The radio concert of Dire Straits live at the Schouwburg in Rotterdam, October 19, 1978 was one of the earliest Dire Straits live bootlegs, and for this reason has been known for long among fans. However, I have never seen pictures of this concert (at least none with realizing that they were from this gig). Yesterday when browsing Dire Straits pictures at Getty Images I found some which were specified to be from just this famous gig.

For copyright reasons I do not dare to show them here in full size, but you can click on them to open enlarged in a new tab at Getty Images (where you can also buy them in high resolution if you want).

While watching the pictures, you might like to listen to a sample from this concert:

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Dire Straits, Once Upon a Time in the West, Rotterdam, Netherlands, October 19, 1978

The three picture show mark playing the #68354 rosewood Stratocaster, which he played on the complete late 1978 tour it seems (for more info see this blog article) over the HD 130 212 Music man amp. David plays the Peavey Deuce amp, I am not sure, but there might be a third amp right of the Peavey (third picture), no idea what this can be, on other late 1978 pictures or videos (e.g. Paris October 14, 1978, Chorus TV) there seem to be just the two amps.

The following two pictures are said to be from the same location, something I personally doubt:

I guess these are from early 1979 (probably in Germany), I think so because of a different red Strat (with the Music Man guitar strap), different sweat bands, Mark is wearing a neck lace etc. See the article on Angel of Mercy for more information on the guitar played in the left picture.

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On October 26 Geocities finally closed. Geocities was one of the first hosts for free websites. They were taken over a few years later by Yahoo who now finally decided to drop Geocities forever.

When I built my very first website in 1996, it was Geocities who hosted my original “Dire Straits Guitar Page” at http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/3399/. Although hardly updated within the next years, it was nevertheless one of the first and most complete sources about Mark Knopfler`s gear and sound, and for this reason it had an incredible number of links through all kinds of guitar forums or websites, including the BBC ,  Rockpalast, and numerous guitar magazines.

Unfortunately it was not possible to redirect from a geocities page to some new domain. For this reason I started to make a copy of the original site at my own domain (http://ds.mk-guitar.com) last year and put some internal links from the Geocities page to the new site so that visitors coming from some links find the way to the new location.

From late October on there is only a “This site is no longer available” message but all the content is still available at the new location. If you run any websites that linked to the original site, I would be very thankful if you update your links and your bookmarks.

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• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979

Over the last days I was working on a Strat project. I had some parts from a 70ies Japanese Strat copy, which together with an American Fender neck and a loaded pickguard should make a nice part-o-caster.

In the seventies many guitars were finished with polyester. This finish is like a coat of hard plastic (actually it is rather a resin). It is easy to apply because you can sand it without much danger of sanding through. This was Fender’s main reason for changing from nitro to polyester in about 1968. Before, a finish that was sanded through had to go back into the production process and had to be repainted, one of the reasons why it was common to find a finish over some other colour.

As far as sound is concerned, almost everyone agrees that a thin nitro finish that allows the body to vibrate much more than the thick plastic-like polyester  allows a better  sound with clearer treble. This might  surprise those who think that an electric guitar is  like a blog of wood and the sound depends only on the pick-ups and not on the acoustic qualities of the wood or other parts. But this is really the case, I can definitely hear how a Strat or any other solid-body guitar sounds from playing it without amplifier.

So it makes sense to remove a polyester finish and replace it with a nitro finish. Many modern guitars are finished with polyurethane by the way, which is a bit similar to polyester but thinner so the sound is not that much affected.

Removing polyester is tricky. The problem is that chemical paint strippers in most cases will not work. There are some types that are said to work more or less but the ones I tried did not. I solved the task twice some yeasr ago by sanding down the finish, but believe me this is nothing that you ever want to do. It takes ages to sand through such a thick plastic coat.

This time  I tried something else, something that was recommended in a guitar forum: heat. I used a cheap heat gun and a scraper, and with these tools the finish was off in about 2.5 hours, including the control cavity. I did not heat  until the resin bubbles (which others have described) because then I could only remove rather small pieces. With less heat it was possible to move the scraper under the poly coat and to run it between the wood and the poly so that I could remove rather big pieces of the poly coat. The wood was not hurt and looked almost untouched. I can imagine that if a guitar was refinished with poly over an existing nitro finish, it might be possible to restore the original finish this way.

