That's kinda what happened to me: I listened to jazz, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll. And when I sat down to write a song, I had all these influences comin' through."In the Los Angeles of the early-to-mid Sixties, Cale found work not only as a for-hire guitar gunslinger in the bars of the San Fernando Valley but as a studio engineer in the employ of Leon Russell's Texan boss "Snuff" Garrett. Garrett was the mastermind behind such West Coast pop fluff as Bobby Vee and Gary Lewis & the Playboys, with Russell doing most of the hard graft in the studio. When psychedelia struck LA with the force of an earthquake, Snuff suggested Cale round up a posse of his cronies and cut an album of "psychedelic hits of the day" - "Eight Miles High", "Sunshine Superman" and the like.Released under the unforgettably dumb name Leather Coated Minds, the 1966 album Trip Down Sunset Strip inadvertently spawned the song that would later change the course of Cale's destiny. For many years, too, America was so migratory: people would uproot and move, and with them would come their musical culture, which they'd blend with the culture of wherever they landed.

Four decades later, both men have somehow parlayed their canny, roughhewn Southernness into a concert hall which usually reverberates to the sound of Brahms and Mozart."The geography has something to do with my music," Cale tells me in his hotel room on the day before the show. Almost 40 years ago, "Johnnie Cale" and his band the Valentines were playing the same honkytonk circuit around Texas and Oklahoma as The Band's Levon Helm, then drumming with the rockabilly renegade Ronnie Hawkins. For the best part of 25 years, Jean-Jacques Cale has assumed the role of American rock's anonymous drifter - a shadowy Everyman, a dishevelled figure you might have spotted once at some roadside diner. And yet Cale's very recalcitrance is mesmerising, as though the implicit distrust of overt emotion has itself induced in him a higher level of emotional engagement. Seated in these improbably formal surroundings, one has a sudden and jolting sense of what Peter Guralnick once termed the "journeys and arrivals of American musicians". The famous voice that gave new depth to the Seventies phrase "laid back" is barely a parched whisper now, testimony to the diffidence that Cale brings to the business of live performance - or at least to the dilemma of presenting himself as any kind of star. As he falls into a subdued, cursory version of his signature song, "After Midnight", he isn't giving very much more away. Yet almost nobody appears to realise that the shuffling figure on the stage is Cale himself It's all part of the effect, of course.