Irretrievable Feelings

     Thinking yesterday evening about a couple of emotions I felt back in the distant and misty lands of the past, both oddly associated with the musical genius of Mark Knopfler.

     The first was listening to the vinyl I bought myself of Dire Straits "making movies", particularly these three songs...

If memory serves, I saw the video for tunnel of love on MTV, and bought the album based on that. The sorcerous power of Knopfler over that Stratocaster on my silver-gray painted particle board speakers took me somewhere I don't recall reaching since, just the vaguest sensation of how it felt. It may well have been my first foray into air-guitar...

     In 1985, Dire Straits released "Brothers in Arms" and the wildly successful "Money for Nothing" video and song climbed the charts but the one that gave me the chills and sent me to the record store was the title track, most particularly it's inclusion on an episode of Miami Vice called "Out Where the Buses Don't Run". In the episode, the protagonists Crockett and Tubbs are being aided in hunting a near mythical drug kingpin by an ex-cop. The tune overlays the moment when they discover that the ex-cop actually murdered the suspect years before and suppressed the memory. It overlays finding the dealer's mummified corpse in a wall. The eerie power of that was the one thing that stuck with me from an otherwise mediocre (in my estimation) series.

   Years later, the song would be used in a different, even more haunting scene, in the second season finale of "the West Wing", "
Two Cathedrals".

     Music, the right music, has amazing power to transport us. Sometimes I envy my younger self, and wish I could go back and listen for the first time again. Most days I just wait for the next great song...