MONEY FOR NOTHING: The Album That Convinced the World to Buy a CD Player

PJ Pat delves into the 40th anniversary of Dire Straits' groundbreaking album 'Brothers in Arms'. He shares intriguing insights, from Sting's contribution to the smash hit 'Money for Nothing' to the album's pioneering role in the digital music revolution. 

Featuring exclusive excerpts from a recent GUITARIST Magazine article, listeners get a rare glimpse into Mark Knopfler's nuanced guitar style and the evolution of the band's sound. This episode is a must-listen for rock enthusiasts and guitar aficionados alike.

00:23 Iconic Album: Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms
00:38 Fun Facts About Brothers in Arms
02:26 The Making of Brothers in Arms
05:39 Mark Knopfler's Guitar Techniques and Gear
06:14 Recording Challenges and Evolution of Sound
11:33 Mark Knopfler's Humble Reflections

Outro music (very last song you hear) by Witch of November

Transcript

Hey, rock lovers. This is PJ Pat. Thank you for joining. Let's hit the intro. Welcome to the It's one Louder podcast. Your host, PJ Pat, has done absolutely nothing that you would know about. Thanks for joining. This is a place where I read and comment and, and my 2 cents as a musician and just a rock fan in general of articles from rock magazines and guitar magazines.

Today's no different. I'm gonna read an article that I saw in the latest, uh, GUITARIST Magazine about that iconic album from Dar Straits Brothers in Arms. Can you Believe 40 Years? Where Has Time Gone In A Flash, I gotta say in the Flash released in 1985? A couple of facts about this iconic album. Did you know that Sting helped write.

Money for nothing is actually one of the most played songs of MTV in that era when it first came out. And it has that special line. I want my MTV and MTV obviously just ran with that. They loved it. Especially that computer generated digital video. They play the crap out of that. And what a song, what a guitar player, songwriter, guitar player, mark ler.

He is one of the most unique guitarists out there plays with his fingers. Has that clean tone and just so precise. This finger playing. Unbelievable. It's basically Unreplicable. Obviously, his skills were definitely on display in this album. Another really cool, fun fact, I just learned that this was one of the first.

All digital albums ever made. So digitally recorded, digitally mixed, digitally mastered DDD, and really launched the era of CDs. And this was pretty much a very unique album. I think it probably contributes to that very clean and crisp sound of the album, I gotta say. So I guess the best way to listen to it is not on vinyl, is on cd.

There you go. Okay. One more fun fact is that the album cover features. This amazing guitar and that is Mark's own guitar that he used on one of the songs. I forget which ones, but I'm sure the article's gonna say. But it is just to reflect the nature of the, the kind of clean Chris sound of the album. I'm thinking, I mean, you're looking at this and you're definitely telling yourself this is not a heavy rock and roll album.

And that's I guess, what they wanted to convey with that, but very, very iconic cover. Okay, let's get into it. The Boy Can Play is the article's Title 1980 Fives. Brothers in Arms Reinvented Mark LERs song Craft and Guitar Style, and rewarded dire Straits with more fame than they could handle. 40 years later in a rare interview, the band looked back on the biggest British Rock album of the eighties words, Henry Yates National Resonator Photo Joby Sessions.

Okay. Dire Straits Brothers in Arms 40th anniversary. As I mentioned these days, mark Effler tends to keep his distance from brothers in arms dire straits, all conquering fifth album belongs to another time. Now its songs to us. 30 something gunslinger in a red headband, whom the 76-year-old only half recognizes before he quit the road.

Six years ago, he'd pull out the occasional track at solo shows treating Madison Square Garden to a valedictory blast through money for nothing in 2019. Butler Preci at the best of times has never gone deep on the 1985 album that briefly made him the world's biggest rockstar. Whether he liked it or not, hint, he did not.

Brothers in arms just happened to coincide with compact discs and it was a sheer fluke. He shrugged in a 1995 interview with guitarist David Mead. If it hadn't been that album, it would've been something else. It was just an accident of timing in the decade. Since then, NoFL has kept his head down. So doily on the subject of Brothers in Arms while quashing talk of Reuniting the band who split in 95, that it's common to meet.

Younger music fans who have never even heard of this 30 million selling album, but times change given the spending power of dire strait's demographic, you'd anticipate a 40th anniversary. Brothers in arms reissue and this year's box set is a stunner complete with. Pin sharp sleeve art of that airborne 37 national resonator and a live disc of the band killing it in San Antonio.

