Mark Knopfler's Second Act

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Mark Knopfler, dressed in jeans, boots and a black T-shirt, cuts a dark figure in a room that is otherwise all sunlight, polished wood and stainless steel. He is hunched in a chair speaking on his mobile phone to his 20-year-old son, himself a musician. "So many young musicians have no idea what work is," he says in a rich, reassuring baritone. "You know it's not just about talent or wanting to be famous. Music is something you really have to be willing to work at."

We are in the second-floor reception area of Knopfler's British Grove Studios, near the Hammersmith section of London, with its fast-food outlets, storefront colleges and shops advertising cut-price international telephone calls. But here at British Grove we are in that rarefied space where art meets commerce, and feng shui meets high tech. The air in the studios is ionized to give the musicians a boost of energy, and the recording equipment is a blend of the best of today's technology and refurbished vintage amps, mikes and mixers. The woman who lets me in has the competent but serene look of a Reiki masseuse. "I've always wanted a studio, and now I have one," Knopfler says, over a lunch of organic beef and wild rice.

Yet even in the state-of-the-art vastness of British Grove, Knopfler admits his favorite place is a little vest-pocket studio, perhaps 10 by 12, a fraction of the size of the rooms around it, wedged between two of the grander recording spaces. It reminds him of the bedroom practice space he'd set up while still teaching English at community college in London in the Seventies — when he was saving portions of his weekly checks in order to buy an electric guitar, and a good decade before his band, Dire Straits, became one of the biggest in the world. "It's where I learned to play guitar until it was so automatic you could do it while you fell asleep."

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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."

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From the jump, it was a rock & roll fantasy. Four working-class guys who came charging into New York, a perfect storm of talent and timing. It was 1979, disco was on the fade (though Donna Summer and Chic still ruled the charts) and punk was on the come, but here was a band that sounded classic, eternal, with the simplicity of an old Sun record and the integrity of jazz, but with the fizz and fun of a senior prom. They were already in their late 20s, long in the tooth for rockers, and in all likelihood that delayed gratification was a lifesaver for Knopfler and the rest of the band. They were a little too old to be subsumed by the tidal wave of adulation, and they had spent enough time learning their craft and scraping together money for the rent (Dire Straits was in itself a reference to their collective poverty) to learn a bit of humility.

The band eventually sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Their 1978 debut made the Top 10 list of every country in Europe, their 1985 song "Brothers in Arms" was the first CD single, and when the MTV era heated up, they were on the leading edge of it — not only did their "Money for Nothing" catch the mania of the new music-video craze, but it was the first video shown on MTV in England.

By the early 1980s, however, Mark's brother David had left the group. In his view, they were always meant to be a cult band. The younger Knopfler, who has gone on to record several solo albums, has said, "I left for the same reasons everyone leaves jobs that are no longer fulfilling their hopes and aspirations. I didn't see myself spending the rest of my life being a strummer for someone else's dreams." Mark is philosophical about the split. "After a short time it became clear to me that David was in the wrong job, going at it as hard as we were. It was a hell of a pace, recording and touring hundreds of gigs. I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't really know what I was doing, although I was determined to survive it. Everyone has got to really want to be there, and the tough days haven't got to put you off."

But other than that, the band's life was relatively free of turmoil — Knopfler continues to tour and record with former Straits musicians Guy Fletcher and John Illsley. And the audiences just got bigger and bigger. In one remarkable year, they played more than 250 concerts. Gold records piled up, and the band won two Grammys. And then, one day in 1995, Mark Knopfler pulled the plug on the entire enterprise and that was that. "I never expected it to get that big," Knopfler tells me. "I don't really care about making more money at this point. What am I going to do with it? Buy a boat? I don't really want a boat. And I've got a lot of guitars."

Knopfler has always brought the borderline-geeky enthusiasm of a hard-core music fan to his work. In grade school he was mad for the Kinks and got himself into trouble for scrawling "Le Kinks" on his notebooks and desks. As a teenager, he was one of those guys who drank hundreds of cups of coffee, smoked constantly and listened obsessively to Bob Dylan.

"My father bought me a guitar when I was a kid, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings by asking for an amplifier. That's why I played in folk joints, and that turned out to be good for me. I got exposed to a lot of other types of music. The big jigsaw puzzle of music started to take shape. You follow the songs, one song leads to another, and then another. Later on, I learned Bob had been in the same boat I was when he was a kid — with a cheap guitar, no money for an amp, wanting to play with a rock band, but having to play in folk joints.

"There should be a statue of Dylan on each coast of America," he says. "I've been in love with the songs ever since hearing his very first record. I'd go round to friends' houses making them play Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde over and over again."

