SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE (Friday A&E cover story, on Copley news wire)

Cale & hearty
J.J. keeps up the pace, as unhurried as it is

By George Varga
UNION-TRIBUNE POP MUSIC CRITIC

May 28, 2004

ESCONDIDO – The lunch check has just arrived, but J.J. Cale immediately waves off his interviewer's offer to pick up the tab.

"No, no, no," said the veteran singer-songwriter, taking out his wallet. "I do real well; Eric Clapton sells a lot of records."

That he does, which is why it's likely most rock fans know such Cale-penned classics as "After Midnight" and "Cocaine" through Clapton's much more popular cover versions than the obscure Cale originals. Like former Dire Straits' leader Mark Knopfler, Clapton has been profoundly influenced by Cale's laconic blend of blues, country, rock and Western swing.

Other artists who have recorded songs by this Oklahoma-born, North County-based tunesmith range from Johnny Cash, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Santana to Bryan Ferry, Freddie King and Cissy Houston (Whitney's mom).

But Clapton, who alone has released three different versions of "After Midnight," beginning in 1970, is the man who single-handedly helped make the spotlight-shunning Cale financially solvent for life.

"I had many day jobs before I started doing music all the time, thanks to Eric Clapton, because of that song," Cale recalled of "After Midnight," speaking from a corner table in a family restaurant just off Interstate 15.

"After that, well, Clapton sells so many records that I knew I wouldn't have to work again."

Cale, who performs Sunday with his band at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, grinned sheepishly. "But I was about 40 years old then," cracked the bearded musician, who was 33 when his first solo album came out in 1972.

Today, John Jaques Cale is 65, slender as a teenager and happy to maintain a lifestyle as laid back as his earthy, easygoing music.

Yet, while he has always been the retiring kind – at least when it comes to maintaining any kind of public image – he has no intention of stepping back from music.

He also has no intention of speeding up his unhurried pace, as evidenced by the fact that his fetching new album, "To Tulsa and Back," is his first new studio release in eight years. That's one year longer than the seven-year stretch between his previous two albums.

"I've retired several times – more than Frank Sinatra," quipped Cale, who earlier in the interview observed: "I've never really retired, I just go: 'Well, I'm not working this year.' It's a nice choice, a nice place to be."

So, for Cale, is North County, a region that also counts rock pioneer Ike Turner, eclectic violin master Mark O'Connor, singer-songwriter Jack Tempchin and veteran vocalist Patti Page among its residents.

"I was the youngest guy in the neighborhood," Cale recalled of his 1989 move to then-rural Valley Center. "Since then, the old people either died or moved away, and it's all young people living there now. . . . Everybody and his dog has moved up to Temecula."

Cale lamented the onslaught of suburban sprawl, which has brought tract homes to his turf. "It ain't country anymore," he noted dryly.

But he welcomes the opportunity to kick back with his wife of seven years, singer-guitarist Christine Lakeland, away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

"I've really enjoyed planting stuff and gardening," Cale said. "I've lived in trailers and played music all my life. I thought grass was something you smoked; I didn't know it was something you mowed. That's how much of a musician I was."

Tulsa to Blue Cheer

A native of Tulsa, where he recorded about half the songs on his new album, Cale started playing guitar when he was 10.

He was still in his teens when he started playing area clubs as the leader of the rock band Johnny Cale & The Valentines. After seven months of active duty in the Air Force, where he learned the basics of audio engineering, and a failed attempt to establish himself as a country artist in Nashville (where he worked in the Grand Ole Opry touring band), he returned home to Tulsa.

"I didn't have no career program," drawled Cale, who toiled at day jobs as a fry cook, elevator operator and steel plant worker. "I was trying to make do with work. Real work. And it slowly evolved, and then I got into engineering, and I moved out to L.A., and was a knob-twister. But even after I put out my first album, (1972's) 'Naturally,' I felt like: 'I've got to get a job here.' "

Cale moved to Los Angeles with several of his Oklahoma music pals, including Leon Russell, in 1964. Becoming an acclaimed songwriter was the last thing on his mind. Becoming a star didn't even enter his thoughts.

"I really liked guitar-playing and engineering," Cale said. "Neither one of them pays very well; a little better than driving a taxi, but not a whole lot. Some of the world's greatest guitar players can't get a job tonight. So talent really has nothing to do with who's popular. . . . I really didn't want to write a hit song – that accidentally happened."

To his regret, Cale quit an early version of Delaney & Bonnie, which later achieved fame working with Clapton. The group performed often at private parties during Cale's tenure, but rarely was paid – at least not in cash.

"I cannot feed my face when there's no money involved," he said drolly. "A lot of times they wanted to pay us in dope. And that was great, but after you take dope, you eventually get hungry."

Thanks to talent and tenacity, Cale endured where other aspiring musicians gave up or fell by the wayside.

"A lot of the guys quit," he said. "And I guess if I'm sitting here talking to you, I have never quit. Here I am. I'm 65 and still BS-ing about music."

In 1967, not long before he engineered Blue Cheer's ear-shattering recording of "Summertime Blues," Cale made a psychedelic album called "A Trip Down Sunset Strip," which was credited to the Leathercoated Minds.

Was he a hippie at the time?

Cale chuckles at the memory.

"Oh, yeah. I took dope, drank a lot of whiskey, grew a beard, said 'cool' a lot," he said. "I thought it would go on forever. It didn't. The world is now back to probably the same place it was in the 1950s."

So, at least in a manner, is Cale, who returned to Tulsa to record with Oklahoma musicians he first worked with in the 1950s.

The result is a thoroughly engaging album that sounds both fresh and timeless. It's the latest work from an unpretentious troubadour who owes his decades-old career largely to one of his biggest fans.

"(Eric) Clapton cut 'After Midnight,' and I went: 'Hell, I'm not an engineer anymore, I'm a songwriter!' And basically, what I really am is a guitar player. I can't sing – I can only sing about two notes," Cale said, matter-of-factly.

"Like I said, Eric sells a lot of records, (so) I don't need the money. . . . Music is a young man's game. I'm amazed that I'm still out playing now."

Name that tune!
J.J. Cale is widely known – and respected – by other musicians. Here's a partial list of Cale-written songs that have been recorded by other artists:

"After Midnight"
–Chet Atkins, Maggie Bell, Eric Clapton, Jerry Garcia, Sergio Mendes, Bob Wilber Quintet.

"Cajun Moon"
–Randy Crawford, Cissy Houston & Herbie Mann, Maria Muldaur, Poco.

"Call Me the Breeze"
–Allman Brothers Band, Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, David Allen Coe, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Mason Proffit.

"Cocaine"
–Eric Clapton, Nazareth.

"Crazy Mama"
–The Band, Larry Carlton, Redbone, Johnny Rivers.

"I Got the Same Old Blues"
–Captain Beefheart, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Bryan Ferry, Freddie King, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

"Lies"
–Asha Putli.

"Magnolia"
–Deep Purple, Jose Feliciano, Poco, Chris Smither, Pat Travers.

"The Sensitive Kind"
–John Mayall, Santana.

"Travelin' Light"
–Eric Clapton, Widespread Panic

–GEORGE VARGA

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Friday, May 21, 2004

He writes the songs that the big names sing

By Brad Kava
Mercury News
Published: Friday, May 21, 2004
When J.J. Cale hears the song ``Cocaine'' on his car radio, he smiles and then turns it off.

That song, which he wrote in the 1970s during a vogue that made the white powder as much a part of a party spread as the avocado dip, didn't make him famous but did help him buy a house in California.

``I used to go to a bar and hear it, and I'd have to leave,'' says Cale, 65, a determinedly low-key singer-songwriter who is embarking on a national tour that brings him to the Catalyst in Santa Cruz on Tuesday. ``I've heard it enough, but I know I'm making two cents from it.''

Cale, who lives in Valley Center near San Diego, is an underground musician beloved by a small coterie of fans. He only breaks into the mainstream when a star covers one of his songs.

Glad for Clapton

Eric Clapton also made a hit of ``After Midnight''; Lynyrd Skynyrd did it with ``They Call Me the Breeze''; Widespread Panic covered ``Traveling Light,'' as has Clapton; and Cale had a radio hit of his own in 1971 with ``Crazy Mama.''

``Eric Clapton pays my rent,'' Cale says. ``I'm so glad for that man. If not for him, I'd be selling shoes.'' This, he insists, is no exaggeration.

Cale left his native Tulsa for Los Angeles in the 1960s, bound for glory. He had played in Oklahoma with Leon Russell, who made it big as Joe Cocker's bandleader, and Carl Radle, who later played with Clapton.

But Cale, who toured for a short time with Delaney and Bonnie, grew frustrated and returned to Tulsa, expecting to take a day job and perform in small clubs on weekends.

One day in 1970, while driving around Tulsa, he heard his ``After Midnight'' on the radio, performed by Clapton.

``I was very poor, and when I heard it on this station -- this was like a Clear Channel station today -- I knew that, if they were playing it here, they were playing it everywhere,'' Cale says.

He soon got calls from Nashville producer Audie Ashworth, asking him to record an album. His ``Naturally,'' which included his own quiet, countryish take on ``After Midnight,'' reached No. 51 on the pop album charts in 1972.

He went on to record 14 albums, including the new ``To Tulsa and Back'' on Sanctuary records. These uniformly understated discs brim with unpolished gems. The newest, in particular, has a wealth of solid songs and a more rocking delivery, which could fool people into thinking they are listening to a new Dire Straits recording.

