DAVID KNOPFLER: NAVIGATING HIS OWN MUSICAL STRAITS
By Paul Freeman [May 2013 Interview] Singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist David Knopfler, founding member of Dire Straits, has achieved a beautiful intimacy with his latest solo album, “Made In Germany.” It’s a captivating, acoustic, live recording, on which he’s joined by longtime collaborator, guitarist Harry Bogdanovs. The stylistic simplicity is as much a pragmatic choice as it is an artistic one. The naked approach showcases Knopfler’s finely honed songwriting skills. Knopfler, born in Glasgow, raised in southeast England, began writing songs at age 11. Among his earliest influences were the Bob Dylan albums his older sister brought home from college. By 14, Knopfler was embracing Jimi Hendrix and the energy of rock ‘n’ roll. By the time he could afford to buy his own records, at 17, he was drawn to the songs of James Taylor, Randy Newman, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Following college, Knopfler served as a social worker in a rough neighborhood, but his passion for music prevailed. He formed a band with flat-mate John Illsley, a bass player, and his own brother, Mark Knopfler. They added drummer Pick Withers and called the foursome Dire Straits. Their 1978 debut album, ”Dire Straits,” which included the song “Sultans of Swing,” made the band a global sensation. After three years, Knopfler felt it was time to part ways with Dire Straits. Exhausted, Knopfler took his time, three years, to be exact, before releasing his first solo album, 1983’s “Release.” A dozen acclaimed albums have followed. Knopfler is accomplished in several areas. He has founded indie record labels and publishing companies. He has scored films and TV projects. A published poet and author, Knopfler is also a lifelong activist, long a member of Greenpeace and Amnesty International. PCC: DAVID KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: To me, the studio is a kind of sacred space. And I, to some extent, mourn the passing of it. But it’s more honest this way, certainly. What you see is what you get. And what you get is what you see. There is a certain honesty to the whole thing. PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: I kind of feel you have to act your age. I’m 60 years old now. And I don’t really want to jump around on stage, screaming about adolescent issues. PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: For a little while there, in the ‘80s, I had a Filofax with 500 contacts to do that thing they called networking. And I burnt it, somewhere around the end of the ‘80s and started just really pleasing myself completely about what I was doing. And that way, when the phone rings, it’s someone you’re going to want to speak to. You don’t need to have the answer phone service anymore. And you just get things really stripped back to what’s essential, which is working with your friends, making music that you love. PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: Everything in those days was done that way. There were no colleges for what you did. The general attitude was, unless you were into classical music, you were a reprobate. And so there were no existing footprints that you could put your shoes into, really, not many, anyway. And most of it was really making it up as you went along. And most of it was really to do with, you did it despite what was going on around you. You did it kind of in the margins. It was really part of a counter-culture that found full expression later. PCC: KNOPFLER: But the biggest influence wasn’t that at all, really. The first influence I can remember is my sister bringing back Bob Dylan albums from college. She was about 17 or 18. I was about 11 or 12. Those records made a huge difference. But then, at 14, I remember seeing and hearing Jimi Hendrix and rock ‘n’ roll. And you couldn’t stop me after that. And then records I bought were a bit later on. I couldn’t afford records at that age. The first records I could afford, I would have been like 17 or 18. And they would have been things like the first Crosby Stills & Nash album, the first James Taylor album, those kinds of things. For me, the influences are so wide and varied. There was Lowell George, there was Randy Newman. I think for me, it was the songs more than the artists. I didn’t really follow artists. I followed songs. So I’d look for the author very often of the songs. I’d check them out and then I’d find out who else they’d worked with. There was no internet, of course, so everything was kind of done by process of painstaking deduction. You’d grab what information you could from the sleeve notes of the record and then you went hunting for other records that might have these people in them. PCC: KNOPFLER: So I went to college and got myself a degree. But when the career adviser asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to work in a guitar shop. I said, ‘That way, I’ll network with other musicians. And getting a band together would be really easy.’ And I said, ‘I think I’d like to do it in or around London somewhere, so I could be nearer to my brother, who’s a really good guitarist.’ And she just didn’t know what I was talking about at all. It just doesn’t compute, does it? In those days, career meant that you joined the civil service or you worked for a corporation. There was just no notion of following your bliss or following your art. That was a totally alien concept. I don’t think that gathered momentum until later than that. PCC: KNOPFLER: I was sharing a flat with a guy called John Illsley, who was later to become the bass player in Dire Straits. And John was playing in a really nasty punk band. That was all the rage back then, in ‘76, ‘77. The idea was, nobody should be able to play properly and everybody should be shouting, ‘My old man, he’s a blank!’ I didn’t really get it, because all my influences were American. I’d grown up with The Beach Boys and The Byrds and all that stuff. We had Dylan, we had Cale, we had Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt. All my influences were basically people that could play properly and have some native actual talent, which was much more of an American thing, whereas the British thing of the ‘70s was, it didn’t matter. You could learn three chords and just get out there and make a racket. And that was cool. I just didn’t get it, really. I did get it eventually. Twenty years after the event, I could kind of see it historically. I could see what they were rebelling against, the sort of Rick Wakeman-esque pomp rock of the time. I could see why they decided that all this middle-class grandiosity had to be demolished. You know, in England, we use ‘middle-class’ in a different way than you do here. Middle-class in England, means you’re doctors and you’re lawyers. We’re not afraid of the term ‘working-class.’ We’re not even afraid of the word ‘socialist,’ although it’s becoming increasingly less fashionable lately. And so I said, to my brother, Mark, ‘I happened to have come across this really good bass player.’ Mark and I were working as a duo at the time, playing acoustic sets. I said, ‘Why don’t you come down and meet him and see what happens.’ I said to John, ‘I know this really good lead guitarist.’ So I lined it up, really completely selfishly, purely to stop this bloody awful punk band from rehearsing in my flat. So there was no great, altruistic dream to it, although I was enjoying working with Mark. That was what I always wanted to do. Mark had a rare talent, the kind that doesn’t grow on trees, what he could do with a guitar. So that was it, really. That’s how it began. That’s what it was about, from my perspective, anyway. I’m sure Mark has me airbrushed out completely, like Trotsky. [Laughs] But that’s the nature of history, isn’t it? PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: It was a combination of things. There’s always an element of luck. There’s an element of the record company getting heavily behind it. And timing was great. All the other bands in London at the time were punk bands or New Wave bands. Visually, we looked like a New Wave band. But we sounded just like a lot of the Old Wave American bands. And so we were much more accessible to the radio stations and to the media to get their heads around, the older guys who were listening to that kind of stuff could relate to us, in the same way they couldn’t relate to the same stuff I couldn’t relate to either, which was all these bands that would come out with one single and then disappear and they didn’t appear to have any real meat to the potatoes. PCC: KNOPFLER: It was just an evolution of Mark’s confidence and talent, I think. By the third album, he was working more with the people that he was looking towards working with. We had Jimmy Iovine as a producer, we had Shelly Yakus as an engineer. It doesn’t get much better than that. He decided to make the record in New York. So there we were at the Power Station, spending $200 an hour, which, in those days, was a small fortune. And we’ spend five days getting a drum sound. I mean, the whole thing was a much more business-like, much more ‘80s operation, compared to what it had been. And I ‘d become a strummer for somebody else’s dreams, rather than the director of my own life. And I’m not very good at that. PCC: KNOPFLER: I think I was probably on to about CD six before I really felt that I knew who I was and what I was and the relationship between me and my work was 100 percent authentic. It took a long time to gather. Some people are early developers. Some people are geniuses. The rest of us have to just dig away the best we can. PCC: KNOPFLER: I was making these records. A friend of mine, who happened to be an A&R guy, said to me, ‘It’s about time you made a more honest record.’ At first, I didn’t really know what he meant. And then he slowly explained that I was kind of hiding behind a lot of this stuff and covering my lyrics up with indirection and with mystery that didn’t need to be there. And I just cleared my decks and got down to, ‘What is a singer-songwriter?’ ‘What is a song?’ And ‘What is it that makes a song work?’ In the end, I think I reached a trust the tale, not the teller sort of thing with the song. Either the song works or it doesn’t. It’s very instinctive. But it’s taken me half a lifetime to find it. PCC: KNOPFLER: It isn’t really what songwriting does best. You don’t want to wind up with this pedantic finger-pointing, lefty bollocks that really doesn’t work that well. