Monday, July 29, 2013

Thank You J J....Poet, Storyteller, Song-writer...


...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