JJ Cale on guitar playing - Russell Hall [Performing Songwriter - Issue 116]

 

How did your guitar playing become distinctive? 

J.J. Cale: 

I could never get the playing of whoever I was listening to exactly right. I would miss a few notes here and there or get a chord wrong. Through that, my playing ended up sounding a bit different from the person I was imitating. As the years went by, I deliberately kept letting that happen. That’s where a person’s style comes from. If you play exactly like someone else, you don’t come up with anything original. In a sense you could say my guitar playing is full of mistakes that came from trying to imitate others.

Do you have a sense of why your music has had a greater influence on British artists than American artists? 

I don’t. It might be that I’m more or less a country-blues type of guy, and the British seem to like American blues. Everyone from England—and from around the planet, really—tries to imitate American blues singers. That’s where rock ’n’ roll came from. I already knew about those artists the British musicians were listening to. I would hear their records and think, “Oh, they’re imitating this or that American blues artist.”

What did British guitar players like Clapton bring to the blues that wasn’t there before? 

They electrified it to a much greater extent. Most of those American players were acoustic players. Some had played electric guitars, but when Eric and those other guys came along, they added something different. It was louder, with more distorted guitar. Those old blues players came along before the solid-body existed in 1950. Some of the guitarists who played with Muddy Waters played solid-body guitars, but not with the intensity and volume the English guys did.

When people talk about your influence, they often speak first of Mark Knopfler. 

Yeah, people have told me that. I’ve never noticed. There might have been some influence on that first album—the one with “Sultans of Swing” [1978’s Dire Straits]. His vocals are pretty close to Bob Dylan, but Mark has his own style. We all borrow when we’re first starting out. I’m still playing [Clarence] “Gatemouth” Brown licks. That’s how we learn. But I never felt I influenced Mark any more than some others influenced him

—By Russell Hall

From Performing Songwriter Issue 116

Photo by Jane Richey

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