Unknown icon: The guitarist Neil Young decried to have “the master’s touch”
The music business wasn’t always meant to be a popularity contest. Before people had even gotten used to the rock bands that were taking off in the post-Beatles world, some of the greatest artists of all time tended to fade into the background of session scenes, only becoming high-profile once people started to pick them out of a lineup when needed for another session. Those artists still deserved their just due, though, and Neil Young considered someone like JJ Cale to be one of the best to pick up a guitar.
For the blues rock enthusiasts, Cale’s is a name that’s only referenced in hushed tones half the time. Whereas many people would cite Cale as an influence back in the day, the modern take on blues guitar playing tends to return to three places: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the Holy Trinity of Kings: BB, Albert and Freddie.
Cale is still a part of that conversation, if only for his songwriting alone. Much like the other fantastic blues players like Willie Dixon and Memphis Minnie, thousands of rock fans have been singing their praises for years—they just might not have known they were singing along to their songs.
When looking back on some of the finest classic rock tracks of all time, Led Zeppelin pulled from them all the time, with both Dixon and Minnie being credited on songs like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘When The Levee Breaks’, respectively. Clapton would even put some shine on Cale’s name when covering the classic, ‘Cocaine’ for his album Slowhand.
As far as Young could see it, Cale deserved to be in the conversation right up there with Jimi Hendrix, telling Musicians Hall of Fame, “JJ Cale’s got the master’s touch. [He’s] one of the finest, most masterful guitar players. You can hear his influence on Clapton and Mark Knopfler. They have obviously learned a lot from JJ, and hardly anybody even knows who JJ is”.
While Cale may have been lost to time by many rock and roll fans, Clapton and Knopfler have passed his delicate approach to the guitar. Compared to Young’s approach, where he sounds like he is wrestling with the guitar half the time he tries to take a solo, Cale was the perfect mix of flash and taste, being able to do those insane runs while also making the guitar talk a range of different languages when he played.
Listening back to his version of some of his classic hits, the guitar ends up sounding closer to a human voice whenever he plays. While guitarists might spend a lot of time trying to work out the bugs of their sound, Cale sounds like he is completely at one with his instrument whenever those records are played.
It’s that perfection that Young would be going for when looking for session players. Even though he may have come up with the basic skeleton of a song like ‘Heart of Gold’, he admitted that it wouldn’t be half the song it is without the other guitar geniuses on the song helping to get the point across. There might be a long line of history whenever a guitar player takes a solo, but Cale’s influence is so omnipresent that it seems to be baked into the basis of rock and roll guitar.
