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June 19-26, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
The soul of SolFest
A local music festival promises to
inspire your sense of wonder
by Margaret Hair
Money for nothing
Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits tries to
flee from success, fails
by Dave Kirby
 The soul of SolFest
A local music festival promises to inspire
your sense of wonder
by Margaret Hair
Looking at the guidelines for SolFest, it’s easy to get an idea of what’s going on in the minds of event organizers. There’s no offensive or dangerous behavior, and there’s no excessive drinking.
Both would be contrary to SolFest, an open-land, 24-hour event that brings in regional performers and breeds all-night drum circle jams to celebrate the beginning of the summer season.
You need proof of age to get in, and there’s a liability waiver to make sure everyone stays true to themselves and the ideals of the festival — it’s meant to be far removed from structure, and it’s meant to be an escape from closed-in music performances and stiff-legged audiences.
Of course, having an outdoor celebration of music and tribal spirit requires an ownership of your own personal enlightenment, as well as your own personal safety. Hence the waiver.
From 4 p.m. Saturday until 4 p.m. Sunday, SolFest will bring the best of world groove, performance art, bluegrass, trance, Middle Eastern fusion and conscious songwriting to its outdoor stage and 6,000-acre festival site. A community potluck and yoga are interwoven with performances by Tzol (lead singer of Denver psychedelic rock act Kan’Nal, toning down the trance for verse-driven indie), Lunar Fire (highly performance- and theatrics-oriented improv, set to drums), Mountain Trance Medicine Band (bluegrass meets world music), Muse of Turiya (long-form grooves) and a host of others.
Live sets are broken up by a 2 a.m.-to-sunset drum circle, cultivating an after-hours sense of community and art making.
The festival has outgrown its former site at Double Rainbow Ranch, and organizers encourage SolFest-goers to bring enough food and water for the weekend — along with, according to the festival website, camping gear, trash bags, sunglasses, swimwear, “wild costumes, drums, musical instruments, bicycles, a sense of humor (and) a sense of wonder.”
On the Bill
Tickets to SolFest are $40 in advance and $50 at the gate. Directions to the festival site (about 40 minutes north of Boulder at the Parrish Ranch Camp Ground) can be found at www.bouldersolfest.com.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Money for nothing
Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits tries to flee from success, fails
by Dave Kirby
It’s pretty easy to tell that Mark Knopfler isn’t altogether comfortable discussing Mark Knopfler, whether it be the worldwide rock star, erudite songwriter or balded, jowly elder statesman. This is a guy who is dying to not talk about himself.
You can see this for yourself on a few YouTubes of Knopfler doing the morning TV circuit in England last fall, promoting the release of his latest solo album Kill To Get Crimson. Struggling through typically banal questions about his latest project, his 2003 motorcycle crash (which left him with several broken bones) or where he gets his songwriting inspiration from, you’re practically squirming at the guy’s awkwardness as he darts his eyes down and away from the cheery interviewers, grinding his hands together as if he were on the wrong end of a terrible job interview, grasping for that clever morning-show laugh line that never seems to arrive in time for a rushed on-air Q&A regimen. Kind of makes you feel like Knopfler’s only reason for being there was to make his agent feel like he was earning his euros for the week.
Rock has never much taken to the Everyman Hero… or at least, hasn’t rewarded the genuine article for much longer than a couple of album-tour-album cycles. Critics never really believe it, the press always wants to tear it down or lift its knickers.
And why not? It’s a pale and unsatisfying story in the end, far less marketable and interesting than the crash-and-burn-and-redeemed survivors, or the now-departed overdoses, or even the whatever-happened-to’s, who need only have a near-hit or two in their past to qualify for some grotesque stage-show exhumation that someone is gambling people will pay big bucks for, if only to hear a song live that even classic rock radio lost interest in years ago.
(Well, we could offer Springsteen as a rough U.S. equivalent to Knopfler’s regular-guy — a working-class bloke who made it to the top and well beyond, but never really seems to show it off much — but there are differences and we’ll save that balancing act for another day.)
Let’s recall that Knopfler and his band, Dire Straits, emerged from the bitter and toxically cynical British rock scene of the late ’70s with solid songs and a low-key helping of guitar-hero crackle. Verse-chorus-verse, a stinging guitar solo, chorus-verse-chorus and out. “Sultans Of Swing” was actually a hit in Europe while the band’s album lingered in critical and commercial indifference in England, and it was from there it took off in the States.
As is so often the case, England was about the last place to embrace something everyone else thought was cool, too busy obsessing over stuff that everyone else thought was callow and silly (and critic-hip). It’s a comfort to know some things don’t change much over time.
Brewed from bits of British folk, lean period-appropriate pub-rock, a nod to JJ Cale and ’50s-era twangabilly, Dire Straits really sustained its upward climb on the strength of Knopfler’s hooky and cinematic songwriting — the pub culture skepticism of “Sultans Of Swing,” the celebrity culture jive of “Lady Writer,” the intoxicating, Springsteen-inspired Americana mythos pervading Making Movies, the biopic sweep of “Telegraph Road” — and all of this stuff before the band exploded as an international powerhouse with “Money For Nothing,” off 1985’s Brothers In Arms, the irony being that the song was a tongue-in-cheek fantasy about how much better the big time rock star lifestyle was than actually working for a living.
And ironic, too, since the single and the album propelled the band into a place Knopfler wasn’t altogether comfortable occupying: world tours, landing strip-sized stages, massive productions before roaring stadium audiences. Knopfler put the band into cold storage for several years after the 1985 triumph, wandering off to play country music and compose soundtracks, only to bring it back with an extremely low-key studio album (On Every Street) in 1991. The album sounded like some eager songs trying to find a decent suit of clothes (although the title track may be among the best of the band’s repertoire), and the world had moved on anyway. Dire Straits was done, and even in these days of massively lucrative reunion concerts, appears quite permanently and irretrievably finished.
Knopfler went on to release some beautiful solo songwriter work — the elegant Sailing to Philadelphia, the poignant working-class folk of The Ragpicker’s Dream, his terrific 2006 aging-boomer collaboration with Emmylou Harris, All The Roadrunning, last year’s nostalgic Kill To Get Crimson — as well as crafty soundtracks like Local Hero, Wag The Dog and the immortal The Princess Bride.
And in some sense, after deflating what had become Dire Straits’ inevitable bigness, Knopfler’s work continues to get smaller — less sweep, shorter guitar solos, more quiet attention to detail. Sounding almost retired and doing this to keep himself busy (the critics hate that, too), it’s as if he continues to atone for having become bigger than he felt he ever should have been, not really believing what most of his fans know: that great songs and thoughtful guitaring can lift you pretty far and keep you afloat there for a long time.
And that’s OK, even if looking down makes you a little queasy.
On the Bill
Mark Knopfler will perform at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 24, at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 18300 W. Alameda Pkwy., Morrison, 720-865-2494.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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