Album Review: Dire Straits’ ‘Making Movies’ is their best, least heard album

Album Review: Dire Straits’ “Making Movies”

Dire Straits and founder Mark Knopfler helped define rock and roll in the 1980s. They came onto the scene in 1978 with their self-titled first album and the hit “Sultans of Swing,” which earned them some Grammy nominations, and rightly so. The infectious groove of “Sultans” catches you unaware, and doesn’t let you go. Then came “Communique” the following year. It was 1985’s “Brothers in Arms” that really made everyone pay attention, and all the women and pop fans who’d never really listened to Dire Straits knew who they were and liked them. It won all kinds of awards like Album of the Year and Song of the Year and sold thirty-million copies.

But I’m a contrarian. Admit it, aren’t you also tired of the only Dire Straits song you hear on the radio these days begins with Sting whining, “I want my MTV”? (The same year, Knopfler also won a Grammy for a country performance for the “Cosmic Square-dance” with country legend and godfather Chet Atkins. If you listen closely, you’ll always hear a little bluegrass lurking in the background of his music.) I like the album and have it on vinyl and cd. One of these days I’ll get an iPod and download it there too. But it’s not my favorite Dire Straits album. In a lot of ways it’s too polished, too worked over. “Why Worry,” “Ride Across the River,” “The Man’s too Strong,” and “One World” are great, even amazing. But for my favorite Dire Straits album, you’ve got to go back two albums to their third offering: “Making Movies.”

With only seven songs, it’s almost an EP. It still has the garage band sound that so many young, new bands have and lose in their later years. Co-produced by the legendary Jimmy Iovine and Knopfler, it also features Roy Bittain, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, on keyboards and organs.

Lyrically, it features gritty, painful, mournful lyrics, looking at the tough side of life—something that came to be a feature of Knopfler’s lyrics. It starts subtly with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel Waltz” and then slides into “Tunnel of Love,” full of the heartbreak of unattached sex searching for something real, followed by the bittersweet “Romeo and Juliet,” which mines broken and shattered relationships. Then comes my favorite, “Skateaway,” a musically sensuous journey through the streets, looking and the unattached and lonely and the dangerous games they play. “Expresso Love” is full of lust and energy but is sad under it all. “Solid Rock” is a rock anthem but one that also holds out some hope among all the pain and alienation found on this album. And the final cut, “Les Boys,” comes across as a light, almost fluffy piece looking at the gay scene in Berlin. But even among the tongue-in-cheekness of it all is a tragicomic sense of despair.

This is one of those classic albums that shows a band emerging into its own and shouting at the world, “We’ve arrived and you better be ready.”