I love dire straits
posted on 30 Aug 2006 under category Meta
DIRE STRAITS
I feel like a kid on Christmas Morning again.
If you’ve been following this blog or my musical exploits for any amount of time, my love for Dire Straits should be no big surprise. While I liked listening to music before, it was watching Mark Knopfler play (and make it look so damn EASY) on the “Alchemy” live video that made me actually want to learn to play guitar for real. The red Squier Strat I got (more than) a few months ago was specifically to fill that childhood dream of playing a red Strat with a maple fretboard just like I saw Mark do as he effortlessly plucked his way through “Once Upon a Time in the West”. A few months ago I also got a tab book from Amazon of ‘Guitar Styles of Mark Knopfler, Vol. 1’ which has tabs of eight songs from the first four albums (my favorite era, weighted heavily toward Love over Gold and Making Movies). So, for the past few months, my playing time has been almost exclusively me picking up that Strat, sans pick, and worming my way through various parts and solos of Expresso Love, Telegraph Road, Tunnel of Love…
And then I finally hit the jackpot and got a Dimeadozen account. I’d been hitting the site every few days for over a year, waiting for an account opening slot, because there’s a LOT of great stuff on there I had been dying to get my hands on. I idly hit it about two weeks ago and instead of the ‘all accounts are full’ screen I got an actual registration page! Needless to say I got signed up really fast, and then I hit my first search request - “Dire Straits”.
A week later, I’m in heaven. Here’s what I’ve finally got:
Live in Chester, May 1978 (soundboard)
“Live in Emerald City” (Philadelphia, 11/12/1980)
Live in New York, 11/14/1980
Live in San Remo, 6/27/1981
“Once Upon a Time” (Brussels, Belgium, 7/5/1981 - soundboard)
Live in Sheffield, 12/1/1982 Live in Osaka, 05/04/1983
I’m not done playing through all of them, but I’m in heaven anyway. It’s just so fantastic to hear all these shows of my favorite band during my favorite (their best) time period - after wearing out Live at the BBC and Alchemy it’s like christmas every time I play one of these over again. I’ll be musing on some of these more in later posts.
(My earlier musings were right - this was right about the time that I got that Dimeadozen account and downloaded a buttload of old Dire Straits bootlegs. That Alchemy video really made an impression on me, and not too long after this I found that Rockpop show from the year before, which was on the Making Movies tour. Definitely my favorite period of the band.
I notice from the list here that Boston isn’t listed, but that one ended up being my favorite. It’s a more complete tracklist of the Emerald City bootleg, since EC cuts off the first five songs - intro up through “Lions”, only cutting in for Single Handed Sailor to the end of the gig, with still a couple of cut verses - and Boston also has a better sound. I got a few more of the late European leg gigs, and so I see that the embryonic Telegraph Road they played was actually done through a good deal of Europe before they went in and recorded the album.)