Toro Toro, Taxi

Dire Straits was, to me, the unlikeliest bunch of megastars of the Eighties.

And they were among the most interesting.

And it was thirty years ago today that the album that, to me, defined them as either “the most interesting megastars” or “the biggest interesting group” (*) was released.

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Making Movies.

Dire Straits had come out of nowhere in 1978 with the mega-hit single “Sultans of Swing”, which introduced the world to the guitar style of Mark Knopfler, a former schoolteacher and guitar virtuoso who’d melded the styles of Chet Atkins, Richard Thompson and Eric Clapton into a thrilling melange of rootsy beauty.

Still, the first two albums – Dire Straits and Communique – were unsatisfying.  They had their moments, to be sure – but by the time one listened to them both back-to-back, it was easy to write them off as an eccentric hybrid of country and pop; niche players worth a listen, certainly, but nothing that was going to take over the world.

We know how the story ends, of course.  After 1982’s EP Love Over Gold, which established the band’s chops as a makers of quirky but consequential pop, came Brothers In Arms, which made them into Europe’s biggest superstars, record-movers and touring machines in the same league as Michael Jackson and Springsteen at the peak of their games.

Connecting the quirky alt-country band and the international pop powerhouse was Making Movies.

In an era of great pop songwriting, Tunnel had complex, literary lyrics – the title cut’s mad chase between a pair of lovers and the soldiers in the amusement park, starting with Bittan’s Rogers and Hammerstein-via-E-Street Band intro…

…and swerving between invocations of Chuck Berry, a sly latin influence, and a backstory that reads like a Dashiell Hammett short story.

And in place of the four-piece pub band from the first two albums, Knopfler stripped the band down to a power trio – John Illsley on bass, Pick Withers on drums, and himself – and added some judicious keyboards from Roy Bittan of the E Street Band.  And in place of the air-tight, three-minute guitar-centered song arrangements came a wide-open, almost symphonic sound, with songs that stretched out toward eight minutes on the title cut, allowing room for the band to stretch out, and use Knopfler’s guitar virtuosity for atmosphere rather than mere fretboard acrobatics.  “Skateaway”, a six-minute streetscape built around a reedy Stratocaster improvisation, really showcased Bittan’s organ and piano work, which paid subtle homage to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin in using the piano to evoke the atmosphere of a busy New York street and its star, a coquette on a pair of skates.

The song, with its off-handed asides to conversations up and down the street as the rollerskating heroine skittles through traffic, is almost a prototype of “Money For Nothing”, four years later – a song about an overheard conversation.

And “Romeo and Juliet”, an exhausted, last-call love song and one of Dire Straits’ most enduring masterpieces, stars Knopfler playing…the dobro, an instrument that hadn’t poked its nose out of the world of bluegrass in thirty years.

(Recorded months before MTV debuted, the video in all its painful lock-step literalism shows how very much in its infancy the art of the music video was).

While the album led with a lot less of the “geez, what an amazing guitar player is Mark Knopfler” than the first two albums, his virtuosity is, if anything, more amazing for its subtlety.  Check out the skirling timbres of the soloing in “Tunnel of Love” – the tone of the Strat fills out from the middle as the solo progresses, accentuating the sub-dominant notes in his slinky patterns in a way that, thirty years later, I’m still getting new insights into.  Or “Skateaway”, which is an etude on the uses of the nuance of the out-of-phase pickup pair and the volume pedal.  It may be one of the most subtly gorgeous albums in the history of the electric guitar.

Making Movies made the case that pop music could be literary, virtuosic – a work of layered, nuanced beauty.  It’s one of the reasons that this part of the eighties was such a glorious era in popular music.   Because I can see someone making an album like this today; I just can’t see it being the jumping off point for a huge popular success.

(*) Of course it’s an absurd choice.  There were many interesting groups that sold a lot of records; there were many megastars at the time that defied the stereotype that “pop is stupid”.  But it’s in the English Majors’ Association Handbook; we are allowed to use one such juxtaposition a year without penalty.  Step off.