Voices of Stockton
Originally published Friday, December 11, 1998
By Tony Sauro, Record TimeOut Editor
According to the folks who organize the Bammie Awards, Stockton has produced 40 percent of California's "outstanding male vocalists" for 1998.
Chris Isaak and Grant Lee Phillips, both born in Stockton but famous in pop-rock music for different reasons, have been nominated by Bay Area Music magazine for the now-statewide 1998 Bammie Awards.
They're on a list of five best-male-vocalist nominees that includes Stephan Jenkins of San Francisco's Third Eye Blind, Scott Weiland (Stone Temple Pilots) and Rufus Wainwright.
Isaak, the pop star with two platinum albums, once won five Bammies in one year (1996) when the awards were limited to the Bay Area. He didn't release an album and was shut out in 1997, the year the awards were expanded to encompass the entire state.
It's the first Bammie nomination for Phillips, the Linden High School graduate who's the leader of Grant Lee Buffalo, a critically praised band that's a musicians' favorite but has yet to achieve much mainstream commercial success. Because his band is based in Los Angeles, Phillips wasn't eligible until last year.
Isaak, the 42-year-old Stagg High School and University of the Pacific graduate, once was Mr. Bammie. Back in the 1980s, he and his band -- Silvertone -- were named the Bay Area's best club band in 1987, 1988 and 1989, when that category was the only one voted on by the public. He won as the Bay Area's top entertainer in both 1992 and 1996. In all, Isaak and Silvertone have won 12 Bammies.
(He also received two Grammy nominations in 1996, but folks named Alanis Morissette and Tom Petty won in his categories that year.)
He's nominated this year for his vocals on "Speak of the Devil," his seventh album since 1985. As the current leg of his American tour reaches San Francisco's Warfield on Monday and Tuesday nights, the album has slipped from Billboard magazine's top 200. Monday's show at the 2,200-capacity Warfield still sold out, though, and a second one had to be added.
Phillips, 34, was nominated for his work on "Jubilee," the fourth -- and best -- Grant Lee Buffalo album. His group also has songs on two current movie soundtracks ("The Whole Shebang" on "Velvet Goldmine" and "Testimony" on "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer") as well as a BAM magazine compilation ("SuperSloMotion" on the "21 Golden State Greats" CD) of music by California bands.
Isaak and Phillips aren't alone.
Chi Cheng, a 28-year-old graduate of Lodi's Tokay High School, was nominated as the state's best bass player. Cheng is a member of Sacramento's Deftones, a hard-rock band that's closing its U.S. tour with shows Wednesday at San Francisco's Maritime Hall and Dec. 18 at Sacramento Memorial Auditorium.
Cheng was nominated (for the first time) along with frequent Bammie winner Les Claypool of Primus, Green Day's Mike Dirnt, Rancid's Matt Freeman and Mike Watt, a solo artist and former member of the Minutemen.
The awards, voted on by readers of BAM magazine, will be presented March 13 at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
Speaking of Grammy Awards, Isaak's new album includes only his second published songwriting collaboration. That tune, "Breaking Apart," was written with Grammy winner Diane Warren and, with its dark beauty and lush mix of twangy guitar, sweetly sad strings and stately piano, could become his first major hit since "Wicked Game" made the national top 10 in 1991.
In a recent interview, Isaak said he figured, if you're going to write with someone, you might as well pick the best.
"I said, 'I don't know how people will take this,' " Isaak recalled prior to the start of his tour, which concludes Dec. 18 at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. "They're either gonna hate it or whatever. But, in my mind, if I was gonna write with someone, I didn't want to write with someone who writes like me. What's the point?" If I'm dark and moody, I wanted to get somebody who writes big, expansive pop-type melodies. That's as opposite as it can be."
The Los Angeles-based Warren is best known for "How Do I Live," which won a Grammy and was a top 10 hit for both LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood. She's very much in demand these days in Nashville, writing hit songs for Reba McEntire, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, Lila McCann and Mark Chesnutt.
"I heard she was a real nice person, but nobody told me she was a complete nut," said Isaak. "In a good way. She's hilarious. I went to her office, and it was just, 'Let's just sit down and jam.' There were gold and silver records all over the walls. She's sold more than 1,000 records, I guess. So I was a little apprehensive.
"The office she works in is just a pig sty, so I was right at home. We just wound up sitting on the floor, playing our guitars, writing, singing, making jokes. It was fantastic. A lot of fun. The two of us are a nice combination. She loves to soar with the melody, and I like to take things to those little minor corners. Throw my two bits of dark into her little mirthful thing and shake, and it should be a good combination."