Cale sees his solo albums as songwriting demos, a chance to display his wares for performers better able to make them into hits. It was easier for them to hear the songs, he figured, on a disc that few people were aware of than if he tried to get them directly into the performers' hands.

The latest CD, though, was a labor of love, a chance to return to Tulsa and share music with the players who joined him on his earliest discs.

``We wanted to make a record like we did in the early 1970s,'' he says, ``for our own grins.''
He adds that he cut out ballads and favored up-tempo tunes to hide his limited, ``two-note'' vocal range.

Listening to the album, you may wonder whether an inspired performer can transform one of these folksy numbers into a worldwide hit, as Clapton did. The tunes, which range from the swing-style ``Motormouth'' to the environmental plea ``Stone River'' and the Latin-tinged ``Rio,'' sound ready for molding, in the right hands.

Like Cale's earlier work, these songs are comforting and enjoyable when he performs them, too. He's getting played on Santa Cruz's KPIG-FM (107.5), where program director Laura Hopper says his new CD is strong, thanks to its ``stylized way of clunking and chunking it out.''

Touring with a full band

Cale is touring with a full band, trying, like Bob Dylan, to change the tunes enough to keep them interesting for himself, as well as the audience.

After the club tour, he plans to tour Europe, where he has a bigger following than in the United States. He will also appear at Clapton's three-day guitar festival in Dallas the first week of June.

SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN

J.J. Cale: Talking touring and Tulsa

David Prince | For The New Mexican

In the current edition of Vanity Fair, Eric Clapton answers the queries posed by the magazine’s regular “Proust Questionnaire” feature. Asked, “What living person do you most admire?” the world-renowned guitarist-vocalist-songwriter answered, “J.J. Cale.”

While those who have followed Clapton’s career closely will likely be familiar with Cale, most people have only the vaguest idea who he is. Indeed, when Cale performed in Santa Fe a couple of summers back, one of the stories previewing the show was published alongside a photo of Welsh musician John Cale, the original Velvet Underground member and solo artist who bears no resemblance to, and isn’t related to, the 65-year-old Oklahoma City native who headlines at the Paramount this Wednesday.

While he is, like his friend and admirer Clapton, a guitar-vocals-songwriting triple threat, Cale earned what modest fame he has by writing songs that have become hits for other performers. Chief among these are “After Midnight” and “Cocaine,” which made loads of cash for Cale and Clapton when they popularized them in quick succession in the mid-’70s. What most prospective concertgoers don’t seem to know, however, is that Cale is every bit as persuasive an interpreter of his own material as are the more famous cover artists who have paid tribute to his predominantly blues and country musical inventions. He is a convincing live attraction on the various guitars he plays and in the way he sings his songs.

“Playing live is a whole other thing for me,” Cale said during a phone conversation last week that found him at his Southern California home. “Records have a tendency to be a bit sterile — you can go back and fix the mistakes. That’s not possible when you’re on the road.”

Cale should know, perhaps more so than most. For beyond the slow-but-steady flow of albums under his own name and a multitude of guest appearances (like Clapton, he was a frequent collaborator on the Delaney & Bonnie and Friends touring schedule), Cale trained as a recording engineer and for years worked the pots and levels at a Burbank, Calif., studio. Among the projects he remembers was recording some of the basic tracks of what became Blue Cheer’s psychedelic, acid-washed remake of Gene Vincent’s “Summertime Blues.”

“I’m basically a background person,” Cale proclaimed. “My records have sold enough to where a few people know who I am, and that’s been real nice if you want to go out and play music. I can do a little of that. I’m real comfortable where I’m at, somewhere in the middle there — I don’t have to hire bodyguards and whatever.”

Cale’s just-released new disc, To Tulsa and Back, is so named because half of the album’s tracks were laid down at a Tulsa studio with a bunch of Cale’s oldest musical buddies, while the remainder were done in L.A. Everything about To Tulsa and Back is attractive, from the up-close-and-personal aural feel of the finished product and the leader’s persuasively behind-the-beat vocal phrasing to his less-is-more way with a six-string guitar solo and the overwhelmingly tight sound of the instrumental backups. Several of the songs come outfitted with pithy horn tracks, which heighten the perception that when you listen to J.J. Cale you’re listening to someone who feels at home with jazz.

“Well, actually,” Cale admitted when the subject of those horn parts came up, “those are all done on synthesizers, so I guess they were good enough to fool you. I have been known to hire three or four horns for a live tour, but not this time. And I don’t want to go through the trouble of synching the synths into the live show.”

