only requited the amount of money he made, following his own way, and he saw no reason to earn more simply because he could.

 

I own a double CD with what the compilers call his 20 best songs and if most of them are indeed quite good, I would argue that perhaps a single CD with only ten tracks are all you need, though they wouldn’t be representative of his entire output, which is quite varied in style and mood even if the same laidback approach is applied to them all. If you want a complete picture of the guy’s music, buy all the studio albums. If you just want a very good set of songs, make your own compilation from those albums. I prefer the tougher, more rocking tunes, like “Call Me the Breeze” or “Anyway the Wind Blows (and partly also because I prefer the ‘70s production values) to the more ruminative, sweeter songs. 

 

 

Celebrating 30 years of Achtung Baby

 U2                                           ACHTUNG BABY (1991)

 

For me, 1991 was the year of Achtung Baby, Use Your Illusion I and II and Nevermind, and almost in that order of significance too. This was also the year of Metallica but whereas I bought those first four albums on release, I wasn’t into Metallica at the time an bought the eponymous album only three of four years later. 

 

I bought Nevermind, and Bleach just before, because of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the enormous hype around the band and how they brought punk to the mainstream. I bought the Use Your Illusion albums because I as a big fan of Appetite for Destruction (my top hard rock album of the ‘80s), but I bought Achtung Baby because I was a long term afficionado of U2 and, though not necessarily contemporaneously all the time, owned all of the preceding records, starting with October, then Boy, before moving forwards with War, The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum.

 

The last two albums were the absolute pinnacle of the first phase of the patented U2 sound of ringing guitar and impassioned, inspiring vocals, emanating from the post punk sound of the late ‘70s and very early ‘80s.

 

With Achtung Baby, amongst other things, inspired by die fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and time spent in the pre-reconstructed city, if no longer physically divided, still very much psychologically divided, the band abandoned it’s by then almost cliched melodic approach and embraced tough, industrial-style, danceable riffing and beats. It’s as if The Edge decided to unlearn all musical expertise he’d acquired up to then, and to start afresh as if he were a guitar novice learning to play the only songs he knew, the songs he wrote in the first place.

 

From opening track “Zoo Station” to “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “The Fly” and “Mysterious Ways,” this album is almost intolerably exciting and builds and builds, even taking account the quieter moody songs, all of them with a suppler, groovier rhythm section, to a crescendo of frenzy and exuberance. This record was meant for being played loudly and I guess it’s no accident that so many club mixes were made of the various tracks, those mixes serving as bonus materials on the 30^th anniversary edition of the album, because almost the entire record is just made for blasting out at high volume in a relatively small space for the delight of a drunken, wasted crowd.

 

Like Searching for the Young Soul Rebels 10 years before, I played Achtung Baby at least once a day for a very long time. Truth be told, this was the first U2 record I experienced viscerally, in my heart and mind, and not just as mostly an appreciation of the musical values and lyrical stance, as was the case with most of the songs on the earlier records.  Achtung Baby was big fun. The other records were closer to intellectual discussions.

 

Perhaps because Achtung Baby was so hugely wonderful that I was mildly obsessed by it, it also meant the end of the road for me as U2 fan. Apart from a greatest hits set, covering the band’s ‘80s output, I never bought another U2 album again. I just suddenly had enough and what I’ve heard of their subsequent releases reinforces my lack of interest. Like Prince, U2 is an act I remember fondly for their ‘80s music, and still have a high regard for what they achieved in that decade, and yet have never been able to persuade myself to investigate what they did next. Achtung Baby is not an ‘80s album but it so completely puts the capstone on that era that there’s no need to investigate further.