Nobody could possibly accuse Mark Knopfler of being punk.
Though the former Dire Straits frontman came of age in the same British postwar deprivations as punk’s pioneers, living through all the rationing and societal change that proved fertile ground for the genre, Knopfler eschewed the strident, heavily political voice of his contemporaries. He certainly has the bona fides, having grown up in hardscrabble Newcastle as the son of a honest-to-God anti-fascist who fled Hungary when it became a Nazi puppet state.
Which isn’t to say Knopfler isn’t a populist, as the characters in his songs are certainly part of the working-class subaltern. They just aren’t the nihilists of punk or the desperate downtrodden that populate Bruce Springsteen songs. They are a plucky bunch, this cast Knopfler created. It makes them far more relatable to a broader cross-section of people, which explains why Dire Straits sold more than 100 million albums.
Take “Sultans of Swing.” The heroes aren’t the crowd of boys fooling around in the corner, drunk and dressed in their brown baggies and platform soles. As we know, they don’t give a damn about any trumpet-playing band. And had The Damned told the story, they’d have bricked the poor Sultans and screamed about crushing the system that allowed the boys to buy those clothes in the first place. Instead our hero is the quietly contented Harry, who has a daytime job and is doing all right, and isn’t bothered one way or the other if he makes the scene.
Consider the deliverers of consumer durables in “Money for Nothing.” Our roughnecks acknowledge rock stars aren’t dumb and get paid handsomely for what appears to be little work with limited artistic merit — “What’s that? Hawaiian noises?” But their reaction to this apparent injustice is to simply get back to work. More stiff upper lip, less Stiff Little Fingers.
And a sociologist could have a field day comparing Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” with The Jam’s “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight.” In the former, a busker — alone but not lonely — pleasantly strums his way through a catalog of upbeat early rockers in the subway tunnels, what with his dedication and devotion. In the latter, The Jam has their solitary man attacked by skinheads in the concrete caves below London.
Knopfler’s characters are men who aren’t happy in spite of their hand-to-mouth, workaday lives — they are happy because of it. None of this would make Dire Straits or Knopfler particularly popular with the critical-theory crowd, but Knopfler recognizes the virtue in being pleased with your situation. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius would love him, and Foucault would hate him, though even the gloomy men of the Frankfurt School probably whistle along with the ubiquitous intro of “Walk of Life.”
But just-folks don’t care about Stoicism or post-structuralism. They do, however, care about bitching guitar solos, and Knopfler’s got plenty. There are two kickass rips in “Sultans of Swing” alone. Knopfler’s virtuosic finger-picking style was borne of necessity. Given a secondhand guitar that was in (ahem) dire straits, with a bent neck and loose strings, he had no choice but to play the ax mimicking the country and blues pickers he idolized. It’s the same sort of chin-up mentality that inspires Knopfler’s best songs, the ones we know by heart.
Since the first breakup of Dire Straits in 1988 (followed by a reunion and one more studio album before their ultimate dissolution in 1995), Knopfler has found freedom in working solo, allowed to stretch his arms and embrace all those deeply American genres that influenced him without fully immersing himself in one or the other. His best-known solo work is likely the score from The Princess Bride. Made while Dire Straits was still a going concern, the music features Knopfler melding the courtly balladeer style appropriate to the world of the beloved film with just enough American folk to keep it timeless and universal. He’s palled up with some of Nashville’s brightest in his solo run, collaborating on albums with Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris and playing a most Knopflerian guitar on a 1994 re-recording of George Jones’ “White Lightnin’.”
In a roundabout way, Atkins inspired the title of Knopfler’s latest record Down the Road Wherever, support of which brings him to the Ryman on Tuesday. It’s a lyric from “One Song at a Time,” which Knopfler said came from a story Chet used to tell about picking his way out of poverty one song at a time. The album is far more personal than other Knopfler releases, with more inspiration from his hometown and the other English semi-cities he frequented during his come-up. There are songs funny and songs heart-wrenching, but they all end with hope. On what is perhaps the album’s best track, “Just a Boy Away From Home,” the narrator laments his loneliness, looking back forlornly on his life — only to have his spirits lifted by a wanderer-by singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Knopfler, newly 70, can still dazzle on the guitar, and that’s reason enough to hear him play. But he also still has things to teach us about ourselves, and that’s the reason to listen.
