Wicked Fame

Gentlemen's Quarterly
May, 1993
By Stephanie Mansfield

Rocker Chris Isaak has been flirting with fame for years, but this could be the year he swears off Alpo Lean forever.

When Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci began casting his latest film, "Little Buddha," he was stymied in his search for the male lead. Bertolucci was determined to find someone fresh for the role of the American father of a 7-year-old boy reputed to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan holy man. The boy had already been cast, and Bertolucci didn't want a famous face for the father. But finding an unknown who could handle the role seemed an impossible task. The search dragged on for months, as more and more stars-in-waiting were considered and rejected.

Early on, casting director Howard Feuer had suggested Chris Isaak, a gangly, pompadoured singer and guitarist who had done cameos in movies by Jonathan Demme and David Lynch. Bertolucci wasn't interested. He had never seen Isaak perform, nor had he seen any of his highly romantic music videos. Feuer insisted that Isaak was perfect for the film. Every time another actor was proposed, the casting director became more adamant. "You can't be too pushy with Bernardo," he says, "but you have to be forceful. You've got to be tenacious."

In the end, there were two candidates: a film actor with stage experience and Isaak.

Feuer pushed his choice harder, supplying Bertolucci with Isaak's concert tapes. Feuer was well aware that the sequin-suited rocker was a "wild card." Finally, Bertolucci agreed to an unusual request: He would watch a videotape of Isaak reading some scenes with a woman.

"The minute Bernardo saw the tape, he thought Isaak was fabulous," says a triumphant Feuer, who feels that Isaak's masculinity and small-town warmth translate on film as a "Gary Cooper kind of feeling."

But casting directors are paid to think that way. It didn't hurt that the film's producer, Jeremy Thomas, concurred. "Chris was original and unusual," he says. "We hadn't seen him before. He snuck up on everybody unawares."

Playing possum has long been the soulful, slightly mysterious Isaak's style. No matter how many years he's put in as a singer and songwriter, how many videos he's made, how many club dates and concerts, people are still convinced they alone discovered him. Now, with Bertolucci's blessing, the 36-year-old performer is sharing billing with Bridget Fonda and Keanu Reeves in the international production due for release this December. He also has a new album out, "San Francisco Days," which took two years to complete, and a concert tour planned for this summer. Whether he can--unlike Sting or Mick Jagger before him--make the difficult transition from rocker to actor is the question. "It's not can," insists Thomas. "He has. He's done it. I think he's got an enormous future as an actor. With Bertolucci's seal of approval and his new album, 1993 is Chris Isaak's year."

So you'd think the guy could wipe that hangdog look off his face. Lighten up a little. Maybe trade in that '64 Chevy Nova for a Dodge Stealth, move away from San Francisco and start acting like a star.

"By the time I'd had a hit," Isaak says, picking away on a beat-up guitar in a dark Burbank duplex one afternoon last winter, "I'd developed cheap tastes. I like sardines now. To me, ramen noodles are good." Not to mention canned products meant for Fido. "I not only ate it but eventually found a brand I liked! 'What do you mean you're out of Alpo Lean? I'll never shop here again!' "

He turns semiserious for a second. "If you hang in there long enough," he says, ""you'll probably get a shot at it. Some people can't hang in there. Their health gives out."

Or they self-destruct, I suggest.

With perfect timing, he shoots back "Instead of choosing wisely and destructing others."

The quirky humor is as much a part of Isaak's persona as the haunting good looks, reminiscent of Elvis in his "Jailhouse Rock" period. The soft, dark butte of hair rises off his forehead, defying gravity. He wears tight black jeans and black ankle boots with white socks. Certifiably dreamy, he exudes a sullen mystique, which he clearly would like to preserve. Gripping the neck of his guitar, his hands look enormous, and his nails are chewed to the quick.

"That's one thing I can afford," he says. "I have them bitten for me."

In "Little Buddha," Isaak plays a Seattle architect whose comfortable life is shattered when "a bunch of Tibetan monks show up at my house and want to take my son, who they believe is the reincarnation of a famous Buddha." The film was shot partly in Nepal and Bhutan. For Isaak, working with the director of "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor" was a little bewildering. Bertolucci "is a pretty complex guy," he says. "He seems easygoing, except for being very concerned with the film. I didn't necessarily know what he was angry about. I was kind of like the dog. We had an all-Italian crew, so all I heard was, 'Blah-blah-blah-blah CHRIS. Blah- blah-blah CHRIS.' And I thought, Are they happy?"

