By Brad Gallagher:
I recently had the need to purchase a new range for our kitchen and found myself in the home improvement store showroom looking at all of the options. They had about twenty or so ranges on display along with refrigerators, dishwashers, microwaves, washers and dryers, etc… That day there were a number of other customers in the store so I just wandered around looking at all of the appliances while I waited for my turn.
As I wandered around it hit me that they probably make quite a bit of money selling all these appliances. After all, the store had somewhat of a corner on the market around here. It is about the only place here on the island to get appliances and they sell a lot of them. As I was contemplating how much money they probably make each year selling their appliances I was reminded of a story about a rock artist who once made quite a bit of money in a store very much like this one.
As The Story Goes:
Back in early 1980’s, in an appliance store in New York City there were a couple of employee standing in front of a wall filled with color TV’s. Each of the televisions on the wall was dialed into the same program. “MTV”. Now at that time MTV was a relatively new television program. In fact, MTV premiered on August first 1981 when it aired a music video named “Video Killed The Radio Star”. So it had only been around for a year or so and everyone was still infatuated with it. And these particular employees were no exception.
As the employees stood there watching the music videos, they had a number of thoughts, and they were speaking them all out loud. And it just so happened that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits was in that same store at that same time, and was standing in front of that same wall of televisions watching the same music videos. As Knopfler watched and listened he became festinated by the dialog these employees were having, and asked someone for some paper on which he could jot their comments down.
The comments went something like this:
“Now look at them yo-yos, that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free”
And of course: “Now that ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb”
The comments were about the rock artists they were watching on the tv’s. In these employees’ minds, what they did wasn’t really work. They had the impression that once they became rock stars they could just cruise through life and people would throw money at them. After all, they had to haul appliances around and deliver them to peoples homes and also install them. As they described out loud also:
“We got to install microwave ovens, custom kitchen deliveries
We got to move these refrigerators, we gotta move these color TVs”
And then, one of them started to lament about his own carrier choice and said:
“I shoulda learned to play the guitar
I shoulda learned to play them drums
Look at that mama, she got it stickin’ in the camera man
We could have some fun”
As the employees continued to speak there thoughts, Knopfler wrote it all down, and later put it to music and came up with the biggest hit “Dire Straits” ever had. “Money For Nothing”. This song spent 3 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 list in 1985, and was the #8 song on the year end charts that same year. But I’ll bet that some of my readers already knew that, or at least speculated it from listening to the lyrics, and yet there is more to the story that maybe you didn’t know.
The song’s intro, as you probably remember is a slow fade in from almost silence to an all out drum extravaganza climaxing with the guitar jumping in with the lead riff just before the lyrics begin. As the intro progresses there is an almost mystical voice repeatedly singing “I Want My, I Want My MTV”. And if you listen carefully to that voice you will find that it is very reminiscent of the song “Don’t Stand So, Don’t Stand So Close To Me”, by The Police. Well it turns out, after Knopfler wrote the intro and the tune that accompanied “I Want My MTV”, he realized that it sounded just like that song by The Police, so he contacted Sting and asked him to sing the intro for them on the album. Don’t want to get hit by a plagiarism lawsuit after all, and Sting agreed.
In a 1987 interview Sting said:
“Mark [Knopfler] asked me to go in the studio and sing this line, “I want my MTV.” He gave me the melody, and I thought, “Oh, great, ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, that’s a nice quote, it’s fun.” So I did it, and thought nothing of it, until my publishers, Virgin – who I’ve been at war with for years and who I have no respect for – decided that was a song they owned, ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’. They said that they wanted a percentage of the song, much to my embarrassment. So they took it.”1
Sting, in addition to singing the intro and backup vocals on the studio version of the song also sang it live at the 1985 “Live Aid” fund raiser for Africa at Wembley Stadium in London. And the rest is history.
So there you go. Another story to share at your next get together. And come back and see me real soon right here on As The Story Goes.
Click the link below to watch Money For Nothing featuring Sting at Live Aid 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcqhvPNiJzo
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[1]Watrous, Peter (December 1987). “Slapping Sting around – Can he handle the tough questions…?”. Musician.
AS THE STORY GOES 