Chris Isaak plugs into the Boathouse

The Virginian-Pilot
Nov. 20, 1998
By Sue VanHecke

CHRIS Isaak is stuck on a movie set in remote Park City, Utah, and the comely crooner's feeling a little punchy. Make that a lot punchy. ``Put it this way,'' he says, his voice taking a slightly manic tone. ``I talk to the cows. They talk back. They listen. They know. Cow's a wonderful animal. I played my record for the cows and one of the cows, she said to me, `Chris, why so sad?' '' Actually, ``Speak Of The Devil,'' Isaak's latest, isn't all that sad -- compared to the rest of his typically blue oeuvre, that is. ``It's swinging,'' says Isaak, who performs Sunday at Norfolk's Boathouse. ``I'm a cheery guy now. It's loneliness with a backbeat.'' Swinging, yes. Rocking, even. How come? ``Because I plugged in,'' Isaak says. ``I wrote with my guitar plugged in. I played with the whole band playing loud.'' And he forsook the infamous rumpus room of his San Francisco home, his usual work space, for a proper practice place.

``I played in a rehearsal space where you can make noise and not have the neighbors complain. Used to be you had to stop around four o'clock when the neighbors came home.'' Still, there's no mistaking this for anything but an Isaak album. Those hushed and aching, tenderly twanging ballads -- his signature since ``Wicked Game'' lofted to the charttops in '89 -- are here, as are his favorite motifs of loves lost and loves never had. But Isaak sounds kinda gutsy -- kinda combative, even -- this time out. Isaak, a tough guy? Take the title track. His impossibly high, eye-crossingly intense vocals are as close to the bellowing brink as we've ever heard him, causing one to wonder if he might actually have hurt himself during recording. ``Yes, I gave myself a little discomfort,'' he says wryly, then goes on to discuss the song's theme of a complete and total seduction, of being pulled in against your will, like ``when you see somebody and it just takes your breath away.'' ``All of a sudden somebody shows up, sits down at the table next to you and you look and you go, `Oh, my God, this woman is everything. The way she looks, the way she moves, the way she looks at me, she's so serious, she's smart.' And then all of a sudden you're freaking out and inside everything goes discombobulated and you're pouring lemonade in your lap, you're stuttering, everything goes screwy.''

Hard to imagine pompadoured Chris Isaak pouring lemonade in his lap over a woman -- Isaak, a guy so camera-friendly that top photogs like Herb Ritts clamor to shoot him frolicking on the beach with topless supermodels, and A-list directors like Lynch, Demme and Bertolucci feature him in their big-budget films. But he swears his romantic endeavors over the years haven't all been peachy. Explaining his theory of amour, he says: ``My experience has been that with guys, they'll meet a girl who looks like their porn-star dream and then they won't listen when the girl tells 'em, `All I really want to do is have a picnic and wash clothes.' And they're going, `But no, I thought you were going to be this fantasy.' ``Or they get a girl who's really bright, got her own ideas and doing her own thing, and then they say, `My fantasy is that you're gonna have a picnic and wash clothes.' And she's going, `No, my fantasy is that I'm your porn star.'

``Whatever it is, we get it wrong. Usually, it's we look at somebody and physically they fit what our image is and then we try to force them to be something they're not.'' Something Isaak's definitely not is a mega-selling superstar on the fast track to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His insistence on releasing exactly what he wants exactly how he wants has precluded that. ``If you get (the music) the way you like then it's great to win an award or sell records or be in the Hall of Fame,'' he says. ``(But) the reason rock and roll was so good when it started was because there was no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Elvis wasn't thinking, `People are gonna be listening to this in a hundred years.' He was thinking, `This is the way I like it.' They weren't looking at themselves and second-guessing. They were doing it to have a lot of fun.'' That's what Isaak -- whose faves include Connie Francis, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Marty Robbins and the Everly Brothers -- was thinking over a decade ago when he started a band with since-departed guitarist Jimmy Wilsey, he of the tasty toneful twang found on early albums like '85's ``Silvertone'' and '87's ``Chris Isaak.''

Their first onstage performance together? Norfolk-born Gene Vincent's ``Be-Bop-A-Lula.'' ``I had a three-piece band and Jimmy Wilsey knew all the riffs to `Be-Bop-A-Lula,' '' recalls Isaak, who's often compared to other '50s rockers like Presley and Roy Orbison.

``I remember him backstage showing me the riffs and I went, `Wow! That sounds just like the Gene Vincent record -- so come on!' He hopped out on the stage and just played. I remember I was playing a Silvertone (guitar) and he borrowed my Gretsch, played that, people seemed to like it and I went, `Stay.' '' Wilsey did stick around for a while, before being replaced by current guitarist Hershel Yatovitz, no slouch himself. Isaak's still a Gene Vincent fan, though, and fondly recalls meeting Portsmouth resident Dickie ``Be-Bop'' Harrell, Vincent's original drummer, at his last Boathouse performance. ``Somebody said, `Chris, there's a guy here that wants to talk to you. It's Gene Autry's drummer,' '' he remembers with a chuckle. ``I said, `Who?' They said, `Gene Autry's drummer.' And I thought, God, I better get out there because this guy's gonna be old.

``And I like Gene Autry, so I thought, well, OK -- but I don't remember Gene Autry as particularly having a drummer. I walked out there and of course I recognized Be-Bop -- I had the records, he still looks just like the records. I thought he was very cool. ``What a cool player he was, those little, like, flams at the end of a line. I really liked him.'' Isaak's playing a deputy sheriff in the film he's shooting in Utah, way out west among the cows.

``I usually play a kindly caretaker or a teen-age hophead,'' he says, not just a little sarcastically, of the roles he's been offered lately. `` `In this scene you play Carl, the teenage hophead. You enter naked, carrying nothing but your switchblade and your good humor.' '' He says he's found acting ``sometimes very easy, and other times you've got to work at it. But it's fun to try and do. There's a technique to making films, like blocking out actions, hitting your mark take after take, keeping continuity in mind at all times. It's fun to stay focused and concentrate and try to do all those details."

So would Isaak ever seriously consider doing a nude scene?

``In a minute,'' he says, his voice taking that manic tone again. ``I will take my clothes off at the drop of a hat. That's most of the problem with these people. They're going, `Chris, there's not a need for nudity in this scene.'

``But I think, even though my character is a deputy sheriff, in this scene he would be naked, he would be trying to show what's going on inside, he wants to connect with the people around him. Maybe just a hat and a gunbelt . . . ''

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