LER is reticent to start with, but we break the ice over a joke that only guitarists would get the impossibility of playing in a chair with arms and he's off to the races reaching back through the fog of four decades, far more readily than we expected. It's tempting just to say, oh, it's nothing and downplay.

It considers an effler. But thinking about brothers in arms now, it seems like that record meant so much to so many people. That's where we're still here now. It wasn't a million miles from here, just a short tube ride to Holland Park. In fact, that brothers in arms became a notion, recalls Isley speaking to us separately.

We all got together in a little muse house. Myself, mark, Alan Clark, the piano player. Guy Fletcher Keys and Terry Williams drums hitting a cardboard box. Mark slowly introduced us to the new songs and it was a really good balance from the seriousness of Brothers in Arms to the lightness of touch in walk of life.

What I'm doing on bass mostly is complimenting Mark's Thumb work on the low strings, and that goes right back to the first album, although they're far and few between. Mark is actually in really good hands with amazing guitar players that use their hands versus a pick while playing. Jeff Beck is one of them.

Che Atkins, the original, and also Lindsey Buckingham from F Fleetwood Mac. Both amazing guitar players using their hands and both have very distinct styles. And Mark is no different, just amazing. So if you have a chance, go check 'em out and you'll see what I mean. This definitely adds another dimension to just playing using your pick.

Alright, I'm not gonna read the whole article, but I'm gonna just pick and choose, uh, certain excerpts that really talk about the album and give some juicy details. So coming up with the songs, the material gave Dire Straits a confidence to finally book Montera's Air Studios in winter of 84. But there was trouble in Paradise having shifted state-of-the-art digital gear down pothole roads to George Martin's plantation style recording facility.

Tropical Rain, hammered the roof for six weeks while LERs guitar Tech of the period. Ron Eve recalls producer Neil. Dorfman's growing frustration. He was very unhappy because he felt there wasn't enough work going on. And during that recording he was complaining that all of the sounds were too dark. And I think he was talking about the guitar Pre Brothers Dark was not a term you'd associate with LERs Fret work.

By that point, Dar Strait's, 1978, hit Sultans of Swing Love. That song was still the band signature song, and it's. Flittering outro solo recorded with a 61 Strats three-way pickup, selector, jammed between settings. Perhaps the quintessential example of a fender's single coil cluck. Now the 61 made the trip to Monserrat, but Eve believes and mostly stayed in the flight case.

I think Mark got it out once or twice, but I think with some of the superb instruments he had by then, he was fine. That Fender, which was a bit of a parts caster, quite limiting. Instead, brothers in arms heralded the arrival of the 1983 Les Paul 59 Reissue, whose thick burnished tone drove the title track and money for nothing Really.

Wow. I always associated Mark Effler with offender that his, I think, signature red and white. Fender, um, crazy to think that he was a Les Paul on money for nothing, for sure. But we'll see if he used it for the rest of the album. I guess that's what you're talking about in terms of the dark sound. Wow.

Maybe it was from listening to Need Your Love So Bad by Peter Green, and that wasn't a distorted guitar sound, but it was so powerful. E fills us in on the model's providence that Les Paul came from Rudy's music in New York. I played it and the first thing I was conscious of was the neck. My comparison is always my own 65 sg with the really slick neck.

And this wasn't like that, but it wasn't like the plank next from some Les Paul's have either, which I can abide. After the recording that reissue was also the one I converted the wiring onto the out of phase pickups. Going back to the Peter Green sound, I don't think I even. Ask Mark. Now for himself, sees his brother's lead work as a natural evolution.

My approach to solos was probably changing. You start to realize how much real estate there is in a bar where you can put the notes, or if you have a band with that quality where you can lean on the timing, but there wasn't really time to think about it. You're just moving on. The band had developed, it was a lot louder and more powerful with keyboards becoming more important.

That then makes you think in a different way. More inversions perhaps. But I didn't force it. I didn't stop picking on country tunes. I was still doing rootsy things as he handed guitars to Effler across the studio. Floor Eve was also noticing the Gibson's impact. Mark's music had become more wide ranging and moved away from the sound of the first two albums, which had that single coil American sound, very clean, almost a surf guitar sound, if you like.

As he got into more complex arrangements, he knew the guitar sound needed to fit what he was playing, and Mark always loved that. Les Paul tone. It just wasn't really a style. It was up to him. Of course, Eve continues, but I confess I pushed him more towards the Les Paul sound. I felt the resistance early on, but I persevered.

