The guitarist Mark Knopfler always wanted to be: “All I wanted”
Every guitarist’s aspiration should be to find their own voice on their instrument. Emulating your heroes is awfully good when starting out, but the problem comes when you start to become a carbon copy of those who came before. The sweet spot should be to find something new in between those classics, the same way guitarists like Slash have done, but when listening to Mark Knopfler playing, it often sounds like it’s coming from a completely different plane of existence than everyone else.
Then again, there’s a good chance that Knopfler would blame his own incompetence on the guitar as the reason why his playing works. He never wanted to play with a pick whenever he worked with Dire Straits, but despite not having the same attack as someone like Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, hearing him play across the changes on songs like ‘Sultans of Swing’ is the sound of someone truly in tune with their instrument.
However, the guitar scene that Knopfler grew up in demanded that he make some changes to the usual guitarist. No one was going to be as mind-melting as Page or Ritchie Blackmore, and since Eddie Van Halen was right around the corner ready to take over the world, it was up to him to find something new, and dropping the pick made him sound more like a singer the same way that Jeff Beck had done in his prime.
There are definitely influences from everything from rockabilly to bluegrass in some of his songs, but like every other guitarist of Knopfler’s generation, there was no topping what Jimi Hendrix could do. For every other guitar that made playing the guitar seem like hard work, Hendrix truly felt like an alien whenever he picked up the guitar, pulling off the most insane guitar licks that anyone had ever heard and making it look like second nature.
That certainly took a lot of practice, but alongside blues legends like BB King, Knopfler said that there was nothing better than jamming on some of Hendrix’s greatest tunes, saying, “I just wanted to be BB King or Jimi Hendrix. I loved them both. I was playing with a pick then all the time, on electric. I was learning to fingerpick, but that was all I wanted to do. I’d be playing ‘Voodoo Child’ or I’d be playing ‘Purple Haze’, or ‘Hey Joe’.”
Hendrix may have been the main spectacle every time he got onstage, but that shouldn’t discount what King did for the guitar. The psychedelic scene may have embraced Hendrix’s outlandish approach to guitar and loved watching him perform with his teeth and behind his head, but King is where every six-stringer goes when they want to learn the mechanics of melody. King didn’t always have to play many notes, but when listening to tracks like ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, he made every one of them count.
Both of Knopfler’s inspirations might not immediately be influences on his sound, but when looking at how he constructs a solo, a lot of their touches are more subtle. It was always going to be challenging to pick out any influences from a guy who primarily plays with his fingers, but the solo in ‘Sultans of Swing’ feels like a cross between both King’s and Hendrix’s style, starting with slower melodic segments before flying off the handle and playing those triplets at the end of the solo, which may as well have been what Hendrix would have played if he was born to fingerpick.
Despite Knopfler being one of the most humble players in the world when it comes to his technique, the fact that he can make music that sounds as tasteful as it does comes from doing his homework on Hendrix. Anyone can get on board with the flashy outfits and the idea of lighting their instrument on fire, but the real reason why Hendrix will be talked about for centuries to come is because of what he did on record rather than onstage.
