The strange case of Bill Wilson’s claims that he wrote Dire Straits’ classic ‘Sultans of Swing’
Before everything moved onto the permanent archive of the internet, things could essentially fade out of existence, not least songs that were already obscure. This has eternally begged the question: how many great works of art in history were pilfered from the lowly by powerful creatives who could happily call them their own? And, provided you think it is a masterpiece and not one of the many hipsters suddenly deriding it, was the Dire Straits classic ‘Sultans of Swing’ one of them?
Well, if you ask Bill Wilson, he will, in roundabout terms, tell you that it was. The Indiana-born musician returned from the Vietnam War and closed out his military service in the late 1960s in Austin, Texas, where he was quickly assimilated into the local thriving singer-songwriter scene. He recorded demos for Sonobeat Records fleeting while completing his tour of duty on the Air Force base, showcasing his skill as a musician.
However, his focus seemed to hint that he was never gunning to be a career musician in the traditional pursuit of stardom, instead producing a few songs of great quality rather than ramping up quantity and ‘brand’. So, when his duty was complete in 1970, he returned to Indiana, leaving his footing as a notable artist behind. Alas, it only took two years for him to join The Pleasant Street Band, and this caused a resurgent boom for his old demos.
He soon found himself signed to Columbia Records and became one of the many artists in their roster that they began calling the next Bob Dylan. But a change in management along with this cursed tag meant that his debut album with the band was fated to flop. From thereon, he resigned himself to the life of a semi-professional musician, often playing shows and writing but never making the leap to seek out stardom. That is until he began claiming that he his words had indeed hit the heights of a mega-hit just from the voice of another.
A live compilation CD put out by a production company sees an artist dubbed B. Wilson make the following decree before covering ‘Sultans of Swing’: “I do this thing I co-wrote about, I guess, it’s been about 12 years ago I wrote the lyrics and a friend of mine used to work a lot of sessions for my old producer, Bob Johnston, and worked a session with this fellow from England by the name of Mark Knopfler,” he begins.
Continuing: “[He] has his own group over there called Dire Straits. He had this little melody. It sounded like ‘Walk, Don’t Run.’ And he had this little story concerning a band that nobody wanted to listen to. Only a few people show up to hear. So we got together one night after the session and tossed these lyrics around on a napkin and I guess I wound up writing most of the lyrics to the tune. Made enough money to buy a new Blazer that year I remember, so… didn’t do too bad. It goes like this…”
In truth, he got the inspiration for the song bang on. Knopfler himself explains that the song was spawned from a rainy night in Ipswich when he ducked into a bar and found a lacklustre band playing before five disinterested drunks. “When the guys said ‘Thank you very much, We are the Sultans of Swing,’ there was something really funny about it to me because Sultans, they absolutely weren’t,” he once recalled. “You know they were rather tired little blokes in pullovers.” So, does this add credence to Wilson’s claim? And if so, why hasn’t he ever received any credit or public recognition at all for his part in writing this huge hit?
Well, a little bit of digging instantly puts Wilson in the shade. A mere touch of research reveals that Knopfler never went to the US until after ‘Sultans of Swing‘ was released. His only recorded session work in Memphis occurred almost a decade after ‘Sultans of Swing’ hit the airways. Furthermore, there is evidence that their paths crossed even unofficially. But does that make Wilson a damaging character espousing spurious claims? Nah, it merely makes him a storyteller.
His tale was simply cast before a live audience to embellish his own version of ‘Sultans of Swing’ with an aura of mystery. It is merely a mark of the internet’s capacity to take things out of context that has imbued this moment of artistry with a copyright insinuation. Indeed, Wilson may well have even had similar words to the narrative of ‘Sultans of Swing’ written before Dire Straits anyhow, that is just the nature of inspiration and having been on the lowly end of half-occupied gigs, Wilson would’ve known all too well trying to be a Sultan for a weekend before reality takes hold.
Ultimately, his little tale and all the corroborations possible within it highlights the inspiration-art cycle of modern art. As Nick Cave explains: “The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation — everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music — the great artistic experiment of our era. Plagiarism is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary — even admirable — tendency, and that is to steal.“ It seems Wilson simply cooked the books to bring an aura of the mystic to his performance, and that has unfurled towards a mystery of its own.
