On September 20, 1982, I was in the first month of my senior year in high school. Back then, radio was a constant companion for me since I didn’t have money to buy records all that often. I did try and get a job at a record store in my junior year, only to be turned away during the interview because I wasn’t 17 1/2. I really wanted that job because of the employee discounts and being surrounded by music, both new and old. Alas, that never worked out, so I just purchased the odd album here and there when I got a bit of cash from my folks.
During that month I used to listen to a couple of radio stations while getting ready for school. One was KZAP in Sacramento, and the other KWOD — also in Sacramento. KZAP was a rock station that played a good selection of what are now classics, but back then they were either new songs or music that was around a decade old. One morning, they played “Industrial Disease” by Dire Straits. I liked the band, but I wasn’t in love with them until that song got me to buy what I consider their unsung masterpiece, Love Over Gold. I must have heard that song every morning and afternoon for about a week on KAZP. I started paying closer attention to the lyrics (as best as I could) and thought they were funny. Only later did I see from the lyric sheet that the song was about the effects the monotony of work and de-industrialization had on the narrator and society at large. Kind of heavy stuff, but because the song had a light feel, it masked the seriousness of the lyrics. Well, they weren’t all serious, but in the context of the song and the album as a whole, there’s some biting social commentary going on.
At school, I’d ask my friends if they liked Dire Straits and the answer was usually yes — but tempered with “Well, I only know ‘Sultans of Swing’ and the two songs they play on MTV.” Those two songs were “Tunnel of Love” and “Skateaway” from the band’s 1980 album, Making Movies. I’d add that I really liked their new song, and most friends would ask, “What new song?” Well, soon more friends started hearing “Industrial Disease” on the radio and really liked it. Surprisingly, MTV never played a video for the song — even though one exists. My guess is that the video came out in ’83, and by that time the song had peaked and fallen off the charts in the U.S., so why bother?
A couple of weeks later, one of my classmates said he was going to San Francisco to “check out medical schools” since he wanted to be a doctor. At the time I was thinking of doing the same — not because of him, but because my father was an ophthalmologist and I thought I would see if going into the family business was something for me. It wasn’t. I asked my folks if I could use their car to drive into The City to check out the medical school because they were supposedly having an open house. They said “yes,” gave me $20 for lunch and parking. I never did check out UCSF medical school — mostly because I couldn’t find it — but I did check out Tower Records at Bay and Columbus. While there, I saw the cassette for Love Over Gold and bought it with the pocket money my folks gave me. I played it on the way home. Because I only knew the song “Industrial Disease,” that’s the first song I played…and played again…and maybe one more time before letting the rest of the album play out. By the time I got on the Bay Bridge, “Telegraph Road” started playing. And in one of those “It’s like a music video” moments, I came driving through the Caldecott Tunnel right as Pick Withers does a fantastic drum fill into Mark Knopfler’s guitar solo. I had all the windows open (including the sunroof) and it was one of those magical cinematic moments when music just carries you along while traveling down the road. I got yelled at when I got home when I told my folks that I didn’t go to the open house, but it was worth it because of that moment in the car with “Telegraph Road” just blaring out of the car speakers.
Even after its release, Love Over Gold had a big (and in some ways, profound) effect on me. I don’t know what it was about the album, but if Dire Straits’s Making Movies is an album of short stories, Love Over Gold was like a novel. Although the record has five songs, each one is like a chapter in a book. The characters aren’t really related, but they are all affected by the economic and political changes in England and the U.S. — which is the overarching theme of the record. The sprawling “Telegraph Road” (inspired by US Highway 24 that goes into Detroit, Michigan — also known as Telegraph Road), tells a story of city’s economic progress to economic ruin — and the toll it takes on the people there.
“Private Investigations” was a hugely popular song in the UK — where it went to #1 on the charts. Hard to believe that this moody song about a private investigator could catch on with a radio audience, but it did. How this chapter of the musical novel relates to the larger theme Knopfler is sketching in these songs is in the “treachery and treason” that the narrators finds while “digging up the dirt” for his clients. The only thing that can numb this unsavory work is a bottle of whiskey and a new set of lies/blinds on the window and a pain behind the eyes. Not the most upbeat lyrics, but for some reason, people in England really loved it.
