I like a lot of his stuff. He was a master of laid back country blues, and his work was usually very well produced.
BUT.. He did tend to write an awful LOT of songs, and a lot of them were really just 12-bars.
Though every now and again he came up with a masterpiece… the high tail of the bell curve?
Guess he just didn’t allow any introspective self-critisism to get in the way of putting a song on tape? I should probably take a lesson from him and Just Write and record!
JJ Cale is awesome, and I found his music better late than never. He’s a super talented, understated guitar player and songwriter. I dig how the percussion in his songs always seems a little funkier than how other songwriters would have had it.
You could direct that accusation to hundreds of great musicians, and it’s even not very true for JJ Cale, he had more range than say, Muddy Waters. Yeah, I like him, I came to him like many others, via Clapton, but think that his original versions of the Clapton covers are better. His “Cocaine” is such a funky gem of a blues that transcends the traditional 12 bar blues, for instance. Also a great influence on Mark Knopfler and the Dire Straits, they’re unthinkable without him. I’m sorry to never have seen him live, though I don’t know if he even ever played in Europe. He kept a very low profile career. A classical musician’s musician.
I was turned on to JJ Cale’s music from a friend fairly early on, late teens- very early 20s. After the initial “oh HE wrote Cocaine and After Midnight, not Clapton?” I really started doing a deep dive into his music. I even, in the days before CDs, used to have a standing order at my favorite used album store to reserve me a copy of any of his out of print records that came in. Such a great mix of understated Country, Blues, Rock, Jazz, etc.
I saw him live at the Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Small crowd, He sat on a stool, just slow-jammed and sort of whispered the vocals into the mic. Like being in his living room.
True. But he generally stayed in the general area of the usual 3 or 4 chords.
Fine for groove music.
However he hardly ever came up with a chord sequence that makes you sit up and say ‘Hot Damn!’… as, say, McCartney or Lennon occasionally did.
Not of course that an unusual chord sequence necessarily makes a great song… far from it in many cases!
I’m a big fan
He’s great. I discovered him through Widespread Panic’s covers of his songs.
He was also the coolest Twitter user ever. He signed up, posted nothing for years, then made a single post: “I make rock n roll records”. Then never posted again.
Well, every genre has its place (except for Schlager, of course), and some exceptional people are able to transcend, switch between or combine genres, but some stay true to the one genre they do the best. And JJ Cale excelled in the blues and groove style, you can say that he invented and defined this laid back style that many, like Clapton and Mark Knopfler, followed. That’s quite a feat.
I love Panic. I wish they’d come out by me more often.
I’ve been streaming JJ all morning
Waylon Jennings said it best:
I try to model my bass playing after Clyde’s.