Eric Clapton New Album

[Vannessa Rataj]

The conventional way of making an album is often to record the backing tracks and then do the overdubs, so you're always cycling through the songs," says engineer Alan Douglas. "On this album, however, we could literally go for six weeks and maybe only touch on four songs. It was incredibly intense."

For Alan Douglas, certainly. A man who thrives on live recording, staking his reputation on being able to acquit himself quickly and competently, Douglas was involved at both ends of the recording spectrum on the Pilgrim project: the live and the programmed, the improvised and the extensively reworked. It was, as he puts it, "always evolving, always interesting".

As long as Douglas was involved with design and installation projects he was relatively contented. However, once the projects were finished, tedium set in. "By the time the Olympic project was finished I basically hadn't done much engineering for nearly three years," he says. "That was apart from some sessions with Steve Lillywhite, and I was bored senseless. Also, the other problem with being the Chief Engineer at places like Townhouse and Olympic is that, because of their stature, all of the great clients they attract come in with their own engineers, and so you tend to end up just filling in and doing all of the crap."

"When EMI bought out the record company and discovered that the studios were all part of the package I found myself with a golden opportunity to be made redundant, get a payoff and go freelance," he says. The fact that he took that opportunity represents a decision he wouldn't regret, and he's now forged a reputation based on live band recordings and an ability to work calmly and efficiently with sometimes complicated situations. "If people are pushed for time, they know that I'm not going to be messing around, taking ages to get sounds," he says. "I'll work quickly to get the drum sound and set everything else up, and then I'll be running tape in 'record'."

"After we'd returned to England, 95% of the material that we'd recorded in LA was basically scrapped," says Douglas. "Let's just say that Eric didn't feel it was 'different' or current enough. I mean, as a band recording it sounded fantastic, but he just decided that it wasn't what he wanted the record to be. I think he considered it to be too ordinary and, since he really loves contemporary American R&B and hip hop records, he wanted to get that type of feeling on the record... As time went on it became much more of an Eric album, with his own compositions largely replacing those of other people."

"Anyway, when were mixing one of the TDF tracks, on the second day Eric said, 'You know, I've never liked the way that bit follows that bit. Why don't we try...' At that point everything stopped. It was the second day of the mix and we had to rearrange the entire song. Simon sorted out the new arrangement in Pro Tools and, because we always worked digitally, it was very easy to transfer in and out of Pro Tools digitally and avoid the level and speed problems that you'd normally get with analogue. So the song was rearranged, and then it would be a case of 'I think it needs a guitar.' The capacity within Pro Tools to do something, get it so that you liked it and then say, 'Well, actually, I don't know if I ever did really like it. Why don't we try this...' sort of set the scene for how the Pilgrim album would be done.

"His [Eric Clapton's] singing on this album is the best I've ever heard it," says Douglas. "His performances were extraordinary, and in that respect credit is certainly due to Si [Climie] because he's very, very good in terms of the psychology of recording vocalists. That's mainly as a result of him working with a lot of people who can't sing at all, and consequently this album must be heard for Eric's stunning vocal performances... not to mention his blinding guitar work.

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There are, you could argue, two strands of Eric Clapton fans: those who love his scorching electric solos and groundbreaking fusions of blues and rock, and those who prefer his mellow, unplugged pop songs from later years. The two groups might just find common ground on his latest album.

The Breeze: An Appreciation of J.J. Cale will be released next week. It's an all-star tribute to Clapton's friend, the guitarist and singer-songwriter from Tulsa, Okla. J.J. Cale deeply inspired Clapton and wrote two of his biggest hits, "After Midnight" and "Cocaine."

The album includes all-star guests Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, Willie Nelson, Derek Trucks and John Mayer. Clapton was in England when he got a text message that Cale had died; as he tells NPR's Eric Westervelt, it was on the long flight to Los Angeles for the funeral that he began to map his tribute out. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

Eric Clapton: On my phone. When I got to L.A., I drove down with my friend to Escondido and we went to the service. I met his wife, Christine, and his manager, Mike Kappus, and we paid our respects to one another and gave each other hugs. I held back as much as I could, but as soon as I thought it was decent I said, "I'd like to make a record to pay tribute to John." And they said, "That would be great."

Making this record was a way for me to say thank you for all the inspiration over the years. I suppose at some point I started to feel mildly outraged that he hadn't got the recognition that, at least I thought, he should have had. He plowed a furrow that was unique and that's the way he wanted to be, to have a quiet life. But, I still felt that he deserved more recognition, at least in his own country. He was pretty well known in Europe but lesser known in America, I think.

You write in your autobiography that you were a bit tired of the guitar hero thing and the gymnastic guitar playing. It sounds like J.J. Cale helped to start to dial you back, to be a little more restrained in the soloing. Is that accurate?

I think he found it inconvenient to be pestered by people about what he did for a living. I think he saw his job, or his vocation as a musician, on the same sort of scale as someone who likes to do landscape gardening, or an architect. He just thought it was something you could develop a skill at, be good at, get some satisfaction. I don't think he recognized that all of the other paraphernalia was necessary. And, in truth, if he had been held to account for that, it would have taken up too much time for him to do the work he did.

I mean, I wouldn't change anything. For me he was a beacon in a philosophical sense, because I needed to know that there was someone else out there that didn't want all those trappings. When I was growing up in the rock and roll school in England, in the '60s, it just seemed to be a given that everyone was going to end up on TV. The ambition was to have a Top 10 single, to get a recording contract. I felt really alone in the fact that I just wanted to become reasonably good at what I was doing, at playing music. I kind of intuitively knew that that stuff was distracting and counterproductive and mind-distorting.

I never talked to him too much about it. But he lived in a way that I thought was a good model for someone who wanted to pursue music as a serious vocation, without getting too bogged down in all of the peripheral stuff.

Yeah, I think he cleverly plotted his course. But, it was only later that I found out that he began his journey as a recording engineer, anyway. He didn't start making records until he was, I think, in his early 30s. Up until then he had been learning how to make things sound good, recording people like Freddie King and Bobby Bland, getting steeped in that kind of music and knowing how to mic it and record it and mix it. Then he just applied those skills to his own songs.

How did it come about, working with such an incredible collection of musician friends of yours to record The Breeze? Did you just start calling up John Mayer, Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, Willie Nelson, saying, "You want in on this?"

Actually, the first person I asked was Don White, and I never met Don White until the funeral. He introduced himself to me and said, "I would like to say hello. I'm the guy that gave John his first job." It turned out that J.J. played in his band until he decided that he wanted to make a record, and then he excused himself. I was really impressed with this guy. He was a gentleman, you know?

Yes, John's got a pretty good idea of what's going on; he was already doing "The Breeze" on stage. He's ideal for this because we need someone with that kind of energy, and he's a good interpreter. We went into the studio in New York with the tracks and he got the three songs in two hours or something like that, first and second takes. Needed no direction whatsoever.

Yeah, I thought it was important to pick out things people didn't know. If it was gonna be for my satisfaction, I may not have done it that way, but I wanted people to know about his history, so I was choosing songs from way back. Like, "Starbound" is a song that not many people know about. And there were a couple of songs that were unpublished. I thought it was good for people to see the other side of J.J., songs that weren't necessarily instantly commercial but that had substance and showed that side of him as a songwriter.

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