“It was Mark (Knopfler’s) wife Lourdes who came up with the idea (to record Miracle). She said to him that you don’t sing like Willy and he doesn’t play guitar like you, but you really like his stuff so why don’t you do an album together? So I went over to London to do this album. It wasn’t easy because we didn’t want it to sound like a Dire Straits album, and his guitar playing is so unique that it was hard to do. But nothing good is going to be easy. I know that I spent the whole time really trying to impress Mark, I wanted it to be good.”
– Willy DeVille (2006)
The album includes what is probably the best known Willy DeVille song — Storybook Love, it is also one of his best songs among many many great ones.
Willy DeVille (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) – Storybook Love (music video, studio version, Princess Bride soundtrack):
Just a minute before you leave, girl
Just a minute before you touch the door
What is it that you’re trying to achieve, girl?
Do you think we can talk about it some more?
You know, the streets are filled with vipers
Who’ve lost all ray of hope
You know, it ain’t even safe no more
In the palace of the Pope
I’m not sure the exact date this cool video was shot, but I’m sure it has to be @ The Power Station in NYC – April/May 1983.
If anyone got more hard facts… please enlighten me.
Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’
I was layin’ in bed
Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all
If her hair was still red
Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was gonna be rough
They never did like Mama’s homemade dress
Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough
And I was standin’ on the side of the road
Rain fallin’ on my shoes
Heading out for the East Coast
Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through
Tangled up in blue
For the first time in his career, Dylan books a month of sessions to record an album. The sessions will take place at the Power Station in New York, across the way from Sony Studios. Dylan coproduces the album with Mark Knopfler. The band they have devised for the sessions ranks as one of his most inspired gatherings. The rhythm section is Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The two-pronged guitar attack is to be provided by Knopfler and ex-Stones axeman Mick Taylor. Keyboardist Alan Clark has been enlisted from Knopfler’s band. The sessions result in 16 original new songs, 14 cover versions, and a couple of instrumentals (copyrighted under the titles, “Dark Groove” and “Don’t Fly Unless It’s Safe”).
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)
Here we have some brilliant outtakes from the Infidels sessions. Most importantly the electric versions of “Blind Willie McTell”.
Studio A Power Station New York City, New York
April 11 – May 17.
…. Actually we are soul mates. As far as guitar playing goes he never steps all over with fancy licks. Yeah, Mark was incredible. He helped make this record in a thousand ways, not only musically, which in itself would have been enough. Brilliant guy, I can’t say enough about him.
~Bob Dylan (Talking about Knopfler part in the making of “Infidels” – July 1983 to Martin Killer)
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The most celebrated British guitar hero to emerge in the 1970s and ’80s, Mark Knopfler rose to fame as the leader of Dire Straits, and his songwriting and incisive guitar work played a decisive role in making them an international success story. At a time when punk and new wave were making technique for its own sake seem irrelevant, and metal was taking the guitar solo in noisier and unpredictable directions, Knopfler’s clean but dexterous picking proved there was still room for traditionalism and chops in mainstream rock & roll.
~Mark Deming (allmusic.com)
I like Buck Owens’ songs, he’s alright.
~Bob Dylan (to Nat Hentoff, autumn 1965)
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And I said, ‘Why not? It’s the truth! Why can’t I say I’m a Beatles fan?’ I used to get criticized for that.
~Buck Owens
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I’d like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.
~Buck Owens
Porter Wayne Wagoner (August 12, 1927 – October 28, 2007) was a popular American country music singer known for his flashyNudie and Manuel suits and blond pompadour.In 1967, he introduced then-obscure singer DollyParton on his long-running television show, and they were a well-known vocal duo throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.Known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry, Wagoner charted 81 singles from 1954–1983. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2002.
This is a quirky album, from a Dylan not pointing a way for anyone, but from a great artist remaining at his work knowingly in the face of not being creatively on top form in the phenomenal way he had been in the period 1964–68.Warm and abiding, it sounds better and better as the years go by.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
Old Ways is the fourteenth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released August 12, 1985. Young refers to this album in interviews as Old Ways II, as he had originally planned to release a country album titled Old Ways in 1983. Geffen objected to this, asking Young for a “rock ‘n roll” album, which Young would give them in the form of Everybody’s Rockin’. Old Ways I would have contained many still-unreleased songs, one of which was “Depression Blues”, which appeared on Young’s Geffen-era compilation Lucky Thirteen.
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