Mark Knopfler's Second Act

Since those days when money was scarce and obscurity was total, just about every good thing that can happen to a rock musician has happened to Knopfler, yet his orientation remains passionately on his musical present. He is neither fading gently into the night nor straining to re-create the glories of the past. Instead, Knopfler is creating a new paradigm for aging in the world of rock & roll, a strategy that requires maintaining an enthusiasm for music that outstrips obsession with career, and the courage to walk away from fame before it walks away from you — his dissolution of Dire Straits, suddenly, in 1995, remains one of the more startling moves in the history of rock & roll.

"It got too big," Knopfler says. "I like to experiment, keep it stripped down, maybe add a keyboard, a sax, a pedal steel. But those shows in stadiums became events, not really musical experiences. Getting out was the only intelligent decision. I was running from reality, running from my marriage, and I was disappearing into the road life. I didn't like the person I was becoming. I was smoking all the time, killing myself with cigarettes. In order not to disrespect my talent, I had to look after myself. And my writing. My writing was suffering. I wanted to get back to the guy who wrote a song, recorded it and played it for people, but I wanted it all at a more realistic level."

Knopfler's writing during the Dire Straits years produced an abundance of great music, enough for at least two best-of compilations — "The Sultans of Swing," "Romeo and Juliet," "Brothers in Arms," "Once Upon a Time in the West." But beginning with his first solo album, Golden Heart, in 1986, and continuing on with his great records of the last decade, Knopfler has gone on to write his finest songs — songs that put him in the company of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. Yet the great songs of Knopfler's second act have not brought him fame that equals or even approaches the glory days of Dire Straits. He is no longer packing vast arenas; he has gone from being a superstar and a celebrity to being a musician. Here in the U.S., many of the people to whom I mention him look at me blankly until I add, "the guy from Dire Straits," at which point their eyes light up.

Knopfler is in London for just a few days, taking a breather from his European tour, which stretches from Dublin to Moscow, and then on through the U.S. this summer.

"There's a diner nearby," he tells me. "A real greasy spoon. As soon as I get back from the road, I like to go there and have eggs and some toast. It serves to break the spell of the treatment you get when you're touring." Beyond the grounding rituals of a workingman's breakfast, Knopfler has a wife and two sets of children to spend time with, sleep to catch up on, the thousand details of life hovering near, but he has a pro's demeanor, and today he is relaxed and unrushed.

Closing in on 60, Knopfler has a Roman senator's profile, with a cap of silver hair pushed back on his head. He shows no lingering effects from his motorcycle wipeout on a busy London street five years ago, in which he broke several ribs and his collarbone. "He had to be painfully cut out of his leathers," his wife, the British television and film-actress-turned-novelist Kitty Aldridge, tells me. "No one knew at that stage whether he would play the guitar in the same way — or at all — again. But there were no complaints, no depressions, no feeling sorry for himself. He worked at the physiotherapy until eventually he managed to get a guitar under his arm again."

If rock & roll survival is in part a matter of conditioning, Knopfler seems to have found the key to longevity: He looks coiled, radiating power and self-possession.

The first time I saw Knopfler, he was fronting his band Dire Straits, and they were playing the old Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, riding high on their first hit, "The Sultans of Swing." The place was packed with people who were for the most part seeing Knopfler, his brother David and the other Straits members for the first time. Knopfler prowled the small stage, his red-and-white Stratocaster sounding somehow like no other guitar before it.

"I'm left-handed, but I play a right-handed guitar," Knopfler explains, describing his unique guitar sound. "That means I am fretting with my left hand, my stronger hand, so I can get a lot more vibrato on it. The second thing is, I don't use a pick. I use my fingers — not my fingernails, but the fleshy part of the finger right below the nail."