Dire Straits were a massively successful band; they have sold
more than 100 million records worldwide, each of their albums was top-5 in the US, their hallmark record Brothers in Arms was #1 in 18 countries, and they are
members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mark Knopfler is so admired by (at least some) paleontologists that he is
the namesake of a dinosaur species discovered in 2001. (Ed. note: it turns out that
a whole bunch of rockers are real-life dinosaurs.) With all that success, the pedestrian inspirations behind two of their biggest hit songs are a fun bit of trivia.
The band's first single "
Sultans of Swing" was released in 1978. It was originally recorded a year before as a demo, and a
cassette with the resulting track made its way to
Charlie Gillett (
RIP), a legendary DJ at BBC Radio in London. Gillett played the demo in heavy rotation, and shortly after
the band had several major label offers.
The
song lyrics tell the story of a jazz band playing uninspired music on a rainy night in a mostly-empty South London pub to an indifferent audience. And Mark Knopfler says that's
basically just how it happened, including
the band's real-life name. Talking to AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson for his
"A Life on the Road" music series, Knopfler
explained:
======================
And 'Sultans of Swing' was actually in a little pub. And there's a dusty little dixieland jazz band playing down in Deptford or Greenwich and almost nobody in but some young lads were in the end of the pub playing pool in their baggies and their platform soles and all of that. I was just there to have a couple of pints. At the end of the night the trumpet player or whoever does the announcements says 'well..um...right, that's it, time to go,' [and] he says, 'we are the Sultans of Swing.' And you couldn't be less a sultan of anything, you know, if you were in that band on that night in that pub.
======================
"Sultans of Swing" (re-recorded in 1978 for Dire Straits' debut album) was
the band's first big hit, reaching the top-10 in six countries and selling multi-platinum in four. Somewhere out there are (or were) the members of the real-life Sultans of Swing, who must have felt both honored and a little bit insulted that Dire Straits's first #1 song was basically a narration of their underwhelming gig.
Several years later, when he was preparing material for Brothers in Arms, Knopfler was in a New York City appliance store when real-life inspiration struck again. In an interview with
the late British rock journalist Robert Sandall, Knopfler
told the story of how overhearing an appliance deliveryman watching MTV inspired "
Money for Nothing":
======================
Robert Sandall : "Money For Nothing" was reputedly based on an overheard conversation.
Mark Knopfler: Yeah, I was in New York in one of the big appliance shops. Basically, the layout was quite simple, the kitchen display unit in the front, the table and chairs and drawers and everything were all there in the shop window. Then you go inside and they had rows of microwaves and all the rest of it and at the back there were big walls of TVs all turned to MTV.
It was like a stage set because there was this big Joe Six Pack figure with his checked shirt and he had a barrel of some sort - he had been pulling boxes of something through the back door and he was holding forth to an audience of one or two about the performances on MTV. But the kind of stuff he was saying was so classic that I just managed to eavesdrop for a couple of minutes and then I went and got this piece of paper and started writing down the lines of things he was saying. Lines like, "That ain't working" and all that, and "Maybe get a blister on your finger", made me laugh. He said all that stuff and "What's that, Hawaiian noises?", so in a sense it was just a piece of reporting. But again, it's one of those things when you are aware that the situation has possibilities to create something.
======================
"Money for Nothing" became the band's signature song - it was one of the two songs they
played at Live Aid (the other being "
Sultans of Swing") - and the accompanying video
was groundbreaking for its use of 3D animation. Reflective of its inspiration, the video features a blue collar, hardhat-type guy watching and commenting on music videos that are playing on a wall of TVs behind him, which it turns out was pretty much how it went down.
[On an unrelated note that is a piece of good trivia, the songwriting credits for "Money for Nothing" belong to both Mark Knopfler and Sting. Knopfler wrote the song himself, but he borrowed Sting's rhythm and melody of "don't stand, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me" and added it to the song as "I want my, I want my, I want my MTV." He asked Sting to sing the part, and he happily obliged. Sting
said in a 1987 interview that "I did it, and thought nothing of it, until my publishers, Virgin -who I've been at war with for years and who I have no respect for - decided that was a song they owned, 'Don't Stand So Close to Me'. They said that they wanted a percentage of the song, much to my embarrassment. So they took it."]
Dire Straits
previously ("Walk of Life" as perfect film exit music), and
previously (Brothers in Arms written up by hippybear, of course), and
previously (Brothers in Arms as the First Big CD). (And a deleted
previously: this post was inspired by me accidentally posting an intended AskMe question on the main page earlier this week. Oops.)
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