Mr. Blue (Chris Issak)

Esquire Magazine
Jan 1996 v125 n1 p112(3).
By Julie Baumgold

Abstract: Isaak writes and sings haunting songs about the misery and confusion of love. He is currently touring to promote his album 'ForeverBlue.' The guitarist, 39, is hard working and usually plays small clubs instead of arenas.

CHRIS ISAAK TOURS as long as his album lives, His record Forever Blue is still alive, so he is on the road. As he joggles through the night on his gold tour bus, he loses the little roll of muscle that surfers develop under their rib cages. He is far from the big waves.

He had just been the host of an MTV fashion event. There was Cindy and Naomi and Helena Christensen, with whom he once rolled around on the beach--she in only underpants with her feet bleeding and sand striping her face, as they poured buckets of seawater on them and he sang "Wicked Game." He had been nervous all day about just what he was supposed to do, and afterward he went back to his hotel room with a few bottles of fruit juice and watched John Wayne movies till after four because he was still nervous. He'd been going for eight days straight, and, anyway, as the song does not go, he was not in the mood for love.

Chris Isaak is a famously wounded heart, whupped by love and not ready to love again. He is a rock star and a movie actor who was dumped by an ordinary girl. He is a walking love song. He sings his pain every night, and girls come up out of the audience and dance to it, bumping him hopefully with their hips, as he sings, "Oh, I'll never fall in love . . ." and thinks he means it. "I do not have any confidence in figuring out love," he says. "Talk about love, I get confused. Because I can't put it together, I write about the confusion."

Many have seen much in Chris Isaak. Jonathan Demme cast him in two movies. Herb Ritts directed one version of his "Wicked Game" video. David Lynch did the other and had him costar in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Bernardo Bertolucci made him the father of a reincarnated lama in Little Buddha. On the charts, he exists in five music formats, caught somewhere among genres: adult contemporary, hot AC, contemporary hit radio, adult album alternative, and alternative. Many have seen his considerable allure--but no longer the ordinary girl. Of his audience, he says, "It's like you took a scoop through a mall." Still, at thirty-nine, he is a middle- level star born to be unplugged. He plays in theaters, not arenas. He opens stores. He travels with a bus and a truck, about twenty people sleeping in pods, rocking through the nights. Last November, he opened the Old Navy store and played the Beacon in New York.

The Beacon was a fiery show. He was blue with his red guitar. Pretty girls danced in the aisles and made snakes with their arms as he sang about guys who cry in the night. "A heart-ripper," said Ian Blackbum, who had driven down from Albany, where he works for a station that plays progressive rock.

Isaak came out to the rumble song from West Side Story, but he was dressed in country- western--the starburst suit hung with keys, the fancy shirt and boots. He cradled his guitar in his boxer's arms. He does his old songs without quarrel and the newer ones like "Go Walking Down There" and "Somebody's Crying" with pleasure--because they are all a part of him. He has five albums to draw on and, with an occasional exception, performs only his own songs. He writes "pretty melodies" that "tell the stories in my head." He writes about walking away He locates himself on a lonely street a place where there are tears to cry because she's found somebody new, a territory where he never said, "i love you," and now it's too late. And there is "Trouble going round,/ Trouble in this town" and "Blue Hotel" and"Blue Spanish Sky." He's unrequited blue, and there she goes as he lies awake dreaming in a "Heart Shaped World." He has a smoky voice, a shivery instrument with falsetto yodeling peaks and hollow bass valleys. He is very American and very western, with roots in roadhouse singing, cowboy crooning, and the black honky-tonk of the fifties. Elvis is there, too, with his early pompadoured sincerity. Madonna, a fan, says his voice is mysterious and familiar at the same time. It's the kind of fervent croon that makes people think of lost loves. His time is a quarter to three.

