Chris Isaak

The Face
April 1993
By Karo Taro Greenfield

Late afternoon, and the waves were big, ragged, about the size of VW buses. There seemed to be no way to get through to the surf from the shore. Chris Isaak stood on the sand embankment, overlooking Ocean Beach, in the Sunset district of San Francisco where he lives. Dressed in a full red-and-black neoprene wetsuit with a seven-foot Town and Country surfboard under his arm, he gazed out at the relentless surf, searching for a channel--a lane through which to paddle out to the surf.

"It's not worth it," a local surfer rasped, shaking his head. "Shitty waves."

The wind was ripping through the surf, making the waves erratic, sloppy and unpredictable. But the waves were huge. The ocean's power was evident in the way the foam exploded when the swells broke about a kilometre out.

Chris Isaak walked down to the beach, threw his board into the water and began paddling, chopping at the water with his powerful forearms as he slowly, almost imperceptibly, worked his way out into the surf. Getting out seemed impossible. For every five metres' progress Chris made, a thick wall of white water pounded him back four.

"He's not gonna make it." The local surfer shook his head. "Forget it!"

There are certain days at certain beaches when the sheer force of nature inherent in the swell and the pounding, crushing, grinding power of the water is so strong that very few people will go into the water. These few are big wave surfers. They're like great bullfighters, in that inherent in the sport is the possibility of grievous bodily harm or death.

At beaches like Pipeline in Hawaii, Ulawatu in Bali, Bells in Australia or Ocean Beach in San Francisco, on some days the swell is so powerful that not even professional surfers will go out. Why risk looking bad or potentially doing harm to a six-figure yearly salary as a pro surfer? These are the days when big wave surfers rule.

"I'll go out some days when no one else will," Chris Isaak says, "I'll go out when nobody else is out there. I went out in a hockey helmet for protection once. I swim and let my leash tow my board behind me. I'm a good swimmer--not really speed, but endurance. I can go a long time."

That day at Ocean Beach, a few bemused locals looked on as the singer finally found a channel, began paddling furiously and barely cleared three huge walls of incoming water. But then he was out, a black dot on the horizon, near where the lines of waves kept appearing, each bigger than the last.

"I was dead," Chris says, "exhausted from swimming and paddling. I was about a mile out and the surf was gigantic and breaking straight up and down, like it would pancake you to the bottom if you took off wrong. And then I looked back in at the beach, at the alleys and houses behind the beach and I thought, 'Shit! How am I gonna get back in?'"

He kept paddling up the faces of waves and then down the backs, and then paddling against the north-to-south current which was carrying him away from the sand embankment where he had come into the water. He was paddling the equivalent of 100 metres every five minutes just to stay in one place. Each wave seemed too big to ride, each too powerful and tight and intimidating-- particularly due to the sucking noise they made as water drew from the bottom into the face of the wave. So Chris went further out, his arms aching. He was also starting to freeze: what sun there had been was now setting, and San Francisco in the winter means near-zero temperature nights.

"There was nobody else out but me," Chris recalls, "I kept lining up like I was gonna take off, getting halfway up on my board and then chickening out and backing off the wave at the last minute."

He finally chose a wave, a monster that was coming in at the end of a set; they call them waves, a closer that seems to have the combined strength of all the waves that preceded it. This would be Chris' ride in. No one wants to be in the water at night a mile off San Francisco in any conditions, much less when it's as stormy and cold as it was this time. The locals who had been watching from the shore had gone home, to warm living rooms and dinners and television, while Chris froze in the water, arms and legs starting to feel like exposed nerves.

"I just chose one and took it," Chris said. "I slide all the way down the face, barely staying on it for a while and then, oh man, I ate it. Face-first into the water, thrown around. It was like a washing machine, like a dream of a washing machine. You don't even know which way the surface is. But when I came up, I was near enough to the shore to walk in.

