Surfing through life's blue notes

Love gone sour prompted Chris Isaak to bare his soul on his new album.

New York Times
The Sunday Age
July 23, 1995
By Guy Garcia

In less than an hour, Chris Isaak will take the stage of the new Los Angeles Hard Rock Cafe casino to perform a warm-up show for his current tour. Bedecked in an embroidered black and silver suit, he will shimmy like Elvis Presley, croon like Roy Orbison and deliver a rollicking rendition of Bo Diddley's 'Diddley Daddy' surrounded by a bevy of female fans.

At the moment, however, the 38 year old heart-throb and occasional film actor seems like the lonliest man in the world. Isaak is pensive as he searches for the words to describe the pain he felt in breaking up with his girlfriend of three years.

"It ended really badly," he says. "It was 25 October 1993, and since then I haven't seen her. I get a postcard once in a while. At least I think it was her, because they weren't signed."

The end of that relationship is the subject of his new album, 'Forever Blue' (WEA). Regret and loss permeate the record, which opens with the song 'Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,' an angry, bass driven number. "It's not about cheating," he says. "It's about hurting."

With his Ricky Nelson pompadour and cocktail lounge wardrobe, Isaak could easily be dismissed as a pretender to the retro throne, a rockabilly Milli Vanilli coasting on his looks and a public pining for a more innocent era. But like Lyle Lovett and k.d.lang, two other performers who put a modern twist on vintage pop, Isaak is an original songsmith who blends classic country, '60's surf music and '50s rock-and-roll into a brooding sound that is romantic without being mushy.

Like his four previous albums, 'Forever Blue' is a scrapbook of heartbroken valentines. The songs range from the country-tinged 'Graduation Day' to 'Somebody's Crying', a mid-tempo anthem to angst that ranks among his best. By the title track, a spare, jazzy ballad built around a lilting melody and solitary acoustic guitar, Isaak has reached a kind of weary resignation: "The stars have all stopped shining/ The sun just won't break through/ Each day's the same, more clouds and rain/ And you're left forever blue."

"It's very personal," Isaak says of the record. "It's got some dark things, some sad things, some angry parts. There's resignation in there and acceptance and hope."

The downside of love has been a conspicuous topic in Isaak's work since his 1985 debut album, 'Silvertone', which included titles like 'Unhappiness' and 'Tears'. 'Wicked Game', the haunting ballad that propelled him to stardom six years ago, ends with the warning "Nobody loves no one." But while the theme of 'Forever Blue' may not be new, its biographical nature marks a turning point for the San Francisco singer, who had always taken pains to keep his personal life private.

Still, he is keeping his ex-girlfriend's identity a secret, revealing only that "she wasn't from San Francisco, she didn't surf, she had a lot of odd jobs - secretarial assistant, waitress. She was the friend of a friend, and when I met her I knew someday she wouldn't love me."

When that day came, Isaak, whose duplex apartment is within view of the Pacific, fought unhappiness by surfing and writing songs. "I wrote the song 'Forever Blue' late at night, sitting upstairs looking out at the ocean. I was thinking about her, and I started to write a letter. And then I realised that I was never going to send the letter, so I picked up the guitar. It came together really quick."

Cynics might wonder why, after a decade of rockabilly strum and twang, Isaak would suddenly decide to bare his own wounded heart. "Life is really short," he says. "I couldn't care less what other people are going to think."

Isaak has never been much of a slave to convention. The son of a forklift operator in Stockton, California, he grew up listening to Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Hank Williams.

During the '70's, when many of his peers were turning on to Hendrix and dropping out of college, Isaak was in Japan as an exchange student. He moved to San Francisco and took up surfing in the early 80's, when he formed a band called Silvertone. Before long, he had an ardent following that included Rikki Lee Jones and Bruce Springsteen.

Another early fan was the director Jonathan Demme, who cast him in cameo roles in 'Married to the Mob' and 'The Silence of the Lambs.' But commercial success eluded him until the director David Lynch used 'Wicked Game' on the soundtrack for his 1990 film 'Wild at Heart.' Isaak has since progressed to more substantial roles. Lynch cast him as what the director calls "a deadpan cool guy" named Desmond in the 1992 film 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me'. And Isaak played the father who discovers that his son may be a reincarnated monk in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1994 film 'Little Buddha'.

More recently, Isaak finished filming a small part in an Allison Anders film, 'Grace of My Heart', in which he plays, as he puts it, "a musician who rips off his wife's songs, kind of a Troy Donahue ne'er-do-well".

Although he enjoys acting, he rates it far behind surfing, which offers him a refuge from the hurly-burly of the world. "Surfing is what cheers me up the most," he says. "I was talking to a guy in Malibu who is 70 years old, and he surfs every day. He's really on the ball. I said, 'You know, if I could be 70 and doing what he's doing, I'd be happy'."

Even without a girlfriend? For a moment the hint of a smile crosses his face. "One thing at a time," he says. "That would be the icing on the cake."

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