http://www.npr.org/2014/07/26/334454588/eric-clapton-and-j-j-cale-notes-on-a-friendship
I was surprised to read that J J Cale wasn't in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It just shows how meaningless it is. 
Thanks for the link, superval!!
The following really hit home for me. I think because I always thought J.J.
wanted fame and fortune. Now I see that it may not have been desired at all...:
Interviewer: From the interviews I've heard with J.J. Cale, he didn't really seem to mind that he never became famous in the way you did. Do you think he cared?
Eric Clapton: 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.
Interviewer: So it was a benefit in that sense?
Eric Clapton: 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.
