Cover Story: Chris Isaak

FHM
August 1992
by Harold Von Kursk

Feelings of loss and longing characterise the recordings of singer, songwriter and sometimes movie actor Chris Isaak - feelings to do more with personal history than romantic posturing. He talks to Harold Von Kursk about fame, fortune and the ache at the heart of his music.

"I'm a romantic. My music involves looking at things that are gone. A lot of life slips through your fingers." That's about as close as Chris Isaak will ever come to self-analysis. He's not a man who likes to talk about the existential fires that burn within him, nor does he take himself as seriously as the brooding lyrics to his songs would suggest. Still, there is an intensely introspective side to this roguish retro rockabilly singer and occasional film actor.

"I come from a long line of moody people who aren't sure that love or happiness is waiting for you," he confesses. "That's why I like being on the road. It gives you a better sense of what loneliness is because when you're by yourself you think more. You can't sleep at night, so you sit up in the bed of your hotel room watch a late-night movie, and wonder what you're doing in life."

These are the type of ruminations that give an edge to his handsome, chiselled features. He's the embodiment of the great American musical archtype - The Crooner - whose plaintive, angst- ridden lyrics have throbbingly woen their way into our hearts. The heroic cheekbones and boxer's nose anchor the laid-back sexuality that turns on his ardent legions of female admirers and arouses the interest of fashion photographers like Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts.

There's also a vaguely dangerous side to his darker moods, a quality that film director Jonathan Demme first noted when he wanted Isaak to play the villain in his 1986 film Something Wild, the role that sent Ray Liotta on his way to Goodfellas. That same year David Lynch also wanted Isaak for Kyle MacLachlan's part in Blue Velvet, but in both cases the singer felt compelled to finish the album he was working on at the time.

"I'm obsessive when it comes to my music. I can sing or play the same song 30 or 40 times if I feel like it. I already put so much work into the album (eventually realeased as Chris Isaak) that I just couldn't afford to interrupt that process and do either of those movies. Acting actually comes a lot easier to me than music, because I'm always agonising over the lyrics and paying an extreme amount of attention to making a song work."

Isaak did of course take time off to make two cameo appearances in Demme's subsequent films, that of a murderous clown in Married to the Mob, and then as a SWAT team commander in Silence of the Lambs. And today Isaak can finally be seen taking a more meaningful thespic turn in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch's new film based on his short-lived Twin Peaks television series.

"I play agent Dale Cooper's (Kyle MacLachlan's) alter ego," says Isaak. "But I don't get a chance to be really weird or anything like that. That'll make my mom real happy because she's always complaining about my getting offered roles as psychos."

In one of those eerie ironies that Twin Peaks fans would adore, it was David Lynch who was responsible for transforming Chris Isaak froma minor cult figure into a major pop star. Warner Brothers, Isaak's record label, had already written off Heart Shaped World after its release in 1989 drew scant attention. But then Lynch included an instrumental version of Wicked Game in his 1990 road movie, Wild At Heart, which won top prize at Cannes.

"I've always thought of Chris as a character in a road movie," explains Lynch. "You can imagine him as a stranger sitting in some strange truckstop and ordering coffee and cherry pie and trying to chat with one of the locals. He has the face and personality of someone who doesn't show you everything. Our exterior images are always hiding deeper layers of meaning, and Chris gives you the impression that there's a lot more to him than we know."

When the film's soundtrack reached the attention of Lee Chestnut, programmer at WAPU in Atlanta, Georgia, he began giving it heavy rotation at his influential Power 99 Top-40 station. Wicked Game soon raced to the top of the US singles charts 18 months after its initial release and would eventually become a smash hit in the UK and across Europe. The album has now sold over two million copies worldwide and critics have been falling over themselves in praise of Isaak's lovelorn melodies.

"Hey, my life has been really good whether or not I had the hit," observes Isaak. "I had the best of all possible worlds. We played a lot of gigs and we had enough money to make the records exactly the way I wanted to make them. It was a fantastic existence. I've been able to eat Chinese food five times a week, had fancy clothes in real bright colours, and I never had to lift heavy objects. It wasn't as if I was beating my head against the wall. When this record finally became a hit, my feeling was 'Hey, this is great. I sure hope it doesn't change anything'"

At last glance, things haven't changed that much for the native of the sleepy town of Stockton, California. At age 35, Isaak still lives the simple life of the itinerant musician.

"I've never coveted wealth or material comforts. The only thing I really care about is being respected for the music and trying to turn people onto a sound that predates pop and says a little more, I think. Success doesn't mean much except that I get to reach more people, although even that doesn't mean you're writing any better songs than you used to. Success is very contradictory. It's weird."

