The Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster was introduced by Fender in 2003. Officially it was available in one colour only – Hot Rod Red. However, the first production run was in a different colour. I remember when I first saw one in a shop in 2003: it did not look like on Fender’s product pictures, or like Mark Knopfler’s famous red 1961 Strat, instead it was much darker. Without the headstock decal with Knopfper’s signature you would not have believed that this guitar should have anything to do with Mark Knopfler. I saw two more of these in other shops only a bit later, and both also had the darker red, something that looked similar to Fender’s Dakota red of the 60ies (see this blog post for more info on Fender’s different red finishes).

I must say that I was disappointed by the look of the first signature Strats, and I could not understand why the ones that Knopfler played on stage looked so much brighter. Was it just the stage lights that caused this impression? A few months later I saw another one on the Frankfurt Music Fair, and this one was as I always had imagined it to be: a bright red like in the early days of Dire Straits. From an insider I got the information that indeed the first production run was a wrong colour due to a mistake. Rumours say that when Knopfler found the first signature Strat in a London guitar shop that also had the wrong colour, he was upset and made Fender to correct the mistake immediately.

It seems noone knows exactly how many of the darker ones were produced. I somewhere read a figure like some 30, but if I take into consideration that alone in my city I saw three of them in the shops, plus what I read in internet forums,  I believe there must be far more.  As it seems the serial numbers do not really give an answer to how many there are because darker ones  exist with serial numbers higher than of Hot Rod red ones. I heard that Glenn Saggers, Mark Knopfler’s guitar technician, started to file a list with the serial numbers of the wrong-coloured  guitars. If you own one of the dark ones, you might use the comment function of this blog post to tell us the serial number, maybe we can find out more this way.

Otherwise those darker guitars were identical to the later ones, and theoretically they might become a special collector item due to their limited number.

 

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That’s the nice thing about internet: I just released the other blog post about a little snippet of In the Gallery which I found on Youtube the other day where I stated that no other video clips (except of a snippet of Lady Writer in bad quality) exist from the Pinkpop Festival in 1979, when a reader of this blog – Brunno Nunes – added a comment with a link to this video: Lady Writer, the complete song,  in great quality. I really have never seen this one before, so I thought it might be worth another blog post.

It also includes a few backstage scenes from before the gig, and from the end of the set. Also, due to the various camera positions, you get a glance of the backstage line, and even on the floor where Mark’s effects were place, normally well hidden behind those monitor speakers (e.g. at 0:49 or 4:49). We can see the Morley vloule pedal and, left from it, the MXR analog delay. There seems to be a third little box about a feet left from the MXR. Of course the picture quality is not good enough to see any details, but nevertheless. I oberserved something similar in the Rockpalast videos, see this blog post.

Mark added a second Music Man amp (HD -130 212) just a few weeks ago (I guess about March ’79). One month later (July ’79) this second amp got speakers with an aluminium dust cap, but here it seems to be the “normal” paper ones (whhich definitely makes a change of tone). David played his Peavey Deuce amp with an Ampeg speaker cabinet, like he did that whole year. There are a lot of other amps on stage, a little bit behind the Straits’ amps which should have nothing to do with them, remember this was a festival with many bands.

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