The ZZ Top song Mark Knopfler said was what music was “all about”
The 1980s were a huge decade for both Dire Straits and ZZ Top.
The two couldn’t have come from more different parts of the world. While forming Dire Straits in London, frontman Mark Knopfler hailed from the seaside port of Blyth near the UK’s Newcastle area, whereas the famed rock trio ZZ Top joined forces at the tail-end of the 1960s in Texas’ Houston. Yet, both were shaped by working-class climates and guided by an unfussy approach to their songcraft, forever chasing the mystical boogie until their dual commercial explosion across the new decade.
Both found fame early, too. After a few years of gigging and a couple of low-key records, 1972’s Tres Hombres catapulted ZZ Top to the centre of the era’s Southern rock big names, pushed by the ‘La Grange’ number. Dire Straits hit the ground running even sooner, with their debut ‘Sultans of Swing’ entering the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic in 1978.
Such rootsy offerings were never above the evolving trends in technology around them. ZZ Top’s guitarist, Billy Gibbons, began to layer their good-time rock cuts with oodles of keyboards, having become enamoured with the synthpop new wave dominating the charts, and Dire Straits began pioneering the latest in digital recording and emulator capabilities for a pop-ready sheen. Suddenly, the pair found inordinate levels of success, ZZ Top’s Eliminator scoring the rock airwaves with its wry cartoon rock edge and tongue-in-cheek promos, and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms two years later would stand as one of the decade’s biggest-selling albums, its second single, ‘Money for Nothing’, a landmark of MTV’s golden age with its early CGI video.
‘Money for Nothing’ was noted by fans and guitar heads for its novel clawhammer style of play. Originating from the banjo tradition, Knopfler deployed a distinct strumming style on his Les Paul by adopting a more percussive impact on the strings with his thumb plucking the low notes. Such a technique was sparked by one of the day’s biggest hits, Gibbons lent his bluesy attack to.
“I was listening to a lot of ZZ Top, things like ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’”, Knopfler revealed to Guitar World. “That boogie they played was right up my alley. I still love it. That’s what it’s all about for me. Boogie is a big part of where I’m from. You know, it almost comes from a fingerstyle perspective, just cranked up a little bit and smokin’ along. Boogie doesn’t really have an overplayed vibe, it just rocks”.
It’s a “vibe” that won them hefty record sales and an elevated stature in the decade’s pop consciousness. With an unprejudiced embrace of music’s rapidly shifting climate and a divebomb into the MTV landscape, the little Texas band and former pub rock outfit briefly stood shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Prince and Madonna as towers of the musical overlay.
Reportedly, Knopfler had directly asked Gibbons for his guitar-playing secrets in his efforts to emulate the ZZ Top sound, but the band kept such magic firmly to their chest and behind their beards, joking to New Musician Magazine in 1986, “He didn’t do a half-bad job, considering that I didn’t tell him a thing!”