All the poly chips had a weight of about 125 grams (4.4 ounces), and in the case of one of those jobs I did a few years ago it was even 200 grams (7 ounces), so the guitar becomes noticably lighter.

Sound differences

As said, there is definitely a difference, but it depends on the thickness of the poly coat, and it is still a subtle difference. The high end is clearer while the poly sounds more compressed. Some years ago I made a sound sample to document the difference between the poly finish and the bare wood so you can decide for yourself. The sound difference when playing the guitar yourself appears even bigger than on this clip. The sample was recorded with the same strings and the same setup, one time before the job, and again immediately after. What you hear are the harmonics at the 12th fret. You can click into the blue status bar to a/b compare it at different positions.

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Should I or shouldn’t I?

The question if the amount of work and the costs are worth the increasement of sound or not cannot be answered generally. First it must be said that refinishing an original Fender – even if it is one of the least desired, heavy 70ies Strats – drastically decreases the value of the guitar! Even those Japanese vintage guitars like the first Squiers, Tokai Springy Sounds, Grecos and so on, will be worth more with the original finish, even if it is poly (the more expensive ones were sometimes nitro anyway).

If you however have a guitar that was refinished anyway, you have not much to lose. If you are not sure if your finish is nitro or poly (polyester or polyurethane) you can find it out with the following trick: take some ordinary paint thinner and apply it to a tiny spot of the finish (e.g. under the pickguard or near the tremolo springs). If it solves the finish (paint is removed or it becomes dull) it is nitro, if not it is poly.

I think almost all of Mark Knopfler’s guitars are nitro, at least his vintage guitars, the Schecters, the Pensas and the MK signatures are. I can’t think of one that might be poly, maybe his blue Fernandez (but maybe not), but I don’t know about some of the odd ones like his Teisco Spectrum, the Eco on “Song for Sonny Liston”, and some more. His two red Fenders from that early Dire Straits days were both refinished but these do not seem to be poly, either.

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A few people asked for the gear I used on the last set of youtube videos that I put online last week, namely on the video clips of the following articles:

The one-man band – Playing both rhythm and lead guitar together

Dire Straits Eastbound Train – Rhythm riff, licks and solo explained

Mark Knopfler licks using the b5 note

Knopfler goes Jazz – Video with licks from Comfort and Joy soundtrack

The setup

The guitar was the fiesta red Squier JV Stratocaster from 1983 which was featured in the following article:

The guitar went into a Morley volume pedal via a Vox vintage coil cable (a new one, they build them again although they are hard to get in some countries), then into an MXR analog delay (via another Vox coil cable), and then into a blackface Fender Pro Reverb from 1965.

The following pictures shows the settings of the MXR:

And here are the settings of the Pro Reverb. Note that it is modified: the speed control poti of the tremolo is used as a master volume.

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For your enjoyment, here are a few rare pictures of Dire Straits. They are from a concert in the Zirkus Krone building, Munchen, Germany, on May 29, 1979. After February 1979, they returned to Germany in May, still on the Communiqué tour.

The gear used on this part of the tour has changed slightly against February: Mark still played the #80470 maple-neck Strat (see also this article on his two red Fender Strats) and the black Fender Telecaster on Water of Love over the Morley Volume pedal, and the MXR analog delay, but now he played two of the Music Man HD 130 amps, David played a Peavey T-60 guitar, David’s black Strat was used by Mark for Setting me up now, John played two Ampeg SVT amps.

While watching these pictures in the slide show, you might want to listen to a sound clip from this concert (date and venue are probably this concert, it is sometimes denoted as Frankfurt, Loreley, June 23, 1979, which is most likely wrong). As this recording runs at a wrong speed (many shows that were recorded on cassette recorders in those days are +/- 5% wrong speed), I corrected the speed.

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"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Pictures from Hamburg Oct. 28, 1978 (?)
• Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture
• Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979
• Early Dire Straits radio interview from 1978

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