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As it happened, after Dire Straits' first hits in the U.S., one of Knopfler's early supporters, the legendary producer Jerry Wexler, invited Knopfler to play on Dylan's 1979 record Slow Train Coming. "I was staying in L.A. and driving over to Santa Monica every day to run down songs with Bob at his place," Knopfler says. "There was always just the pair of us. He'd play piano, and I'd play one of his Fenders. For a guy from the north of England with one record out, it felt pretty special." A few years later, Knopfler was brought on to produce Infidels, one of Dylan's most pungent and well-regarded records. "What a producer does depends on the artist," says Knopfler. "Mostly with Bob you just pick up your guitar and play the song.

"At that time," Knopfler goes on, "I was living half the time in New York and half in London. I think Bob quite liked walking the streets of Greenwich Village again. He used to come round to our house on Bank Street armed against the cold in a fur hat, long blue cashmere coat and biker boots. I'd make a pot of coffee and we'd play pool."

Hanging on the wall at British Grove is an oil painting titled "Four Lambrettas and Three Portraits of Janet Churchman," by John Bratby, the reproduction of which graces the cover of Knopfler's most recent CD, Kill to Get Crimson. Bratby was the founder of the so-called "kitchen sink" school of British painting, with canvases depicting such unlikely subjects as sinks, spoons and toilets. One of the finest tracks on Knopfler's latest record, "Let It All Go," tells the story of a less fortunate painter in the 1930s, who, unable to find a niche in the art market, enlists in the armed forces. It is a song that shares with dozens of other Knopfler compositions a Chekhovian curiosity about and empathy for the lives of disparate characters — the wife of a scaffolder, Irish laborers in Germany, a wounded soldier in Napoleon's army, mercenaries, a dreamy, exquisitely existential surfer.

Knopfler's intellectual range is wide, and his reading is broad and idiosyncratic. In the course of our conversation, he touches on Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Bernard MacLaverty and many other writers, both classic and contemporary, famous and relatively obscure.

And sometimes he will read something that is just plain odd, such as Grinding It Out, by McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, a how-I-did-it that eventually made its way through the pathways of Knopfler's imagination to re-emerge as an astonishing rocker, a song that compassionately captures Kroc's entrepreneurial spirit even as it serves up a devastating critique of megacapitalism, a kind of exquisite poetic two-step that puts "Boom, Like That" in the same league as the work Bertolt Brecht did in Threepenny Opera.

The song begins, "I'm going to San Bernardino/Ring-a-ding-ding," nine words that perfectly fix Kroc's tale in the American Fifties of Frank Sinatra. Kroc is flogging milkshake mixers, and he sells to a couple of guys with a successful hamburger stand, which they in fact call McDonald's, and Kroc is overtaken with a blinding vision of what could be:

The folks line up all down the street
And I'm seeing this girl devour her meat
And then I get it, wham clear as day
My pulse begins to hammer and I hear a voice say:
These boys have got it down
Oughta be one of these in every town
These boys have got this touch
It's clean as a whistle and it don't cost much
Wham, bam, you don't wait long
Shake, fries, patty, you're gone.

In song after song — "Done With Bonaparte," "A Place Where We Used to Live," "This Is Us" — Knopfler imagines his way into the lives of characters with precision and empathy that overshadows the work of many novelists. When I say as much to Knopfler, he shrugs. "I feel sorry for anyone who lacks compassion," he says. "Without compassion you can't make art. I grew up that way, it was how I was raised. My father was a Hungarian Jew, and he did three jail sentences on political charges — he was a Communist — before coming here before the Second World War. He left the Communist Party, but he was always on the left, we all were. For instance, this is my paper," he says, holding up The Guardian, and looking dubiously at my copy of The Times of London.

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When we have finished with our lunch, the shadows have deepened on the second floor of British Grove, and Knopfler surprises me by clearing the dishes himself and taking them into the studio's kitchen. "Mark is as far from the rock & roll stereotype as you can get," his wife tells me. "Manners are important to him and rudeness appalls him. There are no tantrums and no tiaras.

"We both work at home," Aldridge says, "and we meet up in the kitchen at lunchtime and at supper time. He's very interested in writing, the process, inspiration, the ideas. He will talk about writing and writers all night, but when it comes to his own writing, he just gets on with it quietly. He won't bend your ear talking about what he's working on, demand reassurance, or even mention it."

