I'm obliged to Michael Z. Williamson, author, blogger and friend in meatspace and cyberspace, for posting yesterday, on MeWe, this clip of a 2019 performance by Mark Knopfler of his 1982 masterpiece, "Telegraph Road". It was originally performed with his group Dire Straits. It was the lead track of their album "Love over Gold".
The album has always been one of my favorites, so I thought you might enjoy Mark's rendition of the song, almost 40 years after it first appeared. He's grown older (a lot older!), but so have I; and the song itself is timeless.
I daresay "Telegraph Road" will still be played a long, long time after I'm dead. It's a masterpiece of its oeuvre.
Peter
You might find this cover of another Dire Straits classic interesting.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0RV0kgdqJU
Love Knopler a lot..Saw him jam with some other greats, namely Chet Atkins and Les Paul.
ReplyDeleteKnopfler has one or two great songs on the classic CD Irish Heartbeat.
ReplyDeleteI don't know the song, but the music sounds familiar.
ReplyDeleteCompletely non sequitur to this post, but spot-on to something you've written about many times, i.e., the coming pension funding crisis...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/17/begun-the-state-and-local-pension-bailout-requests-have/
Double plus ungood.
It's interesting to see how Knopfler has changed over the years. He's probably gotten technically a bit better -- some of the things he's been doing in the later version are probably a bit trickier than he was doing four decades ago. And, of course, he's touring with a much bigger band than Dire Straits.
ReplyDeleteBut there was an energy in the concerts four decades ago that you don't quite feel in recent tours.
Contrast this version with what you heard on the Alchemy tour in 1983.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Wp2ASqyxI
Note that the band size also affected what he was playing. With the larger band, he stayed with the acoustic guitar until the 4:40 mark (you see him change during the piano solo), whereas he switches to his electric at the much earlier spot -- 1:30 or so, while the melody switches from the introduction to the main melody.
It's an interesting contrast. And, with either version of Knopfler, he's still in my personal top five rock guitarists of all time (and, unfortunately, two of them -- Allman and Hendrix -- are dead so people can't still hear them).
Knopfler is music royalty
ReplyDeleteIt’s almost like he’s a Sultan Of...
And the versions of Sultans of Swing that Dire Straits did live show his talents far more than the version on the original studio release.
ReplyDeleteAnd Alchemy is one of the great live albums of all time.
Seen him twice, and he did this once. I enjoyed both shows very much, even if there was an a-hole in front of me for one of them...
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