The title track is a little harder to fit into the grand narrative, but the character in the song could be related to the “Private Dancer” that Tina Turner covered on her album of the same name — a song, by the way, that was an outtake from the Love Over Gold sessions. In other words, she’s probably a prostitute (you throw your love to all the strangers/and caution to the wind).
The last song, “It Never Rains” is a good one but kind of suffers from shoehorning cliche lines and lyrics from other sources. The use of “tears of a clown,” “Tin Pan Alley,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “Wheel of Fortune,” were unfortunately included, dragging down the importance of the song. However, there were two ways that Knopfler & Company save the song. The first is the music the band created, and the second, to me, is when Knopfler sings: Ah, but it’s a sad reminder/when your organ grinder has to come to you for rent/and all you have to give him his the use of your sideshow tent/yes, and that’s all that remains of the years spent doing the rounds. The invisible hand that smothers the downwardly mobile is cruel and vicious, and the lyrics certainly reflect that. But, as I wrote earlier, the cliches really work against the power of what Knopfler is saying. Still, it’s not enough for me to outright dismiss the song because over the years the entire record has become a kind of go-to to remind me of a time when I was introduced to a sleeper of an album that’s grown into a musical masterpiece for me.
Love Over Gold was also a kind of muse for my creative outlets about a year later. In the fall of 1983, I had started at my local community college because they had a film program — and I wanted to pursue a career motion pictures. My junior and senior years of high school were years when I was both a “theater kid” and a TV production geek. My high school had a program through the state’s Regional Occupation Program (ROP) that trained high school and non-high school students in certain trades. My high school had the ROP program in television production, and on a whim, I took the class in the second half of my junior year. At first, I didn’t like it, but towards the end of the year, things started to get fun. By my senior year, the TV production classes (three hours a day) were like having a playground with (what was then) current technology. I got in with a group of kids who like to screw around and we started contributing silly skits to the weekly show the class produced — a show that had the uninspiring, and very cable access sounding name of “Spotlight.” Now, where does Love Over Gold fit into this story? During my freshman year of college, I had a film course that required students to make a three-minute, edited-in-the-camera film. I was also working at a local radio station being essentially a board-op in the programming department. I worked late sometimes, and when driving home I would often pop the cassette of Love Over Gold into the car’s player. The atmospheric music of “Private Investigations,” coupled with driving on the freeway at night got me thinking of images that might fit with the music — not the lyrics, but just the music. Those cinematic images I was seeing on the road led to a short film I shot on 16mm that had to do with the final hours of a man who is dying (really uplifting stuff). Yes, it was the dreaded college student film, but I shot it in black and white (of course, if you’re going to go full-on art school, you have to use back and white film), and it got a lot of positive feedback for the photography. After that, I thought, “Well, maybe I could do a film based on the lyrics of ‘Industrial Disease’ and then try to adapt ‘Telegraph Road’ as well.” I did film “Industrial Disease,” but it turned out to be a horrible mess. After the first edit, I knew I had a contender for The Golden Turkey Awards. Part of the problem was being too literal with the lyrics. The other part of the problem was that I couldn’t match the images to the lyrics (remember, this is when editing film meant cutting and splicing film together with glue). I couldn’t afford the process to match the sound with the visuals during production, so I had to film it silently and wing the tempo of the song from memory — which is why the whole thing turned into an embarrassment. To this day, only a couple of people have seen the film. After that, I had little enthusiasm to make “Telegraph Road” into a film — though I tried to do some pre-production work with on it with a friend for about a month. Lately, I was thinking about ways to save “Industrial Disease” by finding a way to use the film I shot in 1983, with some footage from the band’s video, and perhaps some new material to create a film/music video that I would feel comfortable showing to those who worked on it all those years ago.
So, when I wrote at the outset that Love Over Gold had a profound effect on my young ears, it wasn’t only that the album was a favorite record I listened to a lot, but it was a key motivator in my early creative (though, somewhat failed) endeavors. I wasn’t the only one who found their muse in that record. Film director Bill Forsyth (who is also a friend of Mark Knopfler) heard Love Over Gold in ’82 and told Knopfler that the album inspired him to start work on what would eventually become the 1984 movie Comfort and Joy — which Mark Knopfler contributed new music and adapted parts of Love Over Gold for the film’s musical soundtrack.
