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"Sultans of Swing" was the important and influential first single release of the British rock band Dire Straits.
When "Sultans of Swing" hit the US pop charts in the spring of 1979 (five full months after Dire Straits' first, self-titled album was officially released), it was like a welcome draft of cold fresh oxygen in the midst of the smoky, decedant party that was pop music at the end of the decade. A stripped-down sportscar of a song, "Sultans" was an instant antidote to the production-line disco and bombastic, overproduced arena-rock that was then dominating pop-rock radio. Its guitar lines were clean and devoid of effects; its vocals were not those of some disco diva or high-alto Led Zeppelin disciple but the ragged, Bob Dylan-influenced croak of Straits’ founder and songwriter Mark Knopfler. And, miracle of miracles, the song told an actual story -- and a story not even about sex or drugs but about the diverse members of a working-class jazz combo trying to rise above an indifferent audience in the clubs of London. The production starkly revealed the ingredients of this minimalist arrangement: two guitars, a bass, and a straight-ahead shuffle beat on the drums (only later would we learn that nearly all the instruments as well as the vocals were done by Knopfler himself). Though the single version of the tune faded early, FM listeners and those who bought the album were treated to a wiry, extended fingerpicked Stratocaster solo that, uncoiling like a spring, instantly moved Knopfler into the pantheon of the rock guitar gods. The song's verse in which an unsympathetic group of young rowdies who "don't give a damn about no trumpet-playing band" disdain the Sultans' musicianship -- " it ain't what they call rock and roll" -- presaged the fact that Knopfler would later move Dire Straits away from this type of straightforward song in favor more elaborate directions and eventually abandon rock altogether in favor of writing movie soundtracks.
