Hot Rock & Roller Retro Cool

Chris Isaak has borrowed from the past to become a star of the future

Rolling Stone
May 21, 1987
by Michael Goldberg

Chris Isaak was born in the summer of 1956, just three months after Elvis Presley scored his first Number One hit, "Heartbreak Hotel," and Isaak's mother, Dorothy, swears she was singing "Blue Suede Shoes" in the delivery room.

When he was five, Isaak would mimic Elvis, using a piece of wood his dad had cut in the shape of a guitar.

When he was eight, he would wear a Beatle wig made from a piece of old carpet, pretend he was Ringo Starr and fantasize that pretty girls were chasing him.

When he was twenty-one, Isaak discovered The Sun Sessions, Elvis's classic mid-Fifties recordings, and thought, "I can do that."

When he was twenty-three, his mom helped him rent a cramped one-room garage apartment in San Francisco, and he formed his first and only band, a rockabilly combo he called Silvertone, after the brand name of one of his guitars.

When he was twenty-four, Isaak met Erik Jacobsen, the producer of the Lovin' Spoonful's classic mid-Sixties hits. After watching Silvertone perform, Jacobsen took Isaak out to lunch and decided, based on their conversation that afternoon, to work with him. "We started thinking about where it was all leading," Silvertone's lead guitarist, James Calvin Wilsey, later recalled. "It dawned on us--this was like no turning back. It would never be the same."

It hasn't been. Now, at thirty, Chris Isaak really is being chased by pretty girls. His albums, produced by Jacobsen, are critically acclaimed. He's been approached by major Hollywood directors who want him in their movies, and at least one magazine has dubbed him "the new Elvis."

Isaak's fans include John Fogerty, Madonna, Sean Penn, Emmylou Harris, Rickie Lee Jones, Jodie Foster and the fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who waived his usual $10,000-plus-a- day fee because he wanted to shoot the cover of Isaak's new album. "I'm just knocked out by Chris Isaak," says Fogerty, who recently joined Isaak onstage for a jam session. "It's obvious that he's going to be 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 like a skyscraper against the landscape."

Even before his rock & roll career has taken off, Isaak's become a hot item in Hollywood. Director Jonathan Demme wanted him for a role in Something Wild, but Isaak passed--he had an album to finish. David Lynch wanted him for Blue Velvet, but Isaak passed again--he was still trying to complete his album.

One listen to Chris Isaak, and it's clear that he made the right choice in temporarily putting his film career on hold. The album, Isaak's second, sounds like an eerie, stylized Eighties version of Meet the Beatles--only with all the songs in minor keys, sung by a vocalist who conjures up Elvis, Roy Orbison and Marty Robbins, Isaak crafts dreamy, slightly surreal tales of lost love, heartbreak and the ultimate loneliness of one's existence in this world. His lyrics are as simple and yet as layered with meaning as haiku.

"I liked his first record but couldn't really articulate what I hoped the second record would be like," says Lenny Waronker, the president of Warner Bros. Records. "And then boom! It's exactly what I wanted. It's the same kind of feeling I had when I heard John Fogerty's Centerfield. I prayed it would sound like something, and then when he played it, it was all of that and more."

Every month or so Chris Isaak gets on the Greyhound bus and goes home to Stockton, California, to get a haircut from his mom, who is also his biggest fan. Growing up in Stockton, a working-class town about sixty-five miles east of San Francisco, had a profound effect on Isaak, who once said of his home town, "I mean, Stockton was so far out there in its idea of fashion and styles and stuff, it was like growing up in Mayberry."

Isaak had a small-town boy's distrust of fads and trends. His mom recalls a 1967 outing to Haight-Ashbury, with Chris and his two older brothers, Jeff and Nick. "We got out of the car and walked down the street with all the flower children, all the acidheads doing their dancing. The kids were saying, 'Those people look crazy!' I remember we had to roll the car windows up 'cause they'd come over to the car and beg. Our kids weren't interested at all. I wanted to go to a coffeehouse there. They just wanted to get back to Stockton."

