...Carry on, carry on....
The
Hat has been giving some thought to Love. Now, stop sniggering and
own up - the less cynical and hard-hearted among you will certainly
have done the same thing from time to time and often this may have
involved recall of that First Great Passion when you were, oh so
young. It probably came from nowhere, smacked you around the head a
little, transported you to heaven, or thereabouts, forced you to
behave absurdly, spend money you didn't have, go places you didn't
know existed and generally change every point of reference you ever
had. Of course, what with you being so young, this may have only lasted a single day, a week or, if
the sun was shining, a whole summer holiday...
And
then..you know it...and then came the world-ending, crashing,
smashing, crushing, painful, all-over-now moment, the Dear John/Jane
note, the cold shrug, the indifference and the excoriating put-down.
How did we survive and clamber from our slough of despond? Surely,
when you are young, this is The End? Tomorrow will never come.
Surely, Nobody can be this miserable and recover? But recover we do,
survive we do – and to the delight of our bemused, concerned
parents, we pull ourselves together and snap out of it...
Fortunately,
those of you who suffered were not alone. In our corner, batting away
on our behalf were all those poets, storytellers and song-writers.
They alone knew how we felt and could put it into words and sing
about it. The long tradition of oral and musical narrative is a
hugely distinguished one and never so effective as when it highlights
some moment, some emotion, some event with which we can identify. For
centuries, we have been bewitched by poets who said it for us,
whether it was chuckling at our fellow pilgrims, commenting on the
gore and futility of war, or burying ourselves in the arms of the
sensual metaphysical love poets or a contemporary and ostentatiously
weepy love song. Even, heaven forbid, when we needed to fight back
with a bit of tough hard-talking and waspish irony - they were there for us, told us what to do and assured us not to worry - it happened to everybody.
There
have always been outstanding singer-songwriters and we have always
been truly blessed with those who can say in a few lines what we have
been thinking and what we wanted to say but couldn't quite. 'Nobody
knows the trouble I've seen' is still as apposite as it ever was.
Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen pressed all our buttons dead centre.
When Dylan wrote those two huge get-lost songs 'Like a Rolling Stone'
and 'Don't think Twice', he put into words the shattered dreams of
millions. When Lennon penned 'Jealous Guy' and a hundred others he was
able to get inside your head and speak on your behalf. The tradition
of sitting at a piano or picking up a guitar and singing on our
behalf is hugely rich and deep in the blues world. Some do it better
than others, but never is it more poignant than when the subject is
love – whether it is joyous, despairing or - as is often the case - just plain darn cynical. Our
friends the songwriters somehow always seemed to know about this stuff and
they are always there when we need them.
For
The Hat, J J Cale always seemed to be one of those songwriters who
has been looking over his shoulder and reading his diary. Setting out
from Tulsa in the late fifties with another brilliant guitarist, poet
and song-writer Leon Russell, not only did he play heavenly guitar
and sing in an amazing laid-back way, but how could he possibly know
what I was thinking and then put it in a song lyric?
Even
though everyone now knows 'After Midnight' and 'Cocaine' thanks to
Clapton's covers, it is 'Crazy Mama' that became one of his biggest
hits – and you should take a quick trip over to Youtube to catch him playing a
wonderful spacy slide version of this. It was, however, probably the
arrival of the album 'Troubadour' in 1976 that brought him into
everybody's front room. Songs like 'Travellin' light is the only way
to fly', 'The woman that got away' and 'You got something' identified
to a wider audience somebody who could say it on our behalf – and
explained why luminaries like Neil Young should talk of him in hushed
tones. He managed to hit the same nerve-endings with the release of
the famous 'Shades' album a few years later, when the track 'Carry
On' got picked up and played by every band and singer in the land - and who could not relate to the killer lyrics of 'I wish I had not said that'? It
is good to know that his 'Road To Escondido' collaboration with Clapton picked
up a Grammy Award over 25 years later and just this year his guitar
playing can be heard on Clapton's CD 'Old Sock'.
And
now he is gone. He leaves us a mountain of brilliance as his legacy.
I fondly hope that there is place somewhere that J J can meet up with
other poets, story tellers and song-writers and spread a little of
that insight, humour, diffidence, knowledge and knowing; where he can
sit down alongside the broken-hearted, the young and in love, those
struggling for the right words, those beaten down cynics who've seen
it all and want to fight back.... pick up his guitar and play it All Right for them.
Now that would be a very cool place to hang out...
Pip Pip John Weldon Cale!
The Man in The Hat