Song Book: J.J. Cale

J.J. Cale’s first album Naturally was released in 1971 and attracted a lot of attention in the Netherlands, no hits, but an artist worth paying attention to.

It would have been cool perhaps to say that I was a Cale fan from the beginning, but truth to be told he was nowhere on my musical radar at the time.

I guess it was several years later when I received his ’5’ album as a birthday present that turned me onto his laid back guitar playing and singing style right away. 

As a result I started backtracking, bought his earlier albums (all on Shelter Records), and started following his career.

His last album I bought was 1982’s Grasshopper, his first one for Mercury Records, but not much difference in style, except perhaps for the 2 instrumentals; Grasshopper and Dr. Jive.

Due to my move from Netherlands to Thailand, I lost track a bit of Cale, but still found a few new albums (on bootleg cassettes) occasionally.

Cale passed away in 2013 and Eric Clapton paid respect 1 year later by recording a tribute album: The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale

Cale was more than happy to see what other artists could make of his music. "I kind of write songs hoping that musicians will take them and make them better and more accessible," he said.

Clapton changed Cale’s career massively by turning his After Midnight and Cocaine into rock standards.

"I'd probably be selling shoes today if it wasn't for Eric," Cale said in 2006.

Despite the Clapton Appreciation and 2 volumes of Tribute to J.J. Cale (2010) no compilation has been released of his earlier covered work…

This seemed a good reason for JOKONKY to jump in again and rectify this poor state of affairs.

Cale’s songs were covered as soon as he released Naturally and this got repeated which each succeeding album for a while.

Whereas Cale liked to keep his songs as laid back as possible, the cover versions usually added quite a bit of instrumentation on top.

Even so several hits were the results, besides the already mentioned Clapton covers, Lynyrd Skynyrd was successful with Call Me The Breeze and Santana didn’t do too bad either with The Sensitive Kind.

While researching possible covers I was very surprised by digging up a few Dutch ones, I knew already about Rob Hoeke & Alan Price covering Cale, but new were both Liesbeth List and Herman Brood & His Wild Romance to me!

Even weirder, Dutch singer Cornelis Vreeswijk spent considerable time playing in Sweden and recorded After Midnight and Clyde in Swedish…

Oh, we got a French version of After as well, complete with Cale on guitar!

Also intriguing, in Jamaica The Pioneers recorded a track called Let It All Hang Out in 1971, supposedly written by someone named Cunningham, but it’s obviously a reggaefied version of After Midnight!

Indian singer Asha Puthli recorded 2 covers (Lies and Right Down Here) in 1973 which add a new twist to Cale songs, not to mention the wild Psychemagik Remix of Right Down Here!

Most Cocaine covers follow the Clapton one which is a shame really, but I did manage to dig up 3 very different versions; Nazareth live, an Italian disco band called Eric’s Friends, and Earl 16 does it reggae.

Spread out across 2 volumes you’ll find a wide variety of Cale covers that should make it clear once and for all that he was a cool song writer as well!