Without J.J. Cale’s songs and laconic guitar style, it’s hard to imagine Eric Clapton having had much of a career in the ’70s, and perhaps Mark Knopfler after him. “Cocaine”, “After Midnight” and “Living On Tulsa Time” (the last, oddly, not included in this set) all gave focus to Clapton’s ’70s output, and cemented Cale’s reputation as a songwriter. From Cale’s songs, Clapton learned his way out of the hard, psychedelic blues of the late ’60s, and found a new way to sing around his somewhat limited range. From Clapton, Cale got a pile of royalty checks.
Still, it is not always a kindness to provide a comprehensive retrospective of an artist’s career. Cale, who got started playing with a young Leon Russell during their high school years in Tulsa, has more than made his mark, but not everything he’s written over the years has been up to that standard.
His initial burst of creativity — the best ideas Clapton appropriated, that is — is well-represented on this set, along with Cale’s early signature song, “Crazy Mama”. Indeed, the first disc is a fine introduction to Cale’s drawling style, a kind of lazy man’s hybridization of country, blues and rock that makes an interesting counterpoint to the contemporaneous Austin outlaw scene.
Some of the mixes are a bit troubling (the electric guitar on “Crazy Mama” comes blazing and all out of proportion, and that happens elsewhere), and though they may be true to the original tapes, they should have been fixed. Cale’s preferred drum sound, that dead-air ’70s tone, today sounds like a low-rent drum machine.
But the first disc holds a number of warm, treasured songs that somehow resonate with the sweltering heat of an Oklahoma front porch at high noon. And that’s a good place to stop, with that first disc. Nothing on the second disc has any spark to it. The paucity of ideas is revealed three tracks in, with a desultory cut of the standard “Mama Don’t”. The last Cale song I remember hearing on the radio, “Shanghaied”, sounds no less forced here.
