Van Halen icon Eddie Van Halen once said he’d never listen to his songs, and it seems that he isn’t the only one. Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler also couldn’t ‘tolerate’ his own albums, or, well, only with one exception.
The rocker was chatting with Los Angeles Times in 1992 when he revealed how the only Dire Straits album he ‘could’ enjoy listening to was 1991’s ‘On Every Street.’ Knopfler stated:
“I don’t like my albums; I can’t listen to them. But I can listen to this one. I think one of the reasons is that I was just determined [that] everybody play together and off each other, and keep it and not mess with a lot of it. To me, they’re just dead recordings, a lot of these things where everybody’s just tracking.”
Then, the guitarist explained why ‘On Every Street’ wasn’t your usual ‘dead recording’ and how it ‘stood out:’
“Whereas, when you’re all playing together and keeping a lot of it, something happens to the air, the reverberations. All my favorite records were made that way. All of them. That was the only way they could record.”
He then quoted Chet Atkins to further prove his point as to why ‘playing together’ in the studio was ‘great’:
“Like Chet said when we were doing an interview together, ‘The way we used to do it, there might have been a mistake or two in there, but after a while, those mistakes begin to sound right.’ A great way of putting it, but it’s true.”
Mark had also previously revealed the only guitarist who could master his Dire Straits riffs right, and you can check out right here to read all about this mystery guitar player.