Money was tight, so Dorothy and the boys often looked for bargains at the local thrift shops. Outfitted in out-of-date used clothing, Chris cultivated an offbeat style, developing a strange pride in not quite fitting in. By the time he enrolled at the University of the Pacific, Isaak's wardrobe consisted of Hawaiian shirts, vintage letterman jackets, pleated wool trousers, old crew-neck sweaters, double-breasted Forties-style suits and pointy black James Bond shoes. "The first few days of class I'd show up looking like the other kids," he says. "I always did that to establish to everybody that I was normal. They could look at me and say, 'He understands what the rules are.' Then after a couple of days I was in these crazy clothes, wearing what I wanted to wear, and they could never figure it out."

Though he never rebelled against his parents, Isaak has always gotten a kick out of shocking "the squares." His mom remembers one school assignment, a short story, that he handed in with the title "Penis in Your Pocket, Kool-Aid in Your Cup." While studying film in college, Isaak made his first movie, a humorous experimental sci-fi film, Forced Journey, which incorporated footage from old movies and porno films. The action revolves around some people who are escaping to earth from a planet run by a "clone of Al Capone"; to get to earth, they have to pass through radio and TV broadcasts that are now out in space (hence the use of the found footage). The 8- mm film--which he wrote, directed, financed, photographed and starred in--was shown at a faculty screening.

"There was a part showing John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and then I cut in about six frames of Swedish School Girls in Disguise or something," says Isaak. "Just barely enough to register. A minute later I put in about twelve frames. Finally I put in the climactic scene of the porn movie, and I let it run for a minute and a half and cut the sound. Suddenly there was a whole room sitting in silence and watching a porn film, and I was in hysterics, man. I was cracking up. I thought, 'This is the end of my college career.'"

In fact, Isaak wound up graduating from the University of the Pacific in 1980 with a degree in English and communications arts and headed off to San Francisco. Back in Stockton, at the Isaak's ranch-style home, his mother has kept his second-floor bedroom just as it was before he left. The photos of Robert Mitchum and Elvis are still up. A couple of stuffed deer heads hang from the walls, as well as a sign that declares, NOTICE--WOMEN TRAINERS ON DUTY. A copy of 1964 paperback called The Beatle Book ("All the facts--Everything you want to know! Their lives. . . their loves . . . their music") lies on the floor, next to some weights. Dozens of antique thrift-shop ties hang from an old neon POLL PARROT SHOES sign. The ceiling is a humorous X-rated collage glued together some years ago. Look around this room and you see some of the raw material from which Chris Isaak has fashioned himself.

Certainly, Isaak is not the first totally self-conscious rocker. But perhaps no one else has so successfully drawn from the past, with an artist's eye, reassembling the disparate images, sounds, styles and artifacts of pop-culture history into one persona. "My style doesn't totally sink in right," he says. "I'll be wearing like thirty-five tie clips, which I never saw anybody do in the Fifties, and combine that with some jazz stuff, like drape suits from the Forties, and tiki heads, which bring me luck. I'm not trying to be authentic."

In a way, Isaak is still the little kid mimicking his idols. The cover of Silvertone, his first album, is a painstaking remake of a classic Elvis photo. In his first video, for "Dancin'"--which drew heavily from the mood and feel of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and Bo Diddley's performance in The Big TNT Show--Isaak portrays a tragic, stylized Ricky Nelson-type singer. His song titles seem to come right off his idols' albums. Elvis lived at "Heartbreak Hotel"; Isaak laments about a "Blue Hotel." Roy Orbison sang "Only the Lonely" and "Crying"; Isaak calls two of his songs "The Lonely Ones" and "Cryin'." And while Buddy Holly wrote "Not Fade Away," Isaak's going to "Fade Away."

