Rockabilly Rage

Elle
February 1989
by Guy Garcia

A cool evening breeze wafts across the amphitheater at the Paul Masson winery in Saratoga, California, as Chris Isaak takes the stage, decked out in a greased-up pompadour and an iridescent ice-blue suit. Halfway through the set, Isaak can't resist taking a shot at the crowd's well-mannered enthusiasm.

"Hey," he says, stepping away from the microphone. "It's so quiet out here I don't even need a mike. I hope you all realize that while you're sitting here listening to me, my roadies are breaking into your cars." A smattering of nervous laughter. "You think I'm joking? I didn't always wear a glow-in-the-dark suit, you know, I used to do a James Brown thing with a psycho-metal guitar." Isaak segues from his monologue into "Wild Love," a full-throttle rave-up. The applause, for the first time tonight, is anything but restrained.

"I couldn't help poking a little fun at them," Isaak confesses after the show. "I'm not used to audiences being so polite." With good reason. Thanks to his good looks, sultry vocals, and energetic, hepcat physicality, Isaak is capable of sending admirers into a hooting, screaming frenzy. The California-born crooner's two albums, Silvertone and Chris Isaak, have won him critical raves and an almost fanatical following. He has appeared on the Carson and Letterman shows and had his pictures plastered across the pages of Rolling Stone. And last summer Isaak added fuel to the media fire by appearing as a clown-garbed gangster in Jonathan Demme's film Married to the Mob. Now, with a new album hitting the stores, Isaak is once again aiming for the only facet of fame that has so far eluded him: commercial success.

"I'm glad the critics like me," Isaak says, sounding more than a little ambivalent. "But sometimes I think I'd like to have a huge disco hit, so that everybody would know who I am and the critics would hate me."

The next morning, Isaak is waiting outside his apartment in San Francisco. He leads the way into a small kitchen dominated by a tiki-god collection--not unlike a shrine to Trader Vic's. It's no coincidence that Isaak's idea of relaxation is surfing. In fact, there's even a hang-10 element in his music--not the sun-bleached sound of the Beach Boys, but the darker, wilder reverberations of the Ventures.

Isaak goes over to his vintage Wurlitzer jukebox and starts punching the buttons. When he selects such songs as Pat Boone's "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano" and Bobby Vinton's "Mack the Knife," it becomes clear that this is the lair of no ordinary rock-and-roll animal. In fact, had things gone a little differently, Isaak might never have taken up music in the first place. "I wanted to be a filmmaker," he says. "Not so much being in films; I just like the idea of writing and directing."

While attending the University of Pacific in Stockton, Isaak went to Japan for a year on a foreign- study project and was tapped to be an extra in a science-fiction movie called Message from Space. Back in the States, he applied to film school before deciding that he didn't want to wait until he "was 40 to get a shot at directing some PBS documentary." Instead, he decided to go to San Francisco to play his first gig--amateur night at a local bar. "I was so thrilled to be up on stage," he recalls. "I thought I had arrived."

Despite the state-of-the-art sheen of his songs, he remains something of an anachronism. The son of a forklift operator, Isaak was raised on the unadulterated country-western and rockabilly sounds of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison. Isaak talks as if the past 15 years of pop never happened, with the notable exception of the Beatles. "When I first heard rockabilly, it was contemporary to me," he says. "It really hit home."

He is rankled, however, by the constant comparisons to Presley and Orbison. "Those guys are legends," he says. "I don't think I've written anything in that realm. But I still have a goal to do something that good." He is also eager to dispel the idea that he's a heartsick hick stuck on writing downbeat tearjerkers like "Cryin'" and "Blue Hotel." "I love upbeat stuff," he says. "I'd love to write something happy but not sappy, like a Brian Wilson or Beatles song."

Even though he has a boisterous stage persona, Isaak maintains that his introspective side is not contrived. "I come from a long line of intense, moody people," he confides. "Some lines in one of my new songs go: 'There are no stars out there tonight/ And there's darkness all around/ You won't say a word/ I wonder why no one's found you.' That's how people are. They won't reach out, and then they say, 'Look how lonely I am.' Everybody's guilty of that. I am too." Maybe so, but who can believe that a guy like Chris Isaak has trouble getting a date on Saturday night? "I can get a date," he says quietly. "But a date isn't true love, if you know what I mean."

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