1937 natiOnal Style 0 reSOnatOr
the guitar that graced the cover of dire straits’ Brothers In Arms is still very much in use
Even more than a Fender Strat, the guitar most powerfully associated with Mark’s work in Dire Straits is, of course, the National Style 0 resonator that appears against a background of blue sky on the cover of the band’s 1985 album Brothers In Arms, the first LP to sell a million copies. It was no mere prop, however, and is still used extensively today for studio and live work – Mark uses it to play the intro to Romeo And Juliet, for example. The guitar dates to around 1936 to ’37 and, though it’s a very familiar guitar, it hides a few details that might not be obvious at first glance, such as the righthand f-hole, which hides a jack socket for an instrument cable so the guitar’s internal pickup can be used. Due to its position, only rightangle jacks can be used, for obvious reasons.
National’s Style 0 resonator debuted in 1930 and continued in production until 1942, when demand for resonators was waning during the war years. The Style O came in several cosmetically quite different variations, but it was based on a brass body that was initially issued with a plain nickel finish, then with a striking ‘lightning bolt’ design, with further variations following thereafter. Knopfler’s is a Variation 7 model, with two occupants in the boat depicted on its reverse, rather than the single occupant shown on the similar but earlier Variation 6. The palm trees on the front of the Variation 7 also had visible coconuts, which were absent on the superficially similar Variation 6 model that preceded it. Most Variation 7s were issued with a tortoiseshellstyle Lucite scratchplate, which, as here, was often removed. A further difference from earlier Variations is the solid, not slotted, headstock with a curved logo at its peak.
For more information on the fascinating history of the National Style 0, we recommend Mark Makin’s excellent reference book, Palmtrees, Senoritas… And Rocket Ships!
which is less frequently talked about, are actually even older, he explains.
“I could do Elmore James-style steel from the very, very beginning when I was just a kid,” he explains. “After I heard it, I could just kind of do it. I don’t know whether I could do it very well, but I was doing it straight away. I probably wouldn’t like to hear it now. It was just pure Jeremy Spencer kind of thing.”
The remark opens up a bit of discussion about his unmistakable playing style, which borrows freely from blues, country and folk without hanging its hat on any one of those classic genres in particular. Like many guitarists, early exposure to a really good record collection – belonging to his friend and musical sparring partner Steve Phillips – laid the blueprint for Knopfler’s approach to the guitar.
“Even when I would be about 20 or so, I was already steeped in a lot of early country blues and everything,” he recalls. “We were listening to all of that stuff because Steve had a record collection and so I’d be around there most nights just drinking his coffee and listening to Blind Willie [Johnson] and all of these people. It’s stuff like that, listening to everything going back to the 20s, maybe even before: early jug band, string band stuff.
“Steve’s house became like a university of the blues for me… as well as the Nationals and all of that. Everything. I think that’s the background of my acoustic fumblings and that started to develop to where I’d take liberties and the thumb would start to play the top strings and the fingers on the bottom – and I was always losing the pick anyway,” he says, explaining how his distinctive style of playing the electric guitar with fingers only evolved from those early acoustic days.
“Then when I could afford an amplifier and started with Gibsons and Fenders and all the rest of it, I could already find my way around and I’d done a lot of listening,” he explains. “I think if you’ve done a lot of listening, if you’ve gone back to both black roots and white roots in music – folk and blues, all of those styles – it might just give you a bit of depth as a writer, I think.”
Coming back to the present, he adds that the slide work on Just A Boy was done using the Fender single-coil sounds most people associate him with.
“That would be one of my Strats: just a regular Strat or one of my signatures,” he says. “Though I also sometimes use a really early ‘Coke bottle’ Danelectro, with one pickup, for slide. Speaking of cheap guitars, I once had a 12-string Dan’ and I was getting up from my chair and I put my thumb straight through the top of it. Straight through the body, and I realised, ‘Oh, this thing’s chipboard – there’s nothing to it.’”
Wasn’t that stuff dubbed ‘Masonite’ by Danelectro, we offer?
“I could do Elmore James-style steel from the very, very beginning as a kid”
“This wasn’t Masonite. You wouldn’t have even used it for a picnic table,” he laughs.
Elsewhere in the album, there are more portraits of life from Knopfler’s earliest days as a pro guitarist, including what is arguably the best song on the album, Matchstick Man, which tells the story of a musician hitchhiking north on a snowbound Christmas Day after playing a dead-end gig in Cornwall. The lyrics describe how a truck driver drops the young man off at a high crossroads overlooking a bleak plain of snow. It’s a song that’s somehow larger than its subject, speaking of what it means to choose your own path through life, without signs, maps or encouragement to guide the way.
“And who would you be, vagabond?” the lyrics ask. “No-one invited you, you know.”
Was this a chapter from Knopfler’s own experience, we wonder?
“Yes. I was standing there with the realisation of what I’d chosen to do in life,” he recalls. “It didn’t bother me. You’re young and you’re just full of it and I didn’t even look to see how far it was from Penzance to Newcastle. I don’t think I even knew it was 500 miles back then, you know? I would climb up into
“I’m not a purist. I’d put a concrete mixer on a record if I thought that it was going to help it”
trucks with a guitar all the time, because, you know, from college and stuff, I used to hitch with a guitar all the time. It’s unthinkable now. I wouldn’t do that now. With a guitar? You’re kidding, aren’t you? But there you are, that’s just the way I was.
“Actually, it did take a while to get a break in music after that,” he recalls. “I got a job that saved my life for a while and I earned some money that actually enabled me to swap my motorcycle for a car and to buy a Fender and stuff like that. It just got me back operating again and eventually to be able to get Dire Straits together.”
After years of living hand to mouth as a gigging guitarist, was the sudden transition to worldwide fame after Sultans Of Swing a bit of a shock to the system?
“It was probably fast by a lot of other people’s standards, but I felt as though I had been working all my life towards it,” Knopfler says. “I was 28 when Sultans broke, when that first album burst open all round the world. We were still living in Deptford, and with the record deals back then when you first signed, they