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with sharing and posting lefty articles on that Facebook-y stuff, social networking stuff. I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t really want to be going up on the stage preaching to people. Half my audience are going to be in complete disagreement with me before I’ve even started. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind anyway about what they think about any of it. And I suppose, inevitably, some spiritual aspect comes through and political aspects and other aspects. They’re going to inform what you’re writing about. That’s inevitable. But I would say that 90 percent of my songs are in and around much more intimate and personal relationship things. I don’t plan it. The most recent song I’ve written is called ‘Hard Times In Idaho.’ And on that, my vision was just an old boy, about my age, sitting up on his horse, in the 1820s, trundling over some freezing river. And generally feeling pretty grumpy about the whole thing. [Laughs] He’s almost reflecting to his horse, talking to his horse in it. And that, you couldn’t really translate as political. Although, maybe ‘Hard Times In Idaho’ does work on another level. But it wasn’t planned that way, really. PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: You always start off doing somebody else’s dance, dancing in somebody else’s footsteps. Inevitably, the influences are going to be there. And one day, you just realize, to mix metaphors, you realize you’ve taken the safety wheels off your bicycle. There’s no longer any footprints in them mud and you’re making your own footprints. And you’re doing your own dance. Where that process takes off is hard to say... because eventually the influences become so unconscious that you’re not even aware anymore that you’re still sounding a bit like this or a bit like that, because it’s no longer an imported talent. It’s very much organically you, who you are and what represents you. PCC: KNOPFLER: So, yes, there were elements of necessity, elements of enjoying it. I think I probably got a bit of a buzz from some of the business stuff that went on in the mid-’80s. It was a pretty lively time. There were lots of independent labels. There were lots of independent distributors. You could make a record, basically on spec and license it to 20 different licensees around the world. It created a hell of a lot of paperwork and management issues. They’d be on three-year licenses. And you’d get the cost of your recording back times four or five from it. So you’d really be ahead of the game, before you had to go out and promote or play a note of it. And I quite liked that, because I didn’t tour. I didn’t need to. I toured a couple of times, but apart from doing TV, I didn’t do an awful lot of work, really, apart from being in the studio, from about ‘85 to 2000. I kind of got back onto the stage, really, in 2001, in a more serious and consistent way. PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: PCC: KNOPFLER: Even when I’m making records, which is about as self-obsessed as you can be, I’m getting off on the fact that the engineer’s been given his first project and he’s excited about it. Or that the musicians coming in are having a great time and they’re enjoying their session, because they’ve been given the freedom to do what they’re gifted at. And, to me, you get a better result with collaboration anyway. I’m always open to everything. I’m doing some new stuff. And new stuff’s scary, but I still put myself into those positions. And I’ve done a lot in a lot of related fields. But songwriting seems to be what I’ve turned out to be best at. And I always suspected I was. That was my natural thing. PCC: KNOPFLER: And that’s rather different now. And it’s probably also reflected in the wider economic thing, the 99 percent/one percent dichotomy. The rich have gotten a lot richer in the last 30 years. And the poor have been marginalized more and more. There are more and more of us. The ‘we’ of the 99 percent , whereas once it was just a gimmick or a slogan, it’s now becoming something of a reality. I mean, 65 to 70 percent of the professors at universities are paid below poverty line, because of the full adjunct scam. It’s not a First World proposition anymore. We don’t really live in the First World anymore. We live in something that pretends to be the First World. PCC: KNOPFLER: DAVID KNOPFLER: LIVE AND ACOUSTIC IN CONCERT THURSDAY - MAY 9th – Space, Evanston IL, USA SATURDAY - MAY 11th – Dosey Doe, Woodlands, TX, USA MONDAY May 13th - The Triple Door- Seattle, WA, USA WEDNESDAY - MAY 15th – Black Oak Casino, Tuolumne, CA, USA THURSDAY - MAY 16th – Club Fox, Redwood City, CA, USA SATURDAY - MAY 18th – Kuumbwa Jazz Club, Santa Cruz, CA, USA SUNDAY - MAY 19th – Center for the Arts, Grass Valley, CA, USA =======================================================
JULY 2013 ========================================================
OCTOBER 2013 For news, tour dates and more, visit knopfler.com. |