Here’s a story with an unusual twist. A struggling songwriter from Oklahoma records a modest tune in 1966, and nothing happens. Four years later, one of the most famous guitarists alive puts it on his debut album, and suddenly everyone is singing along. The songwriter, meanwhile, finds out about it when he hears it on the radio. This is the tale of “After Midnight”, which J.J. Cale wrote and Eric Clapton made famous, and which has become one of the great night-time anthems in rock. It’s a story about generosity, accidents, and what happens when a good song finds the right pair of hands. I’ll start with the man who started it all.
J.J. Cale and the Quiet Original
J.J. Cale was, by all accounts, one of the least pushy men in the music business. Born in Oklahoma and based for years in Tulsa, he preferred to keep his head down and his guitar low. He released “After Midnight” as a single on Liberty Records in 1966, with “Slow Motion” on the flip side, and it vanished without trace. Cale was working odd jobs in music and had half given up on the idea of being a star. Nobody who heard that first version could have guessed that the song would one day be sung back at a stage by crowds in vast halls, with the lights down and every lighter held high.
How the song reached Clapton is a matter of mild dispute. Some say it was Delaney Bramlett who passed it along, others point to Leon Russell, and all agree that it came from the circle of friends Clapton fell in with when he joined the Bramletts’ band at the end of the sixties. What matters is the result. Clapton recorded it in January 1970 for his first solo record, with Delaney producing, and put it out as a single in the autumn. It reached number eighteen in America, which was a handsome start for a man who had spent the previous few years hiding inside the idea of a band.
Cale Finds Out
The most charming part of the story is that Cale had no idea it was happening. He first became aware that Clapton had recorded his song when it turned up on the radio. Imagine that: you’re a songwriter earning very little, and you flick on the wireless to hear a world-famous guitarist singing your words. Cale, being the kind of man he was, took it in good part. The royalties from Clapton’s version helped to keep him going, and the attention eventually nudged him into recording his own debut album, Naturally, in 1971, on which he cut a fresh version of the song himself. It’s hard to think of a happier accident in the whole history of pop.
Clapton, for his part, has always been generous about it. He has admitted that he has listened to Cale’s original countless times and still can’t work out exactly how it was made: how many guitars are on it, how the thing swings the way it does. That’s a remarkable confession from a man who is supposedly the greatest guitarist in Britain. It suggests the song’s apparent simplicity hides a great deal of art. Cale made it look easy, and it never is. The best craftsmen always do, and the rest of us only discover the difficulty when we try to copy them.
What the Song Actually Says
The lyric is not complicated. The working day is over, the narrator has a pocketful of energy and a free evening, and he’s calling someone to come out and join him once midnight has passed. The promise is of letting go, of loosening a tie and stepping out of the daytime self. Cale is reported to have found the idea for the words when someone in the crowd at a gig in Atlanta shouted for the band to cut loose. It’s a perfect example of how a song can arrive sideways, from a stranger’s throwaway remark, and then spend half a century being sung by people who have never heard the story.
For anybody who has ever worked a day job, the song has an immediate appeal. It’s a song for the night shift, for the person who comes alive when the sun goes down. There’s a faint touch of the sinful about it, but it’s a very good-humoured sin. Nobody in the song is doing anything worse than staying up late and having a pleasant time. If you’ve spent your career on the wrong side of the clock, as plenty of late-night workers and wakeful listeners have, it feels less like a pop song and more like a hymn to the hours nobody else wants.
Clapton’s Versions, and a Beer Advert
Clapton’s 1970 recording is an irresistible piece of rhythmic engineering. The tempo is brisk, the guitar licks are crisp and playful, and the vocal is relaxed and cheerful. It sounds like a man enjoying a night off, which is just what the lyric prescribes. The record was one of the first indications that Clapton might thrive as a solo artist, quite apart from the thunder of his earlier groups. There’s a lightness to it that surprised people at the time. Here was the man they’d called a god, grinning, and it turned out he had a very good grin.
Then, in 1987, a brewery asked him to re-record it for a Michelob television advert, and he did, producing a slower, bluesier, more laid-back version. It was released as a single in 1988 alongside his Crossroads box set, and it’s the one that radio tends to play now. It gave the song a second wind and handed a whole new generation a taste of Cale’s songwriting. Their paths crossed again in 2006, when the two men made an album together, The Road to Escondido, which won a Grammy. Cale died in 2013, but the friendship, and the song, remain, as sturdy as ever.
Why It Never Wears Out
I’ve heard “After Midnight” in a great many settings, and it never seems to wear out. Part of the reason is that it belongs to no single era. It could have been written in 1930 or 2030, and nobody would blink. Another part is that it’s an invitation rather than an argument. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It simply says the night is young, the troubles of the day can wait, and there’s room for one more at the table. That’s a generous thing for a song to say, and it’s exactly the sort of generosity that Cale and Clapton, in their different ways, both seemed to embody.
The Last Word
So what does “After Midnight” mean? It means freedom after the working day, the joy of a night that belongs to you. But it also carries a second meaning, which is the happy accident of how it found its audience. A quiet man wrote a good tune, a famous friend heard it, and the world was richer. That’s about as close as pop music comes to a fairy tale. I like to imagine Cale in front of the radio, bemused, listening to a stranger make his song fly. Few things in music are as satisfying as a gift that lands in the right place.