Seeing the Sounds Perfectly

Album: Dire Straits, Makin' Movies, 1980

Acquired: See below, and be forewarned that this is the just of the first of two crosslinks to my own blog within this post. Pointing to other people's sites is for the weak. I will show weakness in this post. A lot of weakness. Enjoy.

Best Track: All of them. But with a six-blade knife to my throat, I'd have to go with "Tunnel of Love" as the best song, and this bit from "Espresso Love" as the best moment on the album:

And I get trouble with my breathing
When she says boys don't know anything
But I know what I want ...
I want everything

Lasting Good Memory: Remember how before MTV really took off, local radio stations sponsored half-hour music video programs on the dingiest UHF or cable public access chanels? If you do, you'll remember that all of those shows' ramshackle charms derived from their limitation of having to play exactly what the record companies were willing to give them. For the Tidewater station that is now Bob FM but in the early 1980s was "K94, Your Southern Rock Leader," this resulted in near nightly showings of clips from the video album of Makin' Movies even though the radio station itself would never play the songs themselves. This forced programming hyprocrisy benefitted me if not the station, which has shuffled formats repeatedly over the past decades from rock to country to urban contemporary to "We Play Anything." While the station has struggled to find it's groove, I continue to love the novelistic songs and filmic videos from Makin' Movies.

Lasting Bad Memory: I came home from a long day of graduate assisting and seminar b.s.'ing sometime in late fall 1995 only to be a witness to the sonic and intellectual crimes of hearing my roommate Toby blasting the Indigo Girl's live cover of "Romeo and Juliet" and then having him spend a good deal of time defending that version as one of his all-time favorite songs. To my recollection, he wasn't even aware that the Indigo Girls were badly interpreting a Dire Straits song, which would have been excusable except for the fact that he said it didn't matter. My position was then and is now that some songs--admittedly a small earful--are perfect in their original form and should never be attempted, let alone committed to album, by other artists.

In this group, I'd put Bruce Sprigsteen's "Born to Run," Frank Sinatra's "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)," John Hiatt's "Have a Little Faith in Me," and Billie Holiday's "Stormy Weather." There are others, but very near the top of the list is Dire Strait's "Romeo and Juliet." If you disagre, you're wrong. Also, when someone tells you that an original version of a song is infinitely better than its cover, you have an aesthetic obligation to give the original a fair listen.

So much of Makin' Movies is just exactly right. This can be partially explained by the production of Jimmy Iovine and partially by the album being the band's third, coming after the seminal
Dire Straits and the somewhat justifiably ignored Communiqué.

I'd also peg the album's success on how, for once, a band perfectly matched mood, sound, and words to the feelings they were trying to convey and evoke. Setting dour or even despairing lyrics to upbeat music can often be effective, and misery in a minor key can often be off-putting. But on Makin' Movies, Mark Knopfler and his mates nailed the pairing of muted music with wistfulness and regret on "Tunnel of Love." The repeated buildup and release (if you know what I'm saying) of a really hot romance is perfectly embodied in the music and lyrics of "Expresso Love." And for a last example, "Les Boys" does in less than three minutes what it took Joel Grey and Liza Minelli several tedious hours to do in Cabaret. (No video available, sorry.)

I love it when plans come together.

Up Next: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, 1992