He'd be on the neck setting with the tone. On the flip side for other tracks, Les Paul would've been dead wrong. The perky walk of life demanded the articulation of Nola's 83 tele style sketcher. The old west metallic plunk of the man's too strong, proved the national wasn't just eye candy, and it's made for exactly mark style.

You can either play those guitars or you can't end parenthesis. And contrary to the nagging rumor, Les Paul Jr. Definitely didn't feature on money for nothing. No rubbish. Mark has a junior, but it certainly was involved on recordings. Knopfler Coaxed, warmth and body from Eve Zone Marshall, JTM 45, into the studio's Laney four by 12 with the cry baby on money for nothing representing the only significant pedal, but the sessions unsung gear.

Curio. The tech points out wasn't even played by the band leader. The Roland synth guitars of that time. Someone like Mark would pick him up and say, I'm not playing that. So he had one made, I'm pretty certain by John, sir, it was a beautiful guitar, but Mark never really mastered it with his style. It was always gonna be difficult because he's such a light player.

His fingers just brushed the strings back. Then with a synth guitar, you had to pick a single note really precisely and monotonically. Then pick the next, huh? But because of how Mark played with all the grace noses, the synth couldn't keep up. So Jackson played the parts on the man's too strong. That anomaly aside, brothers Undisputably belongs to Effler these nine tracks representing the collision of his finest songs and most emotionally charged playing.

So it's a strange thing to sit opposite one of the stone cold British greats of the past half century and hear him dismiss his own talent. The best Koffler can say for his brother's performance, he shrugs, is that he finally felt he was hitting his marks in the studio. Being called a guitar here was just awkward.

He says, 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 player. Not much more than that. Wow. Humble guy. Huh? Humble guy. If you're the one who wrote those songs, you're kind of allowed to be crap. Well, not to be crap, but you're given some leeway because you wrote the thing.

By brothers in arms. I was getting a little bit better. He continues. I was still learning how to play in time after years of working in studios with engineers who would say, you're rushing there and you say, no, I'm not. And they say, yes you are, because you didn't recognize it. You didn't know it yet. You think you're playing in time, but you're not.

You have to learn that it takes a long time, especially if you're playing eighth and 16 notes with your thumb and fingers. I got away with murder. Wow, that is crazy. Listening to a guitar virtuoso like Mark saying stuff like this, if he's saying this and he can't play in time, it took him years to figure it out.

I mean, what about guys like us? What do you think? How we feel? Holy shit. That's on how the World Side, of course, released 17th of May in 1985 Brothers in Arms quickly became inescapable. While LERs fret work enjoyed the kind of mass adulation that simply doesn't happen in the diffused post-internet rock landscape today, the guitarist and Isley Paint the World Tour that followed as both enormous fun and intense graft.

Flour Carries himself with such every man humility. No crap. It's bleeding throughout the whole interview, which is awesome. I mean, to see a star like this be that humble is actually pretty cool and quite refreshing. It's hard to believe he was once a target for the gutter press. It was what we all wanted and we had been chasing.

I suppose you could also say the fallout was much bigger than anything we could ever have Foreseen, he says, of the sigh. There was one occasion when the youth in Manchester shouted out to me on the street, you're a top man. No, no, no. I didn't feel as though I was top of anything. I never did. N'S manager enters his room time's up.

40 years later then has a guitarist made peace with the album that brought him both unimaginable success and intolerable scrutiny up to a point. Ask about the last time he listened to brothers in arms and the notion seems to fill him with horror. Never, never, never. I don't ever go home and play my own records.

Life's tragic enough without that adding to it. Wow. You humble. Self-deprecating guitar hero. You are Mark Effler. There you go. Cool. Right. To see his personality just transcend throughout the interview and you know, they, you get all types, you know, they get these guitar heroes that are just bombastic and all about them.

And then you get guys like, mark, we're all human. We're all different. And um, that's. The beauty of guitar playing. You know, you can pick up the same guitar, actually, two amazing guitar players can pick up the same guitar and play the same song, and each one will sound different. It's all in your life experience.

It's all in how you're, you play, it's all in the fingers, you know? Uh, that's just amazing. That's, that's human and that's something that robots and AI can never replace. Mark Matt words. Alright. I really appreciate you listening. If you dug this cap. Please go check out. It's one ladder.com. That's ITS, the number one ladder.com, and you'll find a bunch of other rock and roll gear.

Hopefully you like a thing or two, you'd be supporting the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and we'll rock with you one ladder at the next one.

Thanks for listening. Don't forget to always rock. One louder.