"My leash had broken. The board was probably a mile down the beach. It wasn't a graceful ride, but I went for it. Had to get in somehow. And I survived. That's the important thing. Right? Made it in. Went down to the diner that night. Worked on recording the new album the next day. But while I was out there in the water, the only think I kept thinking was I had to get in. So I picked a wave and rode it all the way in."

In Los Angeles, in a room with wood panelling and a portrait of Madonna and Child and a dirty, tan Mexican rug, Chris sits sipping water. He doesn't drink, or do drugs, or drink coffee. He likes Coca-Cola, he says, and likes the old bottles Coke used to come in. The ones with the ribbing along the sides. He says David Lynch, who directed Chris in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, likes those bottles too. (It was Lynch who was responsible for the phenomenal success of 1990's "Wicked Game" by choosing it for the soundtrack of Wild at Heart. The song had come out the year before, on the "Heart Shaped World" LP, and gone virtually unnoticed. Since then, propelled by the success of "Wicked Game", the album has sold two milllion copies worldwide.)

"When David found out they were getting rid of those bottles," Chris smiles, "he started saying, 'That's bad, that's bad.' And he was shaking his head. And I was wondering: 'Bad? Bad for the environment? The earth?' And he goes, 'I liked those bottles.'"

Chris and David Lynch have more in common than Coke bottle nostalgia. They both play on widely-held conceptions of American kitsch: David Lynch by parodying it and putting a spin on it in movies like Wild At Heart or Blue Velvet; and Chris by pandering to our conception of what a hunky American star is.

Chris, sitting here in black Levi's, T-shirt, boots and with his hair done up in a big quiff, is the quintessential American man-child. He fits the role perfectly. Too perfectly. Ex-boxer becomes pop star whose songs about love and being in love and being vulnerable because he's in love are great songs because they're sung by a classic American with a classic American tough-but- sensitive-guy persona. And that American-ness, from the black jeans to the old-style Coke bottles, is what defines Chris. He's aware of it, plays it up, and he's riding that wave as far and hard as it will take him.

"This is what I am," Chris says, "I don't try to become more Chris. I don't have meetings with a staff and go, 'How can I become more Chris?' I just do what I like to do and it's great that I'm paid for it, and paid way too much for it. I can't help it that I like simple things and am a pretty simple guy and grew up in a typical, simple family. We were white trash, I admit it. Stockton was in many ways a typical town."

Chris was a fighter when he was growing up in Stockton, California, a dusty, dry town of good Christians, white trash and migrant workers. John Steinbeck wrote about Stockton. John Houston made a movie about Stockton called Fat City, based on Leonard Gardner's great novel of the same name about boxing. (Stockton, incidentally, is ofen used by filmmakers when they want that "typical" American south or mid-western, smalltown look.) It was a town that loved Elvis, Roy Orbison and Sam Vincent, so Chris' tastes, even in the darkest days of the Yes and Black Sabbath-era, were more to Hank Williams than Jon Anderson. Talking to him, you get the feeling he wouldn't know "Whole Lotta Love" from "Paranoid", but could sing all of Johnny Ray's "Cry".

Chris' father and brothers were amateur fighters and Chris took to the sport early.

"Never mess around with guys with cauliflower ears or flattened noses," he warns. "Those are the tough guys."

Chris' own nose is bent from taking too many punches, but his ears aren't the bulbous blobs that some fighters and wrestlers end up with. He was a light-heavyweight by the time he got to the University of Pacific.

He never wanted to be ta professional fighter. Never wanted to get beaten up and piss blood for a living.

"I decided I wouldn't become a fighter when I saw a guy named Indian Yaqui Lopez who was the toughest son of a bitch I ever saw my whole life," Chris remembers, "I used to watch him in the gym. He was a lightweight, I think, or a middle. He had a big scar on his stomach from bullfighting, clear up his side..." Chris runs a finger along his abdomen, "...so one time he went down to Raway State Prison to fight some guy. He got beat. And bad."

Chris shakes his head. "I thought, if this guy, who's the toughest guy I've ever met, gets beat up boxing, then what's gonna happen to me? But I was never knocked out, and I'm proud of that."

