Mark Knopfler

July 7 (8pm). Jubilee Auditorium. Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca)

When we here at SEE saw that Mark Knopfler was coming to town, we started sharing Dire Straits stories. Some were good, some were bad, but none of them were hard to come up with. In honour of the dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri, we invited our writers to share some of their treasured Dire Straits memories with y’all. Enjoy.

MATT HOLLYWOOD
In the words of Bruce McCullough, “Greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls.” Too true, Bruce, but you forgot to mention the most obvious greatest-hits target market: dads.
Before we go any further, a word about me and my dad. Our relationship has always been dysfunctional, a volatile bond that erupted in my teenage years into plenty of “Fuck you, dad!” moments. Our conversations nowadays are mostly strained, awkward, talking without communicating. No surprise, then, that his decent taste in classic rock is the only thing we agree on. On long car trips, he doesn’t appreciate the screechy avant-noise shit I think is appropriate highway-driving music, and I’m not big on the awful pseudo-jazz elevator music he’s inclined to listen to. But set the dial on the nearest classic rock station, and we’re both reasonably happy. (“Gimme Shelter” does not get old, ever.)
It was just prior to one of these trips that I picked up a cheap copy of Private Investigations, a comprehensive double-disc collection of Dire Straits’ and Mark Knopfler’s best and best-known songs. It was a birthday gift for my dad, but of course I had an ulterior motive: a musically tolerable two-hour drive.
With little else to talk about, we ended up talking about the music. It was a small revelation. We started, at first predictably, talking about Knopfler’s lyrics, the delicately interwoven keyboard textures. But the conversation soon turned into one of those elliptical, open-ended discussions that can only happen when both parties are actually engaged, interested, communicating.
The sound of this old music got him talking about the year of his life he lived in Toronto in his early 20s, when he served in the army reserves. (This episode was, believe it or not, previously unknown to me.) He told me about the girlfriends he went out with before my mother—a shocking revelation to me, unaccustomed to imagining my father as a sexual person, or even a social person. He told me about his young life, most of which I was completely unaware of. I didn’t say much about myself. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to hear about him, finally, after 26 years of grey-suited, tight-lipped silence.
So thank you, Mark Knopfler, for being the catalyst for the only real conversation I’ve ever had with my father. I hope that as he eases into old age, and I into middle age, there will be more to come. At least now there’s a precedent.

FISH GRIWKOWSKY
Besides the computer animated video with the word “faggot” in it—which completely blew my ass off and got me addicted to MuchMusic—“Brothers in Arms" always choked me up as a kid.
You don’t think about it much, but phrases like “fields of destruction” and “baptism of fire” kinda maintained political activism in a time between the years when all musicians talked about was politics—between the ’60s and post-9/11. Tracy Chapman, Bruce Springsteen, Midnight Oil, U2, Knopfler’s crew—they all leaned towards a mainstream pop humanism that really affected a lot of people’s political outlooks with a volume that, say, Dead Kennedys couldn’t reach. Even if it was armchair. And though there’s patriotism in “Brothers,” it reminded us of something that’s been deliberately swept under the carpet, once again, in modern times: that war is complete and utter shit.
On a more superficial level, their neon pink-blue colour scheme matched Miami Vice exactly, which gives me boners.

JUSTIN LANGILLE
It was the summer of ’98, and I was 17. There were Wings and Pink Floyd records lying about the basement for my pals and me to roll our joints on, but Mark Knopfler and crew’s 1985 album Brothers in Arms held an allure that the others were missing. Someone was coaxed out of their couchbound stupor to put it on the ancient record player sitting in the corner.
We were unmoved at first, but when “Money for Nothing” came on, we all sat upright. To us, this song wasn’t an early MTV hit; it was the soundtrack “Weird” Al Yankovic used to spoof The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1989 cult classic UHF. We listened closer. A seething indictment of the shitty synth bands getting rich off MTV fame, “Money for Nothing” wasn’t just barroom fodder from the ’80s; it was an important piece of music-industry criticism, with a vocal hook from Sting to boot! That night, we added “educator” to Al Yankovic’s illustrious résumé.

SCOTT LINGLEY
I remember staying up all night as a teenager so that I’d be awake to catch Dire Straits’ performance on MuchMusic’s live telecast of the Live Aid concert. At the time, Dire Straits had about eight hits on the radio from Brothers in Arms and had virtually monopolized music TV with the video for “Money for Nothing,” which also had quite a nifty drum intro that I would spazzily try to recreate on my small, bottom-of-the-line kit.
I sort of recall Mark Knopfler leading the band through their hits in his trademark sweatbands and blazer, but I more clearly recall guest vocalist Sting grooving away in a ridiculous puffy white New Wave jacket at the side of the stage, and noticing for the first time how much less cool he became the farther he got from The Police.
Looking back, I appreciate how unlikely it was that a homely, balding egghead like Knopfler could become one of the biggest rock stars in the world, and how this couldn’t possibly last. Perhaps he knew it too, as his band only had one more studio album in them after that. I don’t own any Dire Straits records, but I do turn up “Sultans of Swing” and mutter along whenever it comes on the radio.

EAMON McGRATH
At 7 a.m. one foggy summer morning littered with liquor bottles, a good friend and I jumped into a van and drove a few blocks to Edmonton’s End of the World, a steep concrete ledge that hangs over a death drop in the river valley. It’s one of those places that you can always count on in this city; whenever you’re stranded and looking for something to do, you can always go to that ledge and look straight down. It’s also one of those places you can never tell anybody where it is, for fear that knowledge of its whereabouts will spread and there’ll be somebody else there the next time you pay it a visit. We played “Sultans of Swing” over and over and over again on the ride there.

FAWNDA MITHRUSH  
I was one of those kids prone to sleeplessness: when someone else was awake, I couldn’t possibly sleep for fear I was missing something—something that only happened when things were quiet and dark and snoozing. Funny: only now do I realize my insomnia may have been completely due to my dad’s night-owl tendencies.
One of these sweaty summer nights, I stayed up watching the old animated Robin Hood, and all I wanted to do was whistle like the rooster in the opening song. I kept trying and trying and couldn’t figure it out—perhaps it was the spaces in my teeth— but my dad spent the whole night teaching and explaining to me exactly how to whistle—and he used the opening riff from “Walk of Life” as his example. I knew the melody well. It was something he and my mom would put on the turntable and dance around to in the living room on Sundays, while my baby sister and I mocked their two-stepping. (Yes, my parents are hippies. How the hell do you think I got named after a woodland creature?) A woo-oo.

TRAVIS SARGENT
TUNNEL OF LOVE—It was August, the summer before twelfth grade. My final summer as a kid, the last bit of irresponsibility before a lifetime of burden began. My friends and would pass the time playing ping-pong and smoking cigarettes in my mother's garage, and at night we'd swipe cold beers from our parent's kitchens and ride around on skateboards. The object of my misguided affection worked as a checkout girl at the town's only pharmacy, and I had made it my mission to lay some smooches on her before summer was over. She was a freshman, a real knockout, and I knew it wouldn't be long before some dashing quarterback swooped in and took her away from me. I had to act fast. I'd crafted the perfect mix-tape of dum-dum teenage love songs, and after walking her home one night, left it in her mailbox as a surprise. I didn't see her again until halfway through the first semester, and just like I imagined, she was on the arm of some musclebound clod. I asked her what she thought of the tape I'd painstakingly put together, and why I hadn't heard from her. She informed me that the tape that'd been left in her mailbox was blank on one side, and on the other was Dire Straits' 1985 chart-topping album Brothers in Arms. We never spoke again.