“Had a Little Saboteur in Him”: Producer Recalls Difficult ‘Infidels’ Sessions With Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler

Bob Dylan has built his entire career on going left when everyone assumed he’d go right, and the same is true of the difficult Infidels sessions he worked on with Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, keyboardist Alan Clark, and producer Neil Dorfman. The early 1980s album, Dylan’s 22nd, was thought to be his transition out of his Christian phase that included albums like Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. Bob was finally back to being Bob.

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…with all the good, bad, and ugly that entails.

Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler Had Two Different Studio Styles

Studio workflows vary wildly from artist to artist. Finding collaborators who enjoy and prefer working at a certain pace, slow or fast, is one of the most essential parts of the recording process. When these colleagues’ workflows clash, it can create tensions like the ones brewing during Bob Dylan’s Infidels sessions, which he invited Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, Alan Clark, and producer Neil Dorfman to work on at New York City’s Power Plant.

Knopfler was riding high on the success of his polished, commercially sensible rock catalogue. He accomplished this quintessential ‘80s sound by poring over albums in the studio, doing upwards of 40 to 50 takes of a single track until it’s perfect. For Dylan, the ever-rubato troubadour with a signature lack of predictable timing, Knopfler’s in-the-weeds approach was a bore.

“I don’t want to use the wrong word here. But Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur,” Dorfman recalled in a 2016 interview with Uncut. “He even had a little saboteur in him. If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop. Walking away from the piano and vocal mic while he’s doing a take. I remember him taking the tinfoil from a sandwich and standing opening and closing it like an accordion into a vocal mic during a take.”

“Of course, everybody stops playing, thinking there was something wrong technically. But it was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this. I don’t want to do this particular song anymore.’”

The Many Changing Forms Of ‘Infidels’

Despite Bob Dylan inviting Mark Knopfler to the Power Plant as a producer, the songwriter made it clear he would be dictating how the sessions and final tracks would look and sound. Dylan ended up changing the track listing, re-cutting certain songs, and making other significant changes after Knopfler and the rest of the Dire Straits crew believed they were done. In his 2016 Uncut interview, producer Neil Dorfman suggested the last-minute switches “really, really bothered Mark.” Knopfler has said as much in other interviews.

Nevertheless, Dylan is one of Knopfler’s musical heroes. So, even if the experience was arduous, Knopfler still found nice things to say about his finicky, tinfoil accordion-playing collaborator. “It was strange at times with Bob,” Knopfler admitted to Guitar Player. “One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it’s fun. I’d say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He’s an absolute genius as a singer. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”

All in all, Knopfler said, navigating opposing workflows is “good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work.”

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