“I got away with murder!”: Is Mark Knopfler a ‘guitar hero’? He certainly doesn’t think so
Mark Knopfler’s work on Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms landed him the label of ‘guitar hero’ in the eyes of many. And the six-string lines on its title track, Money For Nothing and So Far Away show you why.
But Knopfler doesn’t feel the adulation was entirely merited, as he explains in a new interview with Guitar World.
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“That was just awkward,” he reflects on the praise he received for his guitar skills after the release of the 1985 album.
“The world is bursting with fabulous players. Whether I’ve written a good song or not, that’s what counts to me.
“I gave up trying to be a great guitar player. I have enough to get by in the studio – that’s how I see myself as a guitar player. Not much more than that. But I can get away with it.
Knopfler adds that a band’s chief songwriter or songwriters should be allowed a certain degree of leeway regarding their technical skills.
“If you’re the one who wrote the songs,” he says, “you’re kind of allowed to be crap. Well, not to be crap, but you’re given some leeway because you wrote the thing.
“The other guys are there, really standing by their instruments: ‘I play piano,’ ‘I play bass.’ Like, ‘I’m good at this and that’s why I’m here’ – and boy, they are.”
Though we feel he’s underselling his technical prowess a little, in Knopfler’s eyes, he says he “got away with murder”.
He reveals he was “still learning how to play in time” while recording Brothers In Arms – Dire Straits’ fifth album.
He says it came “after years of working in studios with engineers who would say, ‘You’re rushing there.’ And you’d say, ‘No I’m not.’ And they’d say, ‘Yes, you are.’ Because you didn’t recognise it. You didn’t know it yet. You think you’re playing in time – but you’re not. You have to learn that.”
He concludes: “It takes a long time, especially if you’re playing 8th and 16th notes with your thumb and fingers. That’s just part of the journey. Some of the very finest musicians have told me they had to learn the same thing. Glenn Worf [bassist] was just the same. There was a guy in his band who told him, ‘You’re not playing in time.’ And he said, ‘The hell I am!’”
In another recent revelation, Mark Knopfler recently told Classic Rock that the iconic guitar sound of the record’s second track Money For Nothing came as a result of a microphone mishap.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