A few days later, Knopfler and his band take off in a leased Embraer Legacy corporate jet for Poland to resume the tour. Knopfler's sidemen, some of them players he has worked with going back to the Dire Straits days, sit in the front of the plane, while Knopfler, his manager Paul Crockford and I sit in the back. There is laughter and easy banter all around, and that slightly anarchic vibe of men leading what is in some ways a boy's life — blue jeans and iPods, plenty of snacks, plenty of beer. Knopfler, for his part, floats in this atmosphere, and the look of purposeful serenity on his face reminds me of the expression in an animal when it is returned to its natural habitat.

When we land in Warsaw, we are met by a couple of cars and whisked to the sports arena where Knopfler will be playing tonight. It is a stark, bare-bones venue, with cement-and-plywood bleachers, long, windowless corridors, acoustic tiles hanging from the ceiling and an air of collectivist utilitarianism, but Knopfler seems at home here. If any part of him feels that this is a bit of a comedown from the era of playing supersites, there is nothing in his demeanor that betrays it.

There are about 5,000 people here tonight, many standing in the gymnasium's center court, cellphones aloft. Knopfler begins the set with an old one, "Once Upon a Time in the West." On the way to Warsaw, he said, "I can't listen to my early records. It sounds as if I'm trying too hard. I'm overplaying, and my singing is sometimes sharp. But I do like to play the old songs, and people come to hear them. But the trick is to play them without making it some kind of cabaret."

His renditions of "Sailing to Philadelphia" — his strange and moving song about Mason and Dixon, and possibly the greatest song ever inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel — and "Romeo and Juliet" are electrifying in both emotional impact and sheer beauty. When Knopfler sings, "All I do is kiss you/Through the bars of this rhyme," a collective shiver goes through the audience, though he is singing in a language that most of the crowd must struggle with, if they know it at all.

What they don't have to struggle with is the sight of Mark Knopfler picking up his National steel guitar; as soon as it is handed to him, the arena fills with a collective roar, and that level of adoration is sustained through the rest of the two-hour show.

After the encores, Knopfler steps to the lip of the stage and holds his arms out on either side of him while swaying back and forth, like a man balancing on a tightrope. The Warsaw crowd continues clapping and cheering, snapping pictures with cellphones, but now all there is to photograph is the crew unplugging amps. Knopfler and his band have left the stage, left the building, and are, in fact, racing to the airport, where the plane awaits them. They haven't bothered to book hotel rooms in Warsaw; tonight they will sleep in Berlin.

"This tour is the best yet," Knopfler writes me later. "The band hardly ever plays the same thing twice, so I'm always getting new phrases to bounce off. I'm playing OK and enjoying singing more than I used to as it's 11 years since I smoked a cigarette. There's a terrific feel in the group. We travel together and eat together and the same kind of humour prevails. I feel very much at home being captain of my little ship."

[From Issue 1058 — August 7, 2008]

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Knopfler's Deep Cuts
Seven gems from his post-Dire Straits career

"Gravy Train"
CD Single, 1996
Knopfler plays Jeremiah Dixon and James Taylor guests as Charles mason in this duet of escape and anticipation, as the two Englishmen are about to make land and history, mapping a young America.

"Sailing to Philadelphia"
Sailing to Philadelphia, 2000
Knopfler plays Jeremiah Dixon and James Taylor guests as Charles mason in this duet of escape and anticipation, as the two Englishmen are about to make land and history, mapping a young America. [Listen]

"5:15 AM"
Shangri-La, 2004
A bleak beauty set in an English coal-mining town lit by the tawdry sparkle of slot machines in the pubs and by the starlight of Knopfler's guitar. He sings in a near-whisper, as if he doesn't want to wake the dead in the churchyard or the gangster under the bridge, "shot through with bullet holes." [Listen]

"Boom, Like That"
Shangri-La, 2004
Knopfler plays McDonald's founder Ray Kroc in this sardonic portrait of the self-made man. The drums play a second-line rhythm; Knopfler's guitar darts and curls like a metallic snake. [Listen]

"Back to Tupelo"
One Take Radio Sessions, 2005
This haunted Shangri-La portrait of the mid-Sixties Elvis Presley, drowning in bad movies, benefits from the stark, live-in-the-studio take here. [Listen]

"Done With Bonaparte"
Real Live Roadrunning, 2006
The song first appeared on 1996's The Golden Heart, but this live version with Emmylou Harris is the keeper. Inside the Celtic bravado, Knopfler sings with seething rage, depicting a battered army betrayed by its general. Harris marches in step like a soldier's widow.[Listen]

"Behind With the Rent"
Kill to Get Crimson, 2007
An ex-reporter, Knopfler wrote about the down-and-out crowd with poignant detail. You almost smell the smoke and cheap perfume here as a guy blows his last quid on a hooker. The ambience and slicing guitar recall Dire Straits' classic "Wild West End"- a world that Knopfler, despite his success, never left.[Listen]