The Restless J.J. Cale and His ‘Travel-Log’ of an Unplugged Life : Cale’s Latest Album Is an Enlivened Work; It Overflows With Ideas and Hints He’s Ready to Kick the Blocks From Under His Mobile Home

To anyone familiar with his music, it’s tremendously apropos that J.J. Cale has spent the past decade living in a mobile home. While loose and laid-back, Cale’s songs--which include the Eric Clapton-covered “After Midnight” and “Cocaine”--are anything but stationary.

His current, groove-laden “Travel-Log” album is redolent of low-rent good times, barbecue smoke and corrugated metal, but there is also enough rhythmic snap and sizzle present that it’s clear Cale could kick the blocks away from his tires and scream down the road any time he chose.

“I’ve always enjoyed being a Gypsy,” the soft-spoken Oklahoman said Wednesday from his new home near Escondido, where his 24-foot trailer remains parked out back. “I basically make my living writing songs, so I’ve been able to go around in my trailer. If I got tired of a place, I could move on and roam around. It’s a nice environment for writing songs, as opposed to sitting at a recording studio console all day.”

A Tulsa native, Cale first came to Los Angeles in the early ‘60s in a musical migration that also included fellow Tulsans Leon Russell and Carl Radle. He got in the habit then of living in hotels wherever his club gigs took him. Following his introduction to fame with Clapton’s 1970 hit with “After Midnight” and his own subsequent success with “Crazy Mama” in 1971, Cale relocated to Tennessee and adopted his trailer park lifestyle.

When he again moved West a decade ago, Cale settled in Orange County because “I didn’t want to live up by the (Los Angeles) music industry. I was trying to cut down that jones. So I moved down around Anaheim. There’s a lot of trailer camps around Disneyland, and I kind of liked it there. It was real straight, as opposed to the Hollywood environment.

“It’s a quiet life and it had its advantages. There’s no responsibility: You don’t have anything to clean up, it’s cheap, the bills are a cash deal. I’d bicycle most places, which I found could be faster than a car. I didn’t own a phone. As far as business goes it was kind of slim because if you don’t communicate you don’t do too much business nowadays.”

Indeed, Cale’s unplugged lifestyle and infrequent output--”Travel-Log” is his first LP in six years--has led to his being typified as a recluse in the press.

“That’s one of the reasons I’ve been doing quite a few interviews lately: If you don’t say anything, they make up things. So suddenly I’m a recluse. But I’m a songwriter basically, not a performer, and selling songs is kind of an inside deal, so I didn’t need to be hyped for that.”

Along with presently making himself more available to the press, Cale has expanded his typical annual six-week tour--conducted by mobile home, naturally--to a four-month outing. The greater activity is reflective of the album itself, as “Travel-Log” may be Cale’s most enlivened work, and it simmers with more ideas and feeling than some of his more famous emulators have mustered in eons.

It helps no small amount that Cale is surrounded by excellent and kindred musicians on the album, including pianist Spooner Oldham (a true legend in Southern soul music), bassist Tim Drummond (whose credits include James Brown, Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan), saxophonist Steve Douglas (the honk on Duane Eddy’s hits) and percussionist Jimmy Karstein, who has worked with everyone from Gary Lewis to James Harman. Joined by singer-guitarist Christine Lakeland and drummer Jim Cruce, they also form the band that will perform with Cale at the Coach House on Monday.

More than the linking geographical theme to some of the “Travel-Log” songs--titles include “Shanghaied,” “New Orleans” and “Tijuana”--the tracks add up to a coherent whole, suggesting a musical journey. Surprisingly, the album’s 14 songs were recorded over a five-year period, employing a variety of studios and techniques.

“I really scattershot things,” Cale said. “Sometimes I’d write the song first then hire the musicians or write the song into a tape recorder and have the band learn off that, record the rhythm track with a band and write the song from that, sometimes do it in a big studio with real fine gear, sometimes do it in my trailer with real funky, cheesy equipment.” It’s a matter each time, he said, of finding a special atmosphere, “trying to find something I can relate to myself.”

After a successful release in Europe last year, “Travel-Log” was issued domestically this year on Silvertone/RCA. Though Cale earns his bread chiefly as a songwriter, occasionally as a performer, the influences he cites are all guitarists: Chet Atkins, Les Paul, Scotty Moore and Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown among others. Cale usually submerges his guitar technique deep in the grooves of his songs, surfacing with short, brilliant solos. Clapton and Mark Knopfler both list Cale as a source for their styles.

Both on record and live, what Cale tries to communicate through music is “the same feeling I get from playing it. Music is a kind of magical thing, and you can’t make magic every time, but you try. Every once in a while it has that magic, and the audience knows that. I probably miss it more than I hit it, but I think that’s what all musicians try for.”

Years ago Cale opined that, given the compromises of the music business, “the true art stays at home.” He still feels that way. “It can be more artful there because you don’t have to come up with formulas and business decisions, all the money things don’t affect what you do. You just do it for art, for your own enjoyment or for friends, and there’s no connections or financial rewards. With each generation it seems like music is more of a business. People look at the music business like doctors look at medicine.”

Not that Cale objects to the rewards. He generally is against classic songs being cheapened through use in commercials, but the appropriation of “After Midnight” by Michelob doesn’t faze him: “Number one, because they pay me for it. I sold all my songs and have no control over them, but I do get paid when they use them. And--modest fellow--I didn’t think ‘After Midnight’ was one of those kind of special tunes, so it didn’t bother me.”

Cale’s “Cocaine” offers an ambivalent view of that drug’s lure, and was written at a time when it was far from being the societal problem it has since become. Though the song remains a party anthem for some, Cale said he can’t have any regrets about penning it.

“I don’t because I’m a writer. I’m a great believer in freedom of speech. The song is not for cocaine, and it’s not against cocaine. It’s something I observed and wrote a song about. That’s what all writers do, in prose, poetry, whatever. I wasn’t trying to turn anybody on to cocaine, or turn anybody off. When I wrote it I didn’t realize that 10 years later it would be a big thing the government was going crazy over.”

He’s glad that the fans he attracts know his material well enough to not be shouting for “Cocaine” or his other familiar songs during his shows. They can present other problems, though. “The songs people do request are the obscure ones off some old B-side that I probably can’t remember.”

Cale recently purchased a genuine house without wheels on the rural outskirts of Escondido. He explained, “I thought I’d get me a little place and see what mowing the lawn was like.”

He’s 51 now and never thinks of retiring because, he said, “I’m kind of retired now. You have to remember I didn’t do anything for the last five years. I’d rent a recording studio for two days once or twice a year, then once a year ride around in a motor home for six weeks. So basically for 10 months of the year I’ve been retired.

“It’s generally really hard to pay your rent playing music. Most people have to quit after a couple of years. I’ve been real lucky to be able to do it for 30 years. I didn’t get rich. But I can pay my bills. I wouldn’t want to have gotten any bigger than I did because when you’re that famous people really get on your case. My days are all kind of like Saturday because I don’t have a regular job to go to at 9 every day. I read a lot and have a lot of time on my hands.”

Cale recently learned that fans in England publish a newsletter dedicated to his doings called “Troubadour” (the title of an album he released in 1976). “Finding out about that was a real surprise,” he said with a chuckle, “I have no idea what they manage to fill it with.”

The J.J. Cale Band plays Monday at 8 and 10:30 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $19.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.