by Matt Barr

Why aye, man

We had such a good time at the Knopfler show. The Auditorium Theater is an acoustic gem. The crowd was loud and the sound was great.

The last time I saw him in concert, with Dire Straits at the Rosemont Horizon in 1992, he had a lot more hair. He looked like a bespectacled school teacher with half a head of white hair, dressed all in black except for tan tennis shoes.

His band was outstanding, never overplaying, each it seemed playing a variety of instruments in the course of the show.

The show was informally broken into four parts. The first and longest included songs from his first three solo albums (he's on number four) and three Dire Straits standards.

Why Aye Man
Walk of Life
What It Is
Sailing To Philadelphia
Romeo and Juliet
Sultans of Swing

He then introduced the band, whch split into trios and quartets for the next few songs, gems mined off his solo albums that you probably wouldn't have figured on his playing in concert. It worked great, most people at the show hadn't heard the songs, you could tell, but they applauded lustily and swayed along. Mark and the band nailed these understated numbers.

Done With Bonaparte
Song For Sonny Liston
Rüdiger
Donegan's Gone
All That Matters

Mark was seated for the last four. Song For Sonny Liston is on his new CD, and is a song I had never paid much attention to. But stripped of its recording production to a repetitive blues riff it's a very memorable song. Knopfler got up and announced he'd be playing some "period pieces," which sped up the tempo again a little:

Boom, Like That
Speedway at Nazareth
Telegraph Road

As you know, Telegraph Road includes the world's most perfect guitar solo. As you also may know, it'a 15-minute song, and it was so great to see it done live. Speedway at Nazareth, wherein Mark is an Indy Car driver losing race after race till the end of the season, has always been one of my favorites from his solo CDs. It was the perfect pre-finale, bass- and drum-intense with its own very good guitar work.

For encores the band played

Brothers in Arms
Money For Nothing
So Far Away

So Far Away was an unexpected delight. In other shows on the tour he evidently did Our Shangri-La and/or Going Home (Theme From Local Hero) to conclude the encores, but not in Chicago.

Chicago: Difficult to drive to on a Friday afternoon. It took more than two hours to get from before Cline Avenue to the Dan Ryan. It was slow on the way out, around noon Saturday, too, but not as bad, obviously. We ate at a pub called the Exchequer on Wabash Friday before the show and had a post-show drink and breakfast at the hotel. We stayed at the Congress Plaza, which is across the street from the Auditorium Theater.

Anyway, Knopfler played effortlessly, no sticking out of the tongue, standing like you have to pee, no affectations of any kind. He's a wizard. His singing got lost on most of the songs, which didnt matter to the crowd when they were familiar with the songs, and really didn't otherwise, I don't think either, because the instrumental performances were so keen.

In a related and very cool development, Knofpler is making professional quality recordings of his concerts available on his website for $15. I bought the Nashville show from a few days ago and have put three songs you should listen to on the radio.blog on my home page.

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