Instead Chris learned the guitar on an old Checkmate which had a picture of a horse's head on it. His brother had shown an interest in music first, so, like most younger brothers, Chris imitated him. Learned to play along with his brother who jammed on the harmonica. But Chris could sing, too. He discovered his haunting, windy voice for which a college singing teacher would later give him a B-minus. "I bet Bob Dylan had a B-minus voice," Chris says. "Some people like Pavarotti, some people like Bob Dylan. It's all subjective."

After college, Chris went to Japan. He had noticed a sign on a college bulletin-board about courses in Tokyo and figured he had nothing to do for the rest of his life anyway, so why not?

"The worst beating I ever took was in Japan," Chris turns and gazes out the window. "I was over there studying city planning at Aoyama Gakuin University and boxing with the team--this was right after college and part of our instruction. They sent a pro to train with us, so by accident I got in the ring with him. He was a welter-weight, I can't remember his name now, but he was fast. So after chasing him around for a while I got tired and threw a punch, a real punch, which rocked him back a little. Then, when he realised what I'd done, he beat me silly with fast combinations."

Aoyama Gakuin is a beautiful place to get beat up. Aoyama is one of Tokyo's ritziest parts of town. And the college is a wooded campus of grey brick and stone buildings deliberately constructed to be reminiscent of Oxford or Cambridge--only with all the proportions scaled down about one third.

"Japan was great," Chris recalls. "When school ended I went down to Okinawa (an island south of Japan) and then even further out, to Iriomoteshima. I wanted to get as far away as possible and still be in Japan. That was beautiful--there were waves, and the people were different than in Tokyo, a lot more laidback."

He took his guitar with him, and his harmonica, and played for the natives who gawked at him. To them he was a freak: a big, white barbarian with well-muscled arms in shark-skin suits playing Sam Vincent songs.

You can hear the traffic going by on the Hollywood Freeway just about 20 yards from the house. The whish of rushing cars. The occasional roar, a little like a wave crashing, of an 18-wheel truck hauling potatoes or oranges or maybe new-style Coca-Cola bottles in Los Angeles.

Chris came to Los Angeles this morning, straight from Seattle where he's starring in a movie directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who Chris describes as "a very sophisticated guy".

"What I mean is he's very European. He wears designer clothes. I mean, I don't think I'm a dummy, but he's so well-educated, sophisticated."

That's Chris the American talking. Chris the simple, honest, good-natured American who just shakes his head in wonderment at sophisticated Europeans in their designer suits. Gosh, it all must dazzle him.

"I'm not that bad," he laughs. "It's not like I'm sitting here with a stalk of wheat hanging out of my mouth and going, 'Aw shucks'. It's just that, put it this way, I'm the type of guy who understands roller derby--I don't think Bertolucci understands roller derby."

When they met, Chris had just seen 1900, one of Bertolucci's masterpieces, and was in awe of the film-maker. At the time, he didn't know Bertolucci was considering casting him. "I just wanted to meet him."

When asked to do the project, a film based on a "modern American father", Chris, whose son, played by Keanu Reeves (sic), is selected by Tibetan monks to be the next Dalai Lhama and then must pass a rigorous set of tests, Chris was delighted. (Bridget Fonda is also featured.) It's Chris' first true starring role, as opposed to a supporting role in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and cameos in Married To The Mob and The Silence Of The Lambs. "Cameo is too fancy a word for how long I was in those movies," Chris says. "They should make up a word for a part that's not quite significant enough to call a cameo."

Jonathan Demme had offered Chris the plum Ray Liotta part in Something Wild, but Chris felt he had to turn it down to complete "Chris Isaak", his second album. The Bertolucci project, however, should catapult him to another level of fame.

"It's so different working with Bertolucci than David Lynch," he explains. "With Lynch's crew, we're all from the same background. We can all make jokes about the same culture. But Bertolucci's crew are these old Italian men who know how to cook. I'll tell you one thing, the food on Bertolucci's set is a lot better."

