My final song in this two-week theme is the second Dire Straits tune. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ appeared on the band’s excellent 1980 album Making Movies (you can hear the original version here, but be warned, it has perhaps the lamest video in the history of music television).
I’ve been in love with this song since I first heard it on the band’s 1988 greatest hits collection, Money For Nothing. So four years later, when Indigo Girls cut their own version on their album Rites of Passage, I was skeptical. Why cover a song as beautifully conceived and executed as this one?
So while I loved the rest of Rites of Passage, I never warmed to this song. I blame my reaction on one particular line reading by Amy Ray. Those of you who know me know which line that is: “I keep bad bad company!” Ray is a passionate performer, but at some point you can have too much passion and it just becomes silly and uncomfortable.
But I’m ready to admit that I’ve given this recording a bad rap over the years. Listening to it now, it’s hard not to get caught up in the emotion of a woman strumming the hell out of an acoustic guitar and belting out these words like her heart’s on fire.
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade
Says something like, “You and me babe, how about it?”
Juliet says, “Hey, it’s Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”
He’s underneath the window, she’s singing, “Hey la, my boyfriend’s back
You shouldn’t come around here singing up to people like that…
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?”
Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start
And I bet when you exploded into my heart
And I forget, I forget the movie song.
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
Come up on different streets, both the streets of shame
Both dirty, both mean, yes and the dream it was just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?
Well you can fall for chains of silver,
You can fall for chains of gold,
You can fall for pretty strangers
And the promises they hold
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah
Now you just say, “Oh Romeo? Yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him”
Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry
You said, “I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ’til I die”
There’s a place for us, you know the movie song
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
I can’t do the talks, like the talk on TV
And I can’t do a love song, like the way it’s meant to be
I can’t do everything, but I’ll do anything for you
I can’t do anything, except be in love with you
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be
All I do is keep the beat… and bad company
Now all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
Juliet, I’d do the stars with you any time!
Juliet, when we made love you used to cry
You said, “I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ’til I die”
There’s a place for us, you know the movie song
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
A love-struck Romeo sings a streetsuss serenade
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade
He says something like, “You and me babe, how about it?”
You and me babe, how about it?
Meet Me In Montauk 
Had to smile as soon as I saw what the SOTD was…thinking of the laughs we have had over that over-sung line, while Amy (as in my wife, your sister, not the singer) vehemently defended every note.
I agree with you though. Save for perhaps that one now infamous line, this is a great cover of a great song.
You’re damn right I’ve vehemently defended EVERY NOTE!!!!!
I couldn’t be more pleased to hear that you FINALLY are coming around to Amy Ray’s heart-wrenching delivery of this song. I appreciate the original, but this version is the one that moves me.
I never understood your fixation on the “bad company” line, as it seems completely in line with the back and forth between pleas and reconcilation that occurs throughout the entire song. There isn’t a single note – a single phrase – that I would change.
Finally, and I’m almost reluctant to mention it, as I think it’s pretty cool that you didn’t, I also adore this song for being such an unabashed gay anthem. To have Amy Ray singing/belting to her Juliet is just so powerful. When I teach Romeo and Juliet, I play this song when we discuss the various reasons my students’ parents might forbid their relationship with someone they loved. Invariably, I have a handful of students who admit that their parents might be just fine if they brought home someone with a different economic, religious, or racial background than their own, but they would “freak out” if they came home with a partner of the same sex.
By writing “Romeo and Juliet,” Mark Knopfler cleverly twisted the original play’s plot, but Ray’s cover completely turns it upside down and inside out, making every last desperate plea all the more agonizing.