At the same time, he’s enthusiastic about jazz, naming Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and singer-pianist Mose Allison as some of his favorites, although he labeled Allison’s music as “cocktail jazz, really.” Perhaps more persuasive when it comes to quantifying Cale’s affinity for jazz, however, is the tune “Sensitive Kind,” on which Cale’s guitar solo nods in the directions of both John Coltrane and Wes Montgomery, simultaneously.

When Cale visits Santa Fe this week, his backup band will include keyboardist Rocky Frisco, bassist Bill Raffensperger and drummer Jim Karstein, who have been making music with Cale for more than 30 years each, thereby ensuring a smooth, simpatico musical dialogue. The evening’s opening act is Texas-bred singer-songwriter James McMurtry, son of author and rare-book dealer Larry McMurtry. James might not carry a tune particularly well (he is, at best, a marginal vocalist), but it isn’t the sweet tone that draws you to McMurtry. Rather, the lyrical narratives are the featured attraction. Like father, like son.

``I'm comfortable financially, because of Eric and a number of people,'' Cale says. ``I don't really go `I'll write a song like this because Sade might like it.' That doesn't really work anymore.''

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

05:53 PM CDT on Friday, May 28, 2004

J.J. Cale wants to set record straight
'Cocaine' writer is not a recluse, just a guy with a very low profile

By MATT WEITZ

According to J.J. Cale, a lot of what you think you know about the 65-year-old musician is wrong.

Mr. Cale, who is more renowned for others' versions of his songs, most notably Eric Clapton's million-selling takes on "After Midnight" and "Cocaine," is ready to set you straight. But he'll do it in such a riendly, folksy way that it will feel more like an evening session on some back porch than a dedicated bit of myth-busting.

He rarely bothers to give interviews or indulge in any other form of publicity. This has earned him a reputation as being something of a hermit that stretches back to the release of his first album, 1972's classic Naturally.

But, he says, "I'm not really a recluse."

"I'm basically a songwriter," he goes on, in a telephone interview from his home in Southern California. "I try to make records ... to present my songs – and they don't sell so well, except when other people do them."

He regards his reputation for reticence as an invention of marketing departments faced with the challenge of pushing a "boring, kinda background-type guy. They say, 'I know, we'll call him a recluse – he's mysterious.'"

And he understands his low profile: "I finally figured out that nobody's going to come see you if you just sneak into town. I don't play that many gigs, and five years can go by in between records."

The last drought of original music from Mr. Cale began eight years ago and ends June 8 when To Tulsa and Back will be released. As the title implies, the album was made in Mr. Cale's native Tulsa, a town he left decades ago, with the help of a cast of musical "cronies" from his younger days.

Which is the cue for another reality sandwich from the kitchen of J.J. Cale. "There's not really any 'Tulsa sound,'" he says when asked about the label for a loose confederation of musicians that included Leon Russell and Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and got a lot of attention in the '70s. "No more than there's a 'Dallas sound.' What you have is a group of musicians from a certain area who get well known, and the record companies figure out a way to market it."

He's equally dismissive of his unique, almost instantly identifiable guitar style: a sinuous, almost liquid sound.

"I've been playing guitar for many, many years now, and I've copped licks from every guitarist I've ever heard," he explains. "It never comes out sounding like them – it always comes out not quite right. That always made me mad, but what came out of that was a style."

Perhaps this humble realism is an acknowledgment of the role that chance can play in any career. After all, Eric Clapton was looking for some post-Cream direction at the end of the '60s when he began hanging out with Delaney & Bonnie. The move ended up being fortuitous for Mr. Cale.

"I was back in Tulsa, starving to death as an engineer," he recalls. "Playing in bars so I could buy food. I had put out a couple of singles and was trying to get them on the radio without any luck, and apparently somebody had one of those 45s."

The music found its way to Mr. Clapton, who eventually recorded "After Midnight" in 1970. But the two didn't meet (again, contrary to what many think) until long after, when Mr. Cale was playing in London in 1976. Once more, the exposure was serendipitous: "I was supporting my fourth album, which had "Cocaine" on it. He came and sat in, and that's when he heard it. To me, it was basically song number 10 on the album – it'd already been out six months and we'd already tried to get it on the radio three or four times."

With two of an indulgent decade's major party anthems to his credit – and a whole lotta songs about sex ("I was a young fella then") – Mr. Cale was a largely uncredited contributor to the soundtrack of the '70s.

Though he's still in classic J.J. Cale form, To Tulsa and Back reveals a more thoughtful artist, with songs about the environment ("Stone River") and politics ("The Problem").

"That's age," he says with a chuckle. "I guess I'm just a little more politically and socially bent."
Time also helped burnish the experience of recording To Tulsa .

"It was a real hoot, man," he says of the sessions. "It was kind of like a high school reunion. I got to see all these old guys I hadn't seen in years, visit places where I grew up, and have the camaraderie you get when a bunch of old guys get together. Plus, I got an album out of the deal."