The song was shaken and stirred by producer Rob Cavallo, most famous in recent years for helping Berkeley's Green Day craft the punk-pop albums ("Dookie," "Insomniac" and "nimrod.") that made that group big-time stars.
"Actually," Isaak said, "He'd been listening to my tapes. He's been helping talk to me about my music and giving me ideas since he was in the mailroom at Warner Bros.
"He's always been a very smart guy. I'd go to him and say, 'Rob, here's a song idea. What do you think of these?' We'll probably work on something again. He's a good producer. Very good."
Chris Isaak performs Monday and Tuesday at the Warfield, 982 Market St., S.F. Chi Cheng and the Deftones play Wednesday at Maritime Hall, 450 Harrison St., S.F.
Jude
Chris Isaak sure knows how to pick them. Back in 1995, a band called the Wallflowers -- with a lead singer hardly anyone realized was Bob Dylan's son -- opened for Isaak. Then, it was an unknown singer-songwriter named Patti Rothberg.
This year, it's been Shawn Mullins, the rich-voiced Georgian whose "Lullaby" single is No. 9 nationally, and this 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose full name is Michael Jude Christodal.
The more than 4 million romantics who've purchased the "City of Angels" movie soundtrack already will be familiar with Jude's avant-folk approach, because "I Know," a gentle song about romantic trust and commitment, appears on both that album and this promising debut.
After scuffling at a series of odd jobs around Los Angeles -- the grist for several of his songs -- the Boston-raised Jude suddenly has emerged as the newest kid in town. Signed to Madonna's Maverick Records, he attracted a trio of producers (including Black Crowes cohort George Drakoulias) and a bevy of helpful musicians, including the Wallflowers' Michael Ward and Rami Jaffe, Tom Petty keyboard player Benmont Tench and former Grant Lee Buffalo bass player/producer Paul Kimble.
The son of an itinerant '60s musician who never made it big -- and influenced early on by Paul Simon and the Beatles -- Jude writes songs that are alternately sweet and sarcastic, introspective and journalistic, singing them in a remarkably agile voice. Slightly boyish, it's at once cynical and sensitive, vulnerable and confident, able to express sweet sadness and a kind of wise whimsicality, then quiver into a high, fragile falsetto or drop down into a hushed, conspiratorial whisper. He sings, narrates, scats and semi-raps as the mood dictates.
The contemporary comparisons are obvious -- the late Jeff Buckley, transplanted Iowan Dan Bern, Beck, Mark Everett of the eels and Radiohead's Thom Yorke -- but not limiting. He sounds like a young T-Bone Burnett.
His songs -- wordy without being wasteful -- are nestled in attractive, acoustic-based settings that mix folk, rock, pop, light funk and quasi-rap. They're embellished by intriguing keyboard bits, sweetly sad string quartet flourishes and flashes of electric guitar twang and noise.
He can be savagely sarcastic, putting down rock-star pretension and pomposity amid the funk-folk of "Rick James"; using the raw, garage-style "Charlie Says" to cut down to size the "mediocre men of the hour" he observed while working as a janitor at a modeling agency; piercing Hollywood's phony facade on the semi-jazzy "Prophet"; playfully offering an antidote for his allergic reaction to tinseltown on the funky "Out of L.A."; and engaging in some serious self-analysis on the deceptively sweet-voiced "The A--hole."
His storytelling eye is acute amid the slinky grooves and Becklike strut of "Brad and Suzy," which paints a vivid portrait of two yuppies-in-training ("They had no worries all they ever had was cool"). The acoustic-based, semi-narrated "George" uses the memory of a fifth-grade friend's death to frame the moral dilemma of life's ongoing "little lies that tie you down."
His tender sensitivity reveals itself on "You Mama You," paying tribute to his maternal security blanket; "I'm Sorry Now," a regretful, folk-rocking apologia for his relationship dysfunction; "Battered Broken," where he's the repentantly masochistic victim of sensual infatuation; and the absolutely beautiful "I Do," whereupon an invitation to a former girlfriend's wedding unleashes a torrent of repressed longing, regret and undiluted devotion.
Like Bern, he's an iconic name-dropper (Mellencamp, Kerouac, Marvin Gaye, Apollo Creed, James Bond). A flashy phrasemaker like Beck ("I hate spaghetti and I also hate divorce," he reveals on "I'm Sorry Now"), Jude also pays playful tribute to his muse, echoing (with Kimble's harmonic vocal help) another era on "She Gets the Feeling" by ruefully updating sentiments of the now-bald Paul Simon: "Well, the words of the prophets are no longer written on the/Subway walls/One of them lost his hair."
Jude, accompanied by bass player William Roe, opens for Chris Isaak Monday and Tuesday at the Warfield, 982 Market St., S.F.
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