It took Isaak ten years to get his band, Silvertone, together, and he says it is difficult to hold it together. "I've seen bands go broke or out of fashion, or they make a lot of money and get an attorney and fashion-model girlfriend who says, What do you need with those guys?'" CHRIS ISAAK is a California boy, a blue-eyed surfer of the kind who isn't supposed to get his heart broken. He grew up in Stockton, in the San Joaquin Valley. His father was a forklift operator for the Stockton Box Company. His mother worked on the assembly line at Frito-Lay. Even at age five, when he visited his mother at work and saw the harsh lights and the noise, he knew "what a tough gig that was." When his mother's hands went bad, she put herself through school, got her doctorate, and became a psychologist. He had an Italian-Catholic upbringing. "It was a working-class place, an inland port," he says. "I'd see the QueenMary riding through the fields. I'd go to work at 5:00 A. M. unloading theships. It was great pay." He lived near a river and would row out to see the mothballed World War II fleet. Stockton has the world's biggest skid row. It's a rough place, with Saturday-night fights. Chris taught himself to play on his brother's guitar and eventually wrote songs about all this. "Where you grow up cuts the deepest," he says. He went to the University of the Pacific and loved it. He went down by the Santa Fe station to box as a light heavyweight.

Chris Isaak is a good boy in the bad-boy world of rock. What can you say about a rock star who brushes his teeth and shaves before going onstage?

"Pellegrino for the table?" said his press agent at dinner at Le Madri inNew York. What could I do? He doesn't drink or do drugs, and, after the show to open the Old Navy store, his only request was for a couple of tubs of ice and ten minutes alone. His arms are free of tracks and tattoos. When one or two "fucks" come out, they lack all conviction.

He dresses up to sing. Recently, someone stole one of his mirrored suits. "Maybe they are trying to tell you something," I said to him. He stomps and twitches his butt a bit heavily. "Baby did a bad, bad thing ... a lowdown dirty rotten thing. . ." He spits water up into the air and wets his face under the starlight spots. He plays around with his bandmates-Johnny Reno on sax and Kenny Dale Johnson on drums.

He always stays to sign the last autograph. As he went through the crowd at Old Navy, some knew him and touched his head to get a bit of his sweat, and some, attracted by the handlers, said, "Who's that?" When they heard "Chris Isaak," some more knew, and others still did not. Once he joked about fame:"There's a secret badge we get.... We don't have to wait in line anymore, our food is prepared differently, and we pay no income tax.

He is a charming, very funny, self-deprecating man; his backstage self is no different. He's seen it go bad, as with Chet Baker. The photographer Bruce Weber introduced them, and they sang together. "Life had taken its shots on him," Isaak says of Baker. "He took a whuppin'. He was a beaten man."

Before his Old Navy show, Isaak and a group went to dinner. They passed a chain factory. Someone started to sing "Unchain My Heart." Then Isaak did the "leaning" song from Night of the Hunter. It is a special sound when a singer sings on the street. He told stories, did imitations at dinner. He is quick.

"In movies, they think of me for yuppies and squares," he said and sounded surprised. He and his girl were together three years. "If she is happy, I don't want to know," he said. "If she isn't, I'll feel bad." He said he wants to grow old with a dog and a TV, and then he growered down into his porcini.

After the shows, he says, he goes back to his hotel room--"there are only five layouts"--with his guitar and plays Charlie Rich: "The wedding's over, The honeymoon begun. / You're with another, / I hope you both have fun."

Maybe he waits too long between albums or doesn't tour enough or his ballads are too painful for hot AC. His audience loves him deeply, but when a few scream, others laugh. Perhaps he lacks menace or that seductive quality to make you do what you don't quite want to do. Maybe he is too good.

He now lives far from Stockton in every sense. He is on the San Francisco coast, where cold white fogs hang over a rough sea. Here, he will turn his road notes into songs. He will surf but not off the "reef of destruction." I asked him how he would explain Chris Isaak to a primitive tribe. "Not tasty," he said.

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