It has probably been 10 years since I had been to Chastain and I was looking forward to it. When it was about time to leave work, though, the skies looked dark and ominous and then it started raining. This posed two potential problems 1) traffic to keep me from getting there and 2) getting really wet while sitting outdoors for the show. Luckily the second one wasn’t a problem since it completely stopped raining before the concert started.
Chastain is a great atmosphere. My friends got us a table, which seats 6 people and when you get a table you usually bring a picnic of sort & wine. Very pleasant, and it’s really hard to not have a good time in that environment. The food was tasty, the company was great, the wine was, um, fair. But that was my fault.
But my loyal readers know I usually talk about the music. Well, there’s no doubt that Mark Knopfler is a great musician and has a great band. There were 7 people on stage:drums, bass, MK on guitar, keyboards. I forget what else was up there, but a couple of people were multi-instrumentalists and Knopfler even joked one time that he didn’t even know what one of the instruments was.
Here’s the problem – I don’t know MK’s newer material all that well. I really barely know it at all. I’d imagine a lot of the audience was in the same boat as me. And I imagine Mr. Knopfler knew that as well. Still, he played a LOT of newer stuff. He only played 3 Dire Straits songs: Romeo & Juliet, Sultans of Swing, and one of the encores was So Far Away. What’s worse, on at least the first two he sang like he would REALLY rather not be singing them. That’s pretty weak in my book. I was actually really hoping to hear the one of his newer songs that I know – This is us which he recorded with Emmylou Harris in 2006. Nope. He didn’t feel like playing that either. Jerk. On top of that he didn’t even do one single prank call! This guy clearly has forgotten where he came from.
Still, I just bought So Far Away and This is Us off of Amazon, so I guess it couldn’t have been that bad.