Chris Isaak At 9:30 Club

The Washington Post
November 14, 1998
By Mike Joyce

Chris Isaak was nearly upstaged by his look at the sold-out 9:30 club Thursday night. He walked onstage wearing his rockabilly best--blushing-pink suit, black, sequin-studded shirt, cocky grin--and toting a white guitar with his name written over the sound hole.

Yet if he seemed the very embodiment of retro cool, he sounded even better. Singing in a plaintive tenor, he easily conveyed the emotional longing and sonic luster associated with his best recordings. His new album, the guitar-driven "Speak of the Devil," dominated the first half of the show, with "Please," "Flying," "Wanderin' " and other tunes alternately evoking the innocence of early rock and the sudden shock of realizing that love isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

On several older songs, including the ballads "Wicked Game," "Forever Blue" and "Blue Hotel," Isaak's quartet conjured a series of atmospheric settings that allowed the singer to express--or confess--his own brand of subdued torment. But many of the show's most entertaining songs found him in much more animated form. Both "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" and "Diddley Daddy," for example, evolved into feverish romps with plenty of help from guitarist Hershel Yatovitz and drummer Kenney Dale Johnson.

Lean and handsome, Isaak doesn't need to do anything onstage to elicit squealing waves of female adulation. Just standing there is enough. But that didn't prevent him from shamelessly pandering to his fans for a laugh. "What is feminism," he asked at one point, "but the crazy idea that women are people, too." After all the cheering finally subsided, he turned to his bandmates and cracked, "I told you it would work."

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