Mark Knopfler: Fearless Leader

It’s obviously a rule that you apply to your rock & roll affairs as well. You’ve worked for your success in a very quiet, businesslike manner.

What happened with us is we became so successful quite quickly that we gathered up as much power as we could for ourselves. I would say that the vast majority of what you see is voluntary. I mean, you won’t see us doing jingles for radio stations. I keep the making-music side of it as the main thing. Everything else is peripheral.

Was stardom something you actively pursued?

Oh, no. That’s a byproduct of a love affair with a guitar and wanting to be in a band and make music. I always wanted to be in a band. I used to draw pictures of bands when I was a little kid in school. I used to draw pictures of guitars all day. I used to go and watch a guy in the woodwork room making a guitar, just so I could hold it. I pestered my dad for years and years until I got a cheap imitation one. It was a red imitation Stratocaster. He bought it for me on my fifteenth birthday. It cost fifty pounds, which was a lot then.

Were your parents musically inclined?

They can both sing in tune. My father tried to teach me piano and violin. He tried the piano when I was six, but I wouldn’t bother reading the music. I would just play by ear, and as soon as it got difficult, I was in trouble.

But then I heard my uncle Kingsley play boogie-woogie when I was about eight years old. That was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. Those three chords, the logic of it. So I just used to slam out boogie-woogie on the piano, drive everybody nuts.

How did you do with the violin?

I was about thirteen. I could get great-sounding notes out of it, but don’t ask me to read music. I tried the saxophone a couple of years ago, but it’s so much tied in with reading that it’s impossible for me. I go by my ears. I can’t relate music to those dots.

I found out more about music in the past few years just by studying chords. You learn them the same way you do words. You hear a long word and you know what it means just by its usage. Your vocabulary increases. The same way with chords. I can recognize music now that I couldn’t have four years ago.

What was your first band?

It was just school friends playing at somebody’s house. Then we played a couple of school dances.

When I left university, I went down to London and got in this band called Brewer’s Droop. I was with them for maybe two months. They were sort of an obscene R&B Cajun outfit. Brewer’s droop is something that you suffer from when you’ve been drinking too much and you can’t get it up.

They actually had a deal with RCA that was just falling apart when I joined them. But I did a bunch of gigs with them. That was my first taste of playing on the college and big-clubs circuit. I did a little bit of recording with Brewer’s Droop at Rockfield Studios. I don’t think any of it ever came out.

After that, I just starved to death, basically. It got pretty tough until I got hold of this teaching job that saved my life. Then I had a band called the Café Racers, which was the name of a kind of motorcycle, not a particular make, just a customized street bike. We played around the pubs and the college where I was teaching.

You also worked as a journalist, even dabbling in music criticism.

A girl I knew, her big brother was a newspaper reporter, and I thought, “Oh, he seems to be having an interesting time.” I started out with nine pounds, eighteen shillings and three pence a week [about $23.75 at the time].

What sort of music did you review?

Local bands, some of the big bands that came to town as well. The last story I ever wrote for the newspaper — on the day that I left — was the death of Jimi Hendrix. I was in the press room at Leeds Town Hall,’ cause I’d been covering the courts all day, when the news editor came in and said, “Hello, lad, Jimmy Henderson or Jimi Hendrix or whatever the bloody hell he’s called died. Did you know him? Well, we haven’t got any time. I’m putting you straight onto copy.” I was stunned. I don’t recall what I wrote. I said some stuff, left the paper and got drunk.

How did you get back into rock & roll after you quit teaching?

It’s amazing what I’ve done to get into bands — hitchhike up and down the country with a heavy electric guitar, getting on buses with two guitars to go up to an audition. I remember once hitchhiking home up to Newcastle on Christmas Day from the other end of the country, the snow all around, nobody on the roads, with a guitar and a bag, standing in the middle of nowhere. You’ve really got to want to do it.

For me and John, in the early stages of the Dire Straits thing, there was a collective willpower that went into it. If you’re a lazy son of a bitch, you’re just going to sit around and complain ’cause there’s nothing happening. We weren’t.

Your songwriting has undergone a major shift in recent years, from the evocative, atmospheric quality of “Wild West End” and “Down to the Waterline” to the simpler, more direct verse on Brothers in Arms. What inspired that change?

I’m not saying I’ve had it with ambiguity or that things can’t be multilayered. I’ve just become more drawn to writing those kinds of songs, where there is no problem in terms of who’s singing what. If I listen to Willie Nelson sing “Blue Skies,” it always strikes me as great, very simple and direct.

Sometimes it’s better to go for the big, broad, beautiful statement rather than start getting involved in all this ambiguity. I think “Born in the U.S.A.” is a classic example. Even Reagan can come in and invoke the spirit of Springsteen and couple him with Rambo. Bruce is trying to say, I think, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with loving your country, and there’s nothing wrong with good citizenship. But the meaning has been taken and distorted by outsiders and used for their own purposes. I certainly don’t want Reagan coming on to my songs and using them. I’d certainly have something to say to him about it if he tried, too.