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Isaak's role is played out within the first half hour, an all too brief an appearance judging by the impact he has on screen.

"I don't know if I would have been ready to handle the lead in a film," he admits. "I sort of feel that it would have been better if I'd had a larger role before I had a hit. Now there are all these preconceptions about me and people will think about the musical side of me before they watch me on screen."

This type of true-blue honesty is what you might expect from a man whom David Lynch admires. Isaak doesn't smoke, drink, or do drugs, and that type of outward purity is positively tantalising for Lynch, whose focus is that of a demented boy scout who drools over the faintest hint of abnormality in others.

"David is very down-to-earth and practical," says Isaak of the director whose film, Blue Velvet, used his song Blue Hotel as one of several Fifties-style anthems. "I was really surprised when he used Wicked Games as the theme for Wild at Heart, but that shows you how much I know about the impact of my own material."

Acting is still far from a priority in Isaak's mind, as he is presently finishing work on his new album, his fourth, scheduled to be released next January.

"I'm definitely not going to do any more films until next summer at the earliest," says Isaak. "Right now I've got a chance to capitalise on the success of Wicked Game and I don't want to blow it. In a way, this is my most important test, to see whether I can write material that will live up to expectations. I'm not that sure what I want to do as an actor for the present. I'd maybe like to direct one of my own videos, because I've learned a lot watching directors like Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Bruce Weber work. They've made an ordinary guy like me glamorous. It's fun."

Isaak is quite embarrassed about all the attention focused on his looks. He's never thought of himself as particularly handsome, "the girls just want me to get to my guitarist (Jimmy Wilsey)," and has yet to find the romantic love that his songs describe. Isaak is still deeply mournful of the way his frist love affair ended, and that memory is the source for three albums worth of anguish.

"From the lyrics, you can get the impression that the girl I'm singing about is a real bitch, but that's only the way it was when things went bad. We had a wonderful relationship together but it went really wrong and I don't know why."

That fractured first love affair continues to influence Isaak's perspective on a world whose surfaces he finds cold and unyielding, inviting us to look under the covers.

"I don't believe that life is necessarily tragic. That would be going too far," he says. "The point is that relationships are always out of kilter. We're always at different levels of desire and different levels of commitment. If you believe that love exists, then that in a way is a tragic viewpoint, I guess, because it means you're never in harmony with the other person."

Maybe this is the doom-laden dialectic of love that creates the tension in Isaak's mood and music. His velvety baritone voice has an air of resignation to it, and when he smiles, it's grudging and pained. As a crooner, Isaak is raw-boned and melancholic. On stage, he affects a pose of suave irreverence and playful cosiness that hides the fact that he's nagged by universal doubts.

"I make no bones about my being a moody guy. I don't get nasty with my friends. I just sort of sink away and withdraw into myself. I don't really know why."

For a man whose musical career has soared into the stratosphere, and who is now being offered choice film roles, Chris Isaak might just as easily have been a forklift driver working for his father, Joe, at the Stockton Box Company. The youngest of three boys, Chris Isaak was born on the 26th June 1956, just three months after Elvis Presley scored his first Number Once hit, Heartbreak Hotel. Isaak's mother, Dorothy, swears she was singing Blue Suede Shoes during her son's birth. "I told the doctor who delivered him, 'Watch out for your blue suede shoes'," laughs Isaak's mother. "Because I knew he was going to make his entrance."

Isaak grew up in Stockton, a working-class town where the population of whites, hispanics and blacks lived in general ignorance of the counter-culture movement that was happening in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Sixties. One summer day in 1967, his mom drove Chris and his two older brothers, Nick and Jeff, to San Francisco to check out the Haight-Ashbury scene.

"We couldn't relate at all to the flower children and to acid rock. My brothers and I were totally into Elvis, Roy Orbison, Lefty Frizzell, Chet Baker... I guess because we were isolated from the big city we stayed in touch longer with that music and never had the chance to get overwhelmed by Jefferson Airplane or the Doors. We did like the Beatles, though," smiles Isaak.

As a child, he carried a rebellious streak within him that increasingly began to set him apart from the crowd. His predilection for "shocking the squares" first surfaced in high school, where he handed in a short story entitled Penis in Your Pocket, Kool-Aid in Your Cup.

Rockabilly and Fifties rock 'n' roll kept the Isaak family household entertained during those early years. Chris was taught to play the guitar by his brother Nick, and the family soon discovered that Chris had some serious vocal gifts.

"I grew up thinking every family sat around and sang," recalls Isaak. "My parents would have friends over and we'd get out the guitars. Someone would have an accordion, someone else would play the fiddle. We were playing music all the time."

