Devil In Disguise

Old songs, "pretty" tunes, old-fashioned hero looks- Chris Isaak could comfortably fit into a bygone era. But he's very much a singer of the moment.

The Sunday Age
October 25, 1998
By Larry Schwartz

Chris Isaak is strumming a guitar and singing an old song about a pretty "fraulein." His drummer, Kenney Dale Johnson, keeps time with a tambourine and tiny, multi-colored xylophone. Next, the singer croons a late '50s hit by Hank Locklin. "Send me the pillow that you sleep on." Both men are singing with gusto. "So daaarlin' I can dream on it too." Isaak plays the last chord changes. Then he says softly, "It's a nice song. We never do that. We ought to bring that one out."

He draws on a rich store of music. "I think I know as many songs," he says, "as anyone I ever met." He attributes his interest partly to his father's passion for music. The lanky Californian singer song-writer muses about the particular smell of the old record collection in a cabinet at his family home in the port town of Stockton. His father prized his records almost as much as his tools. "He had good taste. Hank Williams, Fats Domino, a lot of country music."

When we meet at a South Yarra hotel, he opens his new CD player and removes the disc to reveal a black-and-white snapshot with the negative alongside. It's a decades-old photograph of his father, taken in prison when he was jailed for armed robbery. "If you look at the picture, you can see in his face there's a whole lot of stuff going on," he says. "It's a picture that speaks volumes. It reminds me that I'm a guy that had such luck. Versus the guy who had no luck. It's just chance. He just got along in this world and every time it came to be lucky or unlucky, he drew the wrong card. And me, I have all the right cards."

Isaak's mellifluous music has gained a strong following since his first album, Silvertone in 1985. He's become increasingly popular since his 1991 hit, Wicked Game.

He has enjoyed some success as an actor too, working with film directors including Jonathan Demme, David Lynch and Bernardo Bertolucci. The latest project is a lead role in James Rowe's "Shepherd". "I play a southern sheriff,"he says. "I've got an accent...and I have some good lines in the film. I think the best line of dialogue was, 'Damn it, I've got a man being crapped on in his own farm by his own damn animals.' I thought that was good. I don't know why but that struck me as funny."

Lean and angular with hair slicked back and a broken nose from his days as a semi-pro boxer, his good looks have inevitably prompted comparisons with heroes of yesteryear.

"No-one else has so successfully drawn from the past with an artist's eye, reassembling the disparate images, sounds, styles and artifacts of pop-culture history into one persona," Rolling Stone critic Michael Goldberg has written. "Of course, Isaak would be just another two-bit Elvis clone if he didn't manage to transcend all the stagey photos, contrived outfits and retro minutiae...What matters is his music, which is the genuine article."

Isaak enthuses about contemporary albums by the likes of the Verve, Radiohead and Morcheeba. He's understandably wary of being tagged as some kind of throwback to an earlier era. "When you compare somebody to Roy Orbison or Elvis," he once said, "it's like parking a speedboat next to the Queen Mary." Not that he's denying the impact of forebears. "Who hasn't been influenced by Elvis?" he says. "Just show me the guy who's playing rock'n'roll and says he wasn't influenced and I'll show you a guy who's either uneducated or a liar."

He attributes the Elvis comparison primarily to hairstyle. "And then they say he hits his high notes. So Orbison hits high notes. So that will be an easy comparison...If I was black and had square glasses they'd say, 'You are Bo Diddley.'"

The songs on the new album, Speak of the Devil, are described in the promotional blurb as "small masterpieces of tightly coiled emotion, classic moody popcraft and beautifully mournful vocals." Devil was produced by longtime collaborator Erik Jacobsen with Rob Cavallo (Goo Goo Dolls). He contrasts it with the acoustic-based recording he made in 1996. "Baja Sessions was probably the quietest I've done," he says. "This is probably the loudest."

He likens the diverse, experimental sound he sought to the Beatles' approach on Abbey Road. He wrote songs, including the title track, in front of a microphone in the studio with his band Silvertone, playing along. "I would get the band together and we would start a groove thing going," he says. "I'd start singing and give hand signs when I'd do chord changes and work out (a verse) and go home and work out another verse and come in...They've played together for 14 years. When I start, I don't have to say what key it is."

The youngest of three lanky sons, Isaak, 42, grew up determined to rise above the constraints of blue-collar life in a West Coast port town. His father was a forklift operator at a timber company. His mother worked at a potato chip factory until she was sacked after repetitive strain injury prevented her from doing manual work. She went on to tertiary study and gained a doctorate in psychology.

"Losing that job was a rough break," he says, "but my mom is a really tough lady. I'd like to say that we were an enlightened group of guys. But looking back, it must have been hell for my mom. We were all big. My brothers are six-four, six-eight. She was like a cook at a ranchhouse or something. And at a certain point she re-educated us. She came in and she said, 'I'm going to college. I'll be gone today.'"

Before playing music professionally, he completed an arts degree at the University of the Pacific. "Watching those people work when I was growing up," he says. "Watching my daddy get up five o'clock every morning to go to work. Watching that kind of lifestyle, I said, 'There's got to be something easier, lazier.' I looked around the school and thought, 'You guys don't work as hard as my parents. I'll be a guidance counsellor. That's the ultimate nothing.' I just thought, If I can get any kind of education, I'll get a job where I don't have to sweat all day. And then by happenstance or serendipity or just by luck or whatever, after I got out of college, I got into music."

The rest of the story has far exceeded his expectations. "The idea of me going any place that they would take my picture or ask for my autograph is not something that I ever imagined," he says. "I didn't see that."

Speak of the Devil is out on Reprise.

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