They've been shooting in Khatmandu in Nepal, the adjacent mountain kingdom of Bhutan, and Seattle. In Bhutan, the tentative title of the project, Little Buddha, inspired the wrath of the native population to the point where they were stoning the crew.

"They didn't like the word 'Little' being anywhere near 'Buddha'," Chris explains.

What does Chris think of Keanu Reeves as Bhudda? "Well, it makes more sense than me playing Bhudda," Chris says. "Imagine it, Bhudda with blue eyes? I don't think so."

When he came out of the water that day on Ocean Beach, he walked back to his house and had a soda-pop. A Coke, maybe, in the old bottles if he could get them. His furniture is stuff his mom selected. A green table, five chairs.

"When I moved into the house, I had my mom choose all the furniture from the junk store. I don't like thinking about that stuff."

But Chris chose the Wurlitzer jukebox, not because it's so goddamn American but because he likes the convenience of being able to throw in a quarter and hear Bobby Darin, Dean Martin or the Texas Tornadoes whenever he wants.

With his rugged good looks--the perfect mixture of James Dean and Gary Cooper, with a hint of pugilistic toughness--he's always been popular with the women.

"If there weren't any women in the world I'd quit tomorrow," Chris says, "but since I've gotten famous, the female situation hasn't really changed much. Right now, I'm going out with a stripper."

He pauses, then laughs. Irony is his forte, and the reason he runs rings around many on the PR circuit, particularly TV chat show hosts. "No, I'm seeing a real nice girl. I've got a steady, that's all I'm gonna say about her."

He lived in this Sunset district house while recording "San Francisco Days", his fourth album, in which Chris' songwriting reaches another level of heart-wrenching pathos. Recorded with the Silvertones, his regular band, and featuring appearances by steel-guitar master Tom Brumly and guitar-legend Danny Gatton, "San Francisco Days" is Chris' strongest, most coherent album. At his best, he is like a rock 'n' roll Hank Williams, reaching down into his American heart to give a little of the hurtful truth, or at least an incredible simulations of the truth. The music simple and melodic, with low-key production that lets Chris' songs and voice shine. For the first time in Chris' career, because of the success of "Wicked Game", there are great expectations at Warner Bros, his label, that the album should sell well.

"I never really felt that I had to follow up on 'Wicked Game', " he shrugs. "I live up here, kind of isolated, away from the music industry. I mean, my next-door neighbour is a retired army officer. The guy on the other side has a beautiful rose garden, and they just don't care about the music business. I go to work every day and it's not like we sit around talking about skewing the demographics or anything."

When asked how he finds time to act and sing as well as write songs, Chris just laughs, "It's kind of like all one thing to me. I'm a performer. There's too much of this (he does a game-show host voice), 'He sings, he dances, he's amazing'."

Chris shakes his head. "No one ever says about a farmer: 'He reaps, he sows, he milks the cow, he's amazing.' Acting's work, but so is everything else. I've gone from having jobs where I really got dirty, like putting tar-paper on roofs, to having make-up people make me up to look dirty. But the acting is a craft, like everything else. And I work hard at it."

Since 1990's success with "Heart Shaped World" and then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, he's become a hot property here in Los Angeles. Not a star yet, but close. And the Bertolucci movie and another hit record might put him on the A-list. Then, when he's really made it, how will Chris Isaak be living?

"Here's my dream day: get up, have a soda-pop, watch cartoons, take a nap, check the desk for messages and find out there aren't any, have another soda-pop, watch some more cartoons, take a nap, more cartoons and then go to bed."

He leans forward with laughter and slaps his knees. "But I'm not there yet. I've still got to keep going, keep working on my acting and my career. No matter how big I get, nobody lets you do exactly what you want to do. You still have to demand it, you still have to fight for it. And I'll keep fighting. But, as far as a job goes, I've got a great job."

Chris Isaak shakes his head.

"I'm riding one long wave of good luck."

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