Isaak Changes His Tune

Singer-songwriter Chris Isaak is a dangerous romantic who is in love with love, says Michelle Griffin.

The Sunday Age
June 10, 1996
By Michael Griffin

Why does Chris Isaak look so good and sound so sad? He wishes he'd been kinder. "My first love," he says. "I really regret how I handled the first girl I was in love with. I had no idea that the girl I was with was so great. I thought everyone must be like this. Your first romance, you think every time will be this way. I regret I wasn't a nicer guy."

Isaak still has a lot of trouble staying in relationships, he says ruefully, but he's getting better at it. "Like the old Dracula or Wolfman movies, if you can't stop yourself you have the sense to say: 'Go away, I'm changing now'." Uh huh. As if they wouldn't fine that even more attractive.

Chris Isaak is the kind of guy who would date women for the express purpose of breaking up, so he could write a song about it. Since he released the debut 'Silvertone' in 1985, Isaak has made his name charting the map of bitter-sweet regret. He honed his act and his long-time band on the San Francisco club circuit in the mid 80s. His

style, like his band and his "Young Elvis" haircut, have remained constant in success. His songs don't trade on life's little ironies. His brand of broken-hearted country blues is taken straight, no chaser. He's a sentimental guy. "Romance is the most important thing," he insists.

He'll sing for you at any given opportunity, strumming his personalised guitar and staring moodily into the middle distance, caressing the words to a loping country lament. "Farewell, so long, my will to live left with you. I have to go, I think I hear my train. With me I'll take my Bible and your picture. Oh how it hurts me, 'cos I know that I'm to blame." He shakes his head appreciatively. "That's a heavy, heavy, heavy statement. I like it."

Isaak spends at least half the interview serenading the journalist, me, accompanied by long- time friend and drummer Kenney Dale-Johnson on tambourine and brushes. The experience is made even more surreal as Isaak is in a wheelchair with a sprained hamstring, the result of a surfing accident.

"Don't worry about it," he says as helpers ease him into a comfortable chair. "I'm makin' it look worse than it really is." He tried to go into the tube of a three metre wave. "I don't know what I thought," he says. "I'm not good enough to do that. I started going down the wave and the next thing I felt was it shoving me, crushing me under this water. My leg went straight down on to the board and I did the splits and I heard it rip."

His latest release, 'Baja Sessions,' is a pretty little paean to surfside romance. He recorded it in June in Baja, the Mexican isthmus at the bottom of California dotted with little towns and hugged by long beaches and big waves. The region's manana vibe and honeysucke-scented air soak through the sessions.

It's a time-out album, not a rock-out album. Five Isaak songs, including 'Dancin,' are re- played as Latino ballads. There are two new almost-blue originals and gentle, sentimental covers of songs by Gene Autry, Roy Orbison and Arthur Lymon. The man that knows how to shop secondhand can make even 'Yellow Bird' sound fresh. "When you say retro, people think of a guy with greasy hair, a kidney shaped coffee table and a pink shirt. I think it's about taking something from the past and mixing it in with stuff now." Isaak is the son of a forklift operator, Clarence, and Dorothy, a factory worker who went on to get a doctorate is psychology. He just bought her a Lincoln Continental, and his dad, retired, "just likes to hang around my house fixing things."

The Isaaks weren't musical. "Dad liked to sing." says Isaak, "but he had to get a few beers into him first." Isaak, however never drank. "I had a millimetre of wine the other night just to shock people," he says. "My family has done its share of drinking. We've done enough. I didn't need to start." He surfs instead. He started late, only eight years ago, but now owns 13 boards. "I'm from an area that's land- locked, a farm area" says Isaak. "Nobody in my family did sports. Sports were for people who had more money and time. The people I knew didn't play tennis, they didn't sail. We boxed. My Dad. My brother. I stopped after college. Surfing is something I can just enjoy and not have to be good at." He turned 40 this year, crunch time for some, but Isaak says he's still in cruise control, singing, surfing and looking for more romance. He can't be short of offers. "I meet all the same kind of people in this business," he protests.

"Maybe my perfect match is doing something else. It's like there's this librarian out there and she knows there's probably someone out there who is perfectly suited ...'but how come I never meet him down at the Library?" He can expect a few free library membership cards in the mail.

Chris Isaak was in Australia to present the ARIA music awards.

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