A quick word on the demise of
JJ Cale, who
died aged
74 at the
weekend. He's one of those guys people know more through his songs being covered by others, so here's a few you might remember:
- Eric Clapton's covers of both After Midnight and Cocaine, in both cases fairly close approximations of the originals with some of the subtlety sucked out
- Lynyrd Skynyrd's rocked-up version of Call Me The Breeze
- Spiritualized's trancetastic Run, which is basically a sneakily renamed cover of Call Me The Breeze
- Santana's somewhat more histrionic version of Sensitive Kind
- basically the entire career of Dire Straits, though I don't know that they ever specifically covered a Cale song
Cale's own versions of his stuff are the ones to go for, though, as they've got a shuffly laid-back charm that sounds easy but evaporates when anyone else tries to reproduce it. If one were in the mood for strained metaphors one might say that JJ Cale is the
Anne Tyler of swampy country-flavoured rock music: simple on the surface but with more going on the closer you look. Like Tyler there is a certain uniformity to it all, so you probably don't need the whole
oeuvre unless you're particularly fanatical, not that Cale (who was by his own admission not a big fan of hard work anyway) put out albums all that frequently, or not after his 1970s heyday anyway. If you look at
the list you'll see the aversion to effort extends to album titles as well: while he managed to rouse himself to picking a single-word title for six of his first eight albums (arguably seven of nine depending how you interpret the hyphen in his ninth album
Travel-Log), his fifth, eighth and tenth albums are called
5,
#8 and
Number 10 respectively.
I own the two late-70s albums
Troubadour (
aka the one with
Cocaine on it) and
5 (
aka the one with
Sensitive Kind on it); if you have his first album
Naturally (
aka the one with
Call Me The Breeze on it) as well, that would probably do you.
Here's a few for you: a late-70s performances of
After Midnight,
Boilin' Pot and
Cocaine, and an acoustic rendition of
Travelin' Light from the mid-90s.
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