Chris's father was an amateur boxer as a young man, and he taught his son the art of fisticuffs from the tender age of ten.

"Boxing has always been a big sport in Stockton. A lot of guys did it at my school and I just went along. I could hit pretty hard, but I was lousy at defending myself and that's why I had my nose broken six or seven times," says Isaak, stroking the generous indentation that marks the absence of bone and cartilage.

While Isaak's father was often doing double shifts and coming home late at night, his mom was a highly intelligent woman who left her job sealing bags at the Frito-lay potato-chip factory to finish her doctorate in psychology.

"Mom was always a real positive influence on us. She would go to flea markets and second-hand shops and that's where I would pick up all these old records."

After he finished high school with good grades, Isaak went on to study English and Film at the University of the Pacific. On campus he distinguished himself by walking around in florid Hawaiian shirts, crew-neck sweaters, and double-breasted suits from the Forties.

"I've always been a strange dresser. Even now, most of my stage outfits are made by my mother using old curtains."

In one film class, Isaak put together an experimental collage film that intercut scenes of John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima with pornographic footage: "something like Swedish School Girls in Disgrace...just barely enough to register. Finally I put in the climactic scene from the porn movie and cut the sound and let the class sit in silence watching a porn film, and I was in hysterics, man. I was cracking up."

While at university he had a chance to spend a year in Japan as part of an exchange programme and this proved to be a critical period in the then 23 year-old Isaak's life.

"In Japan, I really began to think about what I wanted to do with myself," says Isaak. "One day, I bought a copy of Elvis's The Sun Sessions, and I was just blown away. I must have played it over a hundred times that week. I still think of that album as the Rosetta Stone of rock 'n' roll. That was when I knew I wanted to be a musician because I said to myself, hey, I can do that!"

Strangely, only a few months later, Isaak began to find work as an extra in low-budget Japanese science-fiction flicks ("there aren't that many white guys over there, you know") and this spurred his interest in filmmaking.

"Suddenly I thought that I could just as easily work in film rather music," he recalls. "Not so much as an actor but as a writer and director. I thought I had a capacity for writing serious dialogue. So as soon as I came back to California I applied to film school. But after talking to a lot of people, I decided I didn't want to wait ten years trying to make a documentary for public TV. So I picked up my guitar and decided I had a more realistic chance to become known as a singer."

With the financial support of his mother, Isaak moved to San Francisco where he rented a dismal, one-room garage apartment. There he met lead guitarist Jimmy Wilsey and formed his first and only band, Silvertone, a rockabilly outfit that Isaak named in honour of the brand name of one of his guitars. The band then set out finding gigs, playing mostly at the Mabuhay Gardens, a punk club in San Francisco. In 1985 came their debut album, Silvertone, which earned critical reviews but sold a meagre 12,000 copies.

Still, that album established the identifiable sound which echoes the rockabilly ethos of early Elvis, yet also produces an avant-garde minimalism. Says Isaak: "I think people relate my stuff to the music of the Fifties because my vocals are on top of the mix and there's a real clear sound to Jimmy's guitar. I like the big notes and high-pitched refrains, and Jimmy likes to bend and twang. That's what we're trying to sell. The less you use, the more you can hear."

After hearing Isaak's first album, singer John Fogerty became an instant convert. "He has this great sound that fused together a lot of different traditions," explained Fogerty. "It's obvious that he's going to become a big star. That's a dumb phrase, but he really does have the stuff that big stars are made of. To me, he's already a skyscraper against the landscape."

Fogerty's comments, made in Rolling Stone magazine in 1987, proved highly prophetic, yet stardom has failed to resolve the tensions that still keep Chris Isaak from feeling content. One of the qualities that makes him a star is the sensation that he's withholding something vital. The audience keeps coming back because they have yet to discover anything about the man. He has a gift for sedulous self-deprecation, yet you know that's merely a cover for what he really believes.

It's the music that gives us the clearest picture of his psyche, however. In person, he retains the edginess of the brooding artist although on stage he departs from his complex persona and assumes the role of a wisecracking raconteur.

"It's something I started to do just to establish contact with the audience, just so they don't think I'm as depressed as my material makes me sound."

During his last tour, Isaak would wind up his performances with a series of rousing rock 'n' roll classics, from the Troggs to the Stones. "That's what makes music and film so interesting, they transport you to another place."

These days Isaak is keeping mainly to himself in his house in San Francisco. He's not in love and has no serious expectations of finding the woman of his innermost lyrics anytime soon. Indeed, Isaak's moods still tend to the tenebrous.

"I'm pretty serious when I'm alone. I don't socialise a lot and I don't go out much. That's a side of me that probably isn't much fun getting to know, but then again, depression is a great way to generate new material."

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