Dire Straits

Dire Straits was originally a band, a four-piece whose singer and lead guitarist, Mark Knopfler, happened to do the bulk of the writing. Over time, however, the group slowly became less a unit than Knopfler plus backing players. On one level, this had a certain Darwinian inevitability to it; being both a winningly acerbic tunesmith and virtuoso guitarist, it was only natural that Knopfler would come to the fore.

But it's a mistake to assume that Dire Straits was little more than the Mark Knopfler show because, as their recordings make plain, this was clearly a case of the parts exceeding the whole. Regardless of what Knopfler's songwriting and fancy picking brought to the party, the feel of the performances made the music click. In other words, Dire Straits was nothing if not a groove band.

That's not the same thing as calling it a soul or funk band, of course; the group's sense of rhythm has more in common with the swampy, low-key blues of J.J. Cale and later Eric Clapton. That much was made clear with the quartet's first success, an insinuating bit of bar-band mythmaking called "Sultans of Swing." Even though Knopfler's lyrics paint a vivid picture of an overlooked and underappreciated pub combo, what ultimately reels the listener in is the laid-back insistence of the band's rhythm work, a quality abundant throughout Dire Straits, from the Dylanesque flavor of "Wild West End" to the galloping groove of "Down to the Waterline." (Live at the BBC, recorded in 1978, illustrates that groovesmanship was also very much a part of their live show.)

Communique continues in that fashion for the most part, but expands the scope of Knopfler's storytelling through the moody, elegiac "Once Upon a Time in the West." With the departure of rhythm guitarist David Knopfler (Mark's brother), the band's size is scaled down, but the music on the aptly titled Making Movies moves in the opposite direction, toward sprawling story songs like the sweet, Springsteenian "Romeo and Juliet," although, as "Skateaway" indicates, the band's pursuit of musical drama sometimes comes at the expense of the melody. Fortunately, the band regains its focus for Love Over Gold, on which the Straits -- now a quintet -- easily sustain the mood and melodic structure of the 14-minute megawork "Telegraph Road." Even better, they're able to augment such epics with material as sharply funny as the wry character number "Industrial Disease" or the lighthearted title tune from Twisting by the Pool.

Alchemy, an ambling, long-winded live album, focuses almost exclusively on the band's larger works, offering some flashes of instrumental brilliance but little insight into the material, something that makes the radio-friendly brevity of Brothers in Arms all the more surprising. It may be easy to find parallels to the album's biggest hits in the band's early output -- for instance, the way "Walk of Life" seems to cross "Sultans of Swing" with "Twisting by the Pool," or how "Money for Nothing" taps the same satiric vein as "Industrial Disease" -- but the reality is that Brothers is the exception to Dire Straits' sound.

Perhaps that's why Knopfler and company waited so long to deliver that album's followup, On Every Street. (Money for Nothing, like Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of, is simply a hits collection.) Although the album has its lighter moments, such as the dead-Presley "Calling Elvis" or the consumerist sarcasm of "Heavy Fuel," the bulk of its songs find Dire Straits doing what it does best, stretching dry, reflective words and tunes over moody, effortlessly maintained grooves. But that was it; after releasing On the Night, a live album culled from the On Every Street tour, Dire Straits quietly disbanded as Knopfler pursued the solo career most fans thought he was already leading. (J.D. CONSIDINE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide