No Dire Straits with Me and Mark
It’s time. It’s time for me to indulge myself, it’s time for you to perhaps enjoy my musical fandom journey, or roll your eyes. Mark Knopfler comes to Kansas City on Wednesday night for a show at the Midland Theatre, and I will see the former front man for Dire Straits for the eighth time. I have hardly been bashful about my enthusiasm for the guitar virtuoso, whose finger-picking style of playing has had him rated with the greatest guitarists of his time.
He founded Dire Straits in the late 1970’s, and on their first album the song “Sultan’s of Swing” made the band, and Knopfler famous. They were a very different band for the time, their spare style in sharp contrast to the arena rock that dominated the music scene in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. I enjoyed the song, but it did not make me a huge fan of Dire Straits.
That occurred with the third album “Making Movies”. MTV’s heavy rotation of the song “Skateaway” hooked me. I purchased the album, and played the grooves off it. I was working at a horrendous job at a bean factory in Lawrence, Kansas at the time, and I would return home each night, and scrub the grime off of me in the shower as the entire album played out. This went on for months. The album has one great song after another, with the heartwrenching “Romeo and Juliet” the finest of the bunch, and a song that probably is Knopfler’s signature. He plays it at every concert he does, with the extended guitar runout a spine-tingling event every time.
When you really look back at it, Dire Straits really was pretty much Mark Knopfler’s enterprise. He wrote and sang all the songs, and his creative control can be best personified by the fact that his own brother quit the band during the recording of “Making Movies”. When you hear Mark Knopfler interviewed anytime in the past thirty years, he seems to be the nicest,and most gracious man in the world, but clearly, he had, and wanted, complete control of things.
I mentioned that the style of the band was so different from most rock of the time and used the phrase “arena rock”. What became incredibly ironic was that Dire Straits would soon become one of the greatest stadium attractions in the world. “Making Movies” was followed by “Love Over Gold”, which was quite successful, and included another longtime concert staple, the 14-minute “Telegraph Road”, but it was with the release of “Brothers in Arms” that the band exploded internationally. One of the first CD’s, it helped popularize the new medium, and was the number one album in 1985 in multiple nations, including the U.S., where it was number one for nine weeks. “Money for Nothing” was the first single released only on CD, and was a monstrous hit.
A gigantic tour ensued, two years, millions of fans, tens of millions of dollars. It was all too much for Knopfler, who during his time leading Dire Straits, often did side projects, such as multiple film scores, producing for artists like Bob Dylan, and lending songs out to artists as diverse as Tina Turner. A couple of quotes from the time indicate his mindset about megastardom. "A lot of press reports were saying we were the biggest band in the world. There's not an accent then on the music, there's an accent on popularity. I needed a rest." And.. "It just got too big. If anyone can tell me one good thing about fame, I'd be very interested to hear it.”
The band took an extended break, and reformed, sort of, to make their final album “On Every Street” in 1991. While all Dire Straits albums are mainly Mark Knopfler constructions, when you listen to “On Every Street” ,given the context of his now lengthy solo career, you kind of get the feeling that it is really his first solo record.
The first official one was “Golden Heart” in 1996, and ironically, it sounds more like a Dire Straits record than “On Every Street”. But his music had started to change. There is a lot of lead guitar on “Golden Heart”, but in the now nine solo albums he has released, he clearly cares more about crafting songs than showing off his guitar work. You can find plenty of that on You Tube with multiple epic moments with guitar greats like Eric Clapton and Chet Atkins, who he did an album with called “Neck and Neck”.
If you were a Dire Straits fan, but never really explored his solo catalogue, you likely would be surprised. Much of the music might be described as Americana with a British and Irish lilt. But it is so varied that really trying to put a tag on it is kind of foolish. His most recent solo effort “Down the Road Forever” pretty much covers everything from shuffle blues, to flat out funk.
Most of the songs are about stories and people that are miles from biographical. Prairie wives, sailors, failed poets, sad carpenters, racing drivers, merry gamblers, bar owners, and boxers. They generally are low-key and fascinating, and there is always intricate guitar work, even if it often quiet.
That’s why seeing him live is a delight. I like the albums very much, but I like to see him show off, too, and he does it bigtime in the concerts, although there is no flash, just brilliance. He has very much settled in to his life as a solo artist, and has distanced himself from the Dire Straits days, almost to a fault. He didn’t show up for the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, and the concerts usually only feature a handful of Straits songs, with his stubbornness personified on this tour by the fact that in over sixty shows in Europe and the U.S. he hasn’t played “Sultans of Swing” at all. He played it at every show I saw before, but, apparently, he’s had enough.
But he also can change his mind. He played “Money for Nothing” the first time I saw him, never since, but he is playing it on this tour. Frankly, I don’t care about that. It is, with “Sultan’s of Swing”, Dire Straits most famous song, but it is far down my list of favorites. The last three times he has toured the U.S. he has made a stop in Kansas City, which is convenient, but just a tad disappointing, since the first five times it required a little vacation for my wife and I, four times in Chicago (once with Emmylou Harris), and once in Omaha (with Bob Dylan). That being said, The Midland is a wonderful theater with great acoustics, and to say I am excited for the show is the grandest of understatements.
Knopfler has hinted this could be his last tour, (he turned seventy a couple of weeks ago) although he has backed off on that a bit during the tour, which featured sold out big arenas and festivals throughout Europe, and sellouts of venues like The Midland here in America.
The ten-piece band that hits the stage includes many members who have been with him for a long time. One is musical director and keyboardist Guy Fletcher, who dates back to the late Dire Straits days, and who writes a wonderful tour diary for each tour with fabulous photos and interesting stories mostly about things besides the shows. Many songs significantly use multiple wind instruments for the numbers with a Celtic flair. All of the players are virtuosos, and the musicianship keeps right up with the man himself.
Virtually every number is at least seven minutes long, and they never seem dragged out. There is little conversation from Knopfler, although he does a gracious band introduction segment, and what he does say is often wryly humorous.
I was lucky enough to “reconnect” with Mark Knopfler when his second solo album “Sailing to Philadelphia” came out in 2000. One of the songs “Boom Like That” was the last of his tunes to get any kind of radio airplay, and that got me back in touch. Also, on that album is the thunderous “Speedway at Nazareth”. It is my favorite of his solo songs, and I am lucky that apparently Mark and I have some musical symbiosis, since it always is a featured number near the end of the show. The searing conclusion to the song always has me making an utter fool of myself in public.
Which I am unapologetically doing right here. Thanks for indulging me if you have made it to the finish. Perhaps you might have found a new musical area to explore, perhaps not, but I can honestly say my life would have been far less rich if not for Mark Knopfler.