A Conversation with J.J. Cale by Frank Goodman (Puremusic.com, 6/2004) When you look up “laid back” in the hiptionary, there’s a photo of a Tulsa man in front of an Airstream trailer, with the brim of his weathered hat shielding his eyes from the sun, and especially from the camera. That’d be John Cale. One of the most reluctant legends of rock and roll history, he is nevertheless an essential songwriter and guitar stylist in the idiom. He came out of the club scene in Tulsa (where he was born and raised) in the 60s to L.A. with his friends, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jimmy Karstein. Their buddy Russell Bridges had already blazed the trail and assured them there was money to be made in the studio. That was before Russell Bridges would become Leon Russell in the unpredictable imminent future. John had studio chops, and went to work as an engineer, playing gigs at night. It was actually the owner of the Whiskey who suggested his stage name, J.J. Cale. In the late 60s, John was working for Snuff Garrett in New York and L.A. as a producer, working with acts as unlikely to his eventual notoriety as Blue Cheer. He’d done a record for a label of Garrett’s called Viva Records that included an instrumental track of what would become a B side for Liberty called “After Midnight,” the first of his tunes that would shape his destiny. There are a number of versions of the story about how Eric Clapton first came to hear the tune, but three years later, in 1970, he made it a Top 20 hit. Clapton would go on to cover several more J.J. Cale tunes, including “Cocaine.” (Personally, I always admired the lyric “If you wanna get down, get down on the ground—Cocaine.” It says it all, in very Tulsan fashion.) Although many others have covered his tunes over the years, it’s the Clapton covers that raised John Cale up to cult figure status. But aside from Cale’s songwriting power, his guitar style was irresistible and very influential, certainly no more obviously than in the playing of Mark Knopfler, though Cale characteristically backpedals the notion. He is an incredibly understated and reserved person, his personality apparently unsuited to airplane runway lighting, and he’s been known to spend a lot of time in the desert or by the water in his trailer. Over the years, precious few interviews have been given—so you can imagine how very grateful we felt to have been granted one of the small number that he would do for his new CD. To Tulsa and Back is his first studio record in over seven years. We know that he’s reputedly more comfortable talking about technical and guitaristic things than he is about “show business,” so a portion of our conversation runs along these lines. But his unique personality and considerable contribution to musical culture on a global level shines through in that patented laid back fashion. We found him fascinating, and went on a tear, buying every record of his we could find. We encourage you to begin your spree with his great new record, To Tulsa and Back, and don’t forget to find a copy of that classic first album, Naturally, it’s amazing! And now, our conversation with an American original, J.J. Cale. J.J. Cale: This is Cale calling for Frank. Puremusic: Hi, Frank here, how you doing? Where are you today? JJC: I’m at home. I’m in San Diego. Well, I don’t live in San Diego, but that’s the closest big town. 1 PM: Are you out in the desert these days, are you in a trailer or a house? JJC: No. I’m in a house. I’ve been here. I actually live in a house now. I lived in a trailer quite a long time, but not lately. No, I actually have a house, a yard, all the regular trappings of a domestic life. PM: [laughs] Well, like a lot of your fans, and I’m certainly a fan, it sure was great to see a new studio record come out. It’d been some years since Guitar Man. JJC: Yeah, eight years. I’m really speedy. PM: [laughs] Yeah, right, you’re just firing ’em right off. [laughter] PM: Oh, but only three years since the live record, right? JJC: Yeah, I put out a live record since then, so it doesn’t seem that long to me, because I put a little energy into the live thing. Nothing like a studio thing, because it’s pretty much all done when you go live. But yeah, since then I’ve put out a live album [the 2001 CD fittingly titled Live]. PM: But I know that as an old studio hound yourself, once you go in to cut something, you probably get real deep into it, and it takes a lot of work to get a studio record out. Is that how it is still? JJC: Yeah. I’m a shade tree engineer. I used to make a living as an engineer before I got into songwriting. And so yeah, I overly screw with it because you can. And I don’t think that really helps it any at all—it probably hinders it, really. But I think all us musicians, engineers, studio kind of people, we definitely screw with it more than we should. PM: Yeah, we just do it because it’s fun. JJC: It’s like a puzzle or something, like a video game, you can mess with it all day long. PM: [laughs] And I think that To Tulsa and Back really hits that spot that truly only a record of yours hits. JJC: Well, thanks, man. I try, sometimes, to get out of my own bag, but it ends up that all my records kind of sound like they’re me. PM: And thank God they do, because it’s that bag that we’re looking for when we go to the Cs in the collection for a Cale record. That’s what we’re looking for. JJC: I try to get out of it, but like I said, you can’t change that—I can’t, anyway. I guess I could with electronics and studios and all that kind of stuff. But I’ll eventually say, “Well, that don’t really sound like me.” PM: Yeah. And I don’t think we can change it in terms of how we write a song. JJC: No, no. That’s true. I’ve tried to do that. PM: And that sucks. [laughs] 2 JJC: Yeah. It just ended up that I didn’t like it. And I’d go, “If I don’t like it, I don’t think anybody else will.” PM: These advance copies that they send journalists never have the credits that you want them to have. Who’s playing on To Tulsa and Back? JJC: Yeah, and I’ve got on to them about that. Most people don’t care, but every once in a while, some of the guys who review the record or listen to it or whatever—and especially guys like me, I want to know who the drummer is, and I want to know what studio they did it in and when did they cut it. PM: Oh, all about it. JJC: And on those promo copies they never do that. They just put an old picture on it and the names of the tunes. There are only six songs that I cut in Tulsa. The other seven tunes are what I call home demos. When I say “home demo,” I mean I made them at home, like a lot of this stuff that I’ve put out through the years. PM: Right. JJC: David Teagarden has a studio in Tulsa. And he’s a drummer from the old Teagarden & Van Winkle. They had a duo. PM: You bet. JJC: He was a drummer. And also he played with Bob Seeger for a long time. PM: Right. JJC: Anyway, he was an old crony friend of mine. About three years ago I was going to make another record. So I called up Audie Ashworth there in Nashville. Audie did the first eight albums, I don’t know if you know who he is. So me and him were thinking we’d just make a record like we did the old records and get all the guys that are still alive that we used to use back in the 70s and have some fun together like we used to. So we had planned on that, and then Audie passed away. PM: So sad, yeah. JJC: Right. And so to make a short story longer, well, I just put the whole thing on hold. And then a gentleman who works for Sanctuary wanted me to—he knew Audie and I were going to do something, and he said, “Why don’t you go ahead and make a record, and we’ll put it out.” And so I decided to do the same thing, only go to Tulsa and use some of my old crony friends that I used to play with when I was growing up, the ones that are still alive. A lot of them are gone. So that’s what that was. And David Teagarden has a studio there, and he put it all together for me.