Musician JJ Cale dies; wrote Clapton, Skynyrd hits

If musicians were measured not by the number of records they sold but by the number of peers they influenced, JJ Cale would have been a towering figure in 1970s rock.

His best songs, like "After Midnight," "Cocaine," and "Call Me the Breeze," were hits - for other artists. Eric Clapton took "After Midnight" and "Cocaine" and turned them into the kind of songs that defined rock for a long time. Lynyrd Skynyrd took the easy-shuffling "Breeze" and supercharged it into a hit.

Mr. Cale, the singer-songwriter and producer known as the main architect of the Tulsa Sound, died Friday at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, Calif. His manager, Mike Kappus, said he died of a heart attack. He was 74.

While his best-known songs remain in heavy rotation on the radio nearly 40 years later, most folks wouldn't be able to name Mr. Cale as their author. That was a role he had no problem with.

"No, it doesn't bother me," he said in an interview on his website. "What's really nice is when you get a check in the mail."

And the checks rolled in for decades. The list of artists who covered his music or cite him as a direct influence reads like a who's who of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - Clapton, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Mark Knopfler, the Allman Brothers, Carlos Santana, Captain Beefheart, and Bryan Ferry among many others.

It was Clapton who forged the closest relationship with Mr. Cale. The two collaborated on The Road to Escondido, which won the Grammy for best contemporary blues album in 2008.

Clapton once told Vanity Fair that Mr. Cale was the living person he most admired, and Mr. Cale weighed the impact Clapton had on his life in a 2006 interview: "I'd probably be selling shoes today if it wasn't for Eric."

Clapton described Mr. Cale's music as "a strange hybrid. It's not really blues, it's not really folk or country or rock-and-roll. It's somewhere in the middle."

Mr. Cale arrived at that intersection by birth. Born John Weldon Cale in Oklahoma City, he was raised in Tulsa. Buffeted by country and western on one side and the blues on the other, Oklahoma offered a melting pot.