I’ve written before about the musical unconscious of our youth—how the songs we encounter early on sink beneath the surface of our minds, becoming part of the underlying timbre of memory. The feelings they evoke are pre-verbal, inarticulable—a reminder that falling in love with music for the first time is, in some ways, falling in love with it every time. Whether or not we have the vocabulary to describe it, there’s a resonance, a calling-forth of something familiar yet new, a connection to the past and a return to the beginning.
I can almost say for certain that I first heard Sultans of Swing—the big song from this record—somewhere between the ages of four and six, late at night, playing through the same clock radio where I first heard about the lunatic on the grass. I was in a phase of taking things apart to understand them. My dad, indulging this curiosity, gave me an old rotary phone and a screwdriver and let me go at it. I remember tapping the exposed metal bells with the screwdriver, striking them in time with the beat of the drums.
Even then, before I had any way to name what I was hearing, I could feel it. The way Mark Knopfler’s lead guitar seemed like it was about to leap out of his hands. The way he danced just behind or just ahead of the beat as the chords progressed. The restless vibrato, the bending of notes, the effortless arpeggiation. The minor-key urgency that made the whole piece feel like it was always pushing forward.
His knockoff Dylan vocals—half sprechstimme, half weary drawl—only added to the bleakness of the scene. Allegedly, the song was inspired by a sad Dixieland bar band in South London, playing their hearts out to an empty room.
Years later, I saw two dads outside a coffee shop in my small town, playing an instrumental version of the song. They were clearly enjoying themselves, tearing it up in their fedoras and sunglasses, doing their best Blues Brothers impersonation. And yet, even as I appreciated their enthusiasm, I felt a twinge of secondhand embarrassment. It seemed so parochial, so juvenile—to be 45 or 50 and content just playing the solos from your favorite band’s favorite single. What was the point if you weren’t ready to inhabit the spirit of the whole record?
Dire Straits has that smooth, slightly overdriven sound—a glossy late-'70s blues-rock sheen that would echo through the '90s blues revival. In hindsight, it feels like a time capsule, the last gasp of American-inflected British blues before punk would shift the cultural landscape and cause a sea change.
But as I get older, it’s really just about that one song.
Verdict: Keep
What’s your one song?
one song for me is probably werewolves of london, unsurprisingly
yesss always here for Mark Knopfler