Isaak's stage show also conjures up the past. Plastic tikis glow overhead, while the four-piece band recalls any number of late-Fifties and early-Sixties outfits, with their matching baggy blue gabardine suits, white shirts and wide ties. And then there's Isaak himself, with his Ricky Nelson face, Elvis Presley hair, Buddy Holly suit and Roy Orbison voice.

Of course, Isaak would be just another two-bit Elvis clone if he didn't manage to transcend all the stagy photos, contrived outfits and retro minutiae. Sure, that stuff is fun; it has its charm. But what matters is his music, which is the genuine article. Listen to "Tears" (from Silvertone, his first album) or "You Owe me Some Kind of Love" (from Chris Isaak, the new one), and just try to resist their seductive pull.

Somehow, immersed in the old, Isaak has created something refreshingly new. "They say imitation's the highest form of flattery," he says when pressed about his debts to the past. "If I'm imitating somebody, then people can tell I like that person--although I have no intention of passing myself off as some kind of second-rate Elvis. And that's the only kind of Elvises there are today. Second-rate ones. 'Cause the first-rate one died."

Determinedly eccentric, Isaac (sic) lives for his music, his mom, his girlfriend and surfing--in that order. He abhors alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. "Occasionally some asshole backstage asks me if I 'want a toot,'" says Isaak derisively. "I go, 'No, no.' Then I walk over to a roadie and say, 'Throw him out!'"

Ask what's been on his turntable lately, and Isaak will point to a fourteen-disc boxed set of nearly everything country singer Lefty Frizzell ever recorded or bring out some old Chet Baker jazz LPs. "Gene Vincent, when he sings 'Over the Rainbow,' man, sign me up," says Isaak. "I'll cut off two of my fingers to be able to do that kind of work. That's what's important, that you do something that good."

Despite his talent, ambition and good looks, despite the critical accolades and superstar fans, Chris Isaak is not yet a star. In fact, although Warner Bros. spent more than $200,000 on the making and marketing of Silvertone, the album sold a pitiful 14,000 copies in the United States (an additional 75,000 copies were sold abroad). Warner Bros. puts some of the blame on radio for ignoring Isaak. "It was somebody doing something that was different, and there wasn't a lot of opportunity for airplay," says Waronker. "Oftentimes artists that are doing something that goes against the grain need a record just to get them started. Springsteen and others like him come to mind. I think Chris is an artist who is going to have a career, and the fact that it's going to take one or two or three albums is okay and healthy."

But John Fogerty, who became an Isaak fan after hearing Silvertone playing in the Warner Bros. art department, believes Warner Bros. didn't put enough promotional muscle behind the album. "I could see it was not a big-budget item," says Fogerty. "It did not get the slam-down-your-throat kind of push. The day my album (Centerfield) became Number One, I took the guy who's head of promotion by the lapels and said, 'Now I want to talk to you about the Chris Isaak record.' He said, 'Okay, forget Fogerty. We're on the Isaak record now.' I really wanted to catch his attention."

With Chris Isaak, Warner Bros. seems anxious to make up for, in the words of one music- business executive, "blowing it" the first time. The label ran an expensive full-color ad in Billboard announcing the album's release, threw a record-release party for Isaak at a trendy San Francisco club, hired the acclaimed video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino (whose credits include Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" and Madonna's "Open Your Heart") to direct a clip for Isaak's "You Owe Me Some Kind of Love" and spent yet more money on posters, T-shirts and buttons for press and radio promotion--all solid indications that Warner Bros. believes in Isaak's potential to become a major star. The effort is paying off: the recently released Chris Isaak has already sold 75,000 copies.

"People have to understand that Warner Bros. really has a strong feeling about Chris," says Waronker. "We have to get the word out. There are a lot of intangibles, but ultimately it's going to have to come from our belief in him. We have to make sure that people know who Chris Isaak is and see him and hear him. There's such a strong artist there. As he tours and becomes more accessible in terms of the public getting a hold of this guy, the rest will fall into place."

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