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.