By all accounts, they were. "It was a very brave decision by Bernardo to cast Chris, and we couldn't be happier with the choice," says Thomas. "We made the leap of faith, but Chris made the performance."

Isaak's deadpan wit and habit of lapsing into B-movie dialogue are surprising counterpoints to his music, which centers on loss. Consider, for example, this selection of song titles: "Unhappiness," "Tears," "The Lonely Ones," "Blue Hotel" (a big hit in Europe) and the cheery "Funeral in the Rain." Cynicism also figures prominently, especially in the tag line of "Wicked Game"--"Nobody loves no one." This guy makes Sade look like Kathie Lee Gifford.

His new album is a slight departure--it contains a few more upbeat songs and a version of Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man" that could become a signature showstopper. But basically, the message remains the same: He still wants her. He still needs her. He still loves her. But he'll never have her.

When I ask what the most autobiographical song on the new album is, he quips "Lucky, Lazy Kid."

Actually, he says, he likes listening to "Except the New Girl," a catchy pedal-steel number. The lyrics may be the closest Isaak has ever come to revealing his true nature: "Alone and lonesome,/Trusting no one/They say you've never had a friend/People talk about you,/They say they doubt you/Really ever let anybody in."

Isaak's mother, Dorothy, is perhaps the only person he allows through his barriers. The two are extremely close, and Chris's friends and coworkers agree that she is the major figure in her son's life. "He thinks I'm perfect. He adores me," Dorothy says with a laugh. She pushed him toward a singing career, supported him when he was broke, shows up on the road when he's touring and often sits in on album-mixing sessions. Says a friend of Isaak's,"The motive behind most of what Chris does is his mom."

She is the person he calls at three in the morning and sings new songs to. He used to call every day, but his hectic filming schedule brought it down to several times a week. Dorothy says she is "62 going on 18" and is described by Isaak's saxophone player, Johnny Reno, as "the life of the party. She's definitely rowdy." One year she gave Chris a box of condoms for Christmas.

"He tells me all the time I'm his first love and his only love," Dorothy says. "And he will never love anyone more than me."

So the subjects of romantic love and Freudian conflict are fertile ground for analyzing Isaak's art and life. Falling in love, he says a little grimly, is "not something I do particularly easily." Nor is owning up to the emotion. "It's rough to say 'I love you' to somebody. All those movies we've watched. Something in our hormones says 'Shut up and mow the lawn.' "

I ask what he finds sexy in a woman.

He leans back and smiles. "I don't want a girlfriend who's too much smarter than me. But I also don't want to limit myself to 1 or 2 percent of the population, so I'm willing to accept the fact that I will take orders. Actually, I think it's kind of good" to have a woman smarter than himself, he says, "You get help with your homework. They can start the VCR. Get that day-and-date thing working."

The woman in Isaak's life right now is Sonya Chang, and she is said to be very smart indeed. Formerly his personal assistant, she now comanages him, with Howard Kaufman. Their romantic relationship is supposed to be a secret; professionally, however, it's clear that the brusque, no-nonsense Chang is steering Isaak's career.

"She's tied into the Hollywood scene, and Chris wants to do more acting. She knows who's a player and who's not," says Reno. "He definitely listens to her. She takes charge." Howard Feuer confirms Chang's Hollywood savvy. "She's a very bright girl," he says. "She sorts it all out for him. She'll go with him to every meeting." (Isaak recently left the William Morris Agency for United Talent Agency, where he is represented by Ilene Feldman, whose stable of young stars include Bridget Fonda, Tim Roth and Meg Tilly.)

While gregarious on the surface, Isaak is actually extremely private and cautious. His drummer, Kenney Dale Johnson, calls him "a total loner." "He doesn't play into the whole schmoozing thing too much," says Feuer. "He definitely plays dumber than you," observes Reno.

Isaak is known in the music industry as a workaholic, a perfectionist (he's known to do a hundred takes of a song, if necessary) and something of a straight arrow. He requests that visitors not smoke in his presence, and he doesn't drink and has never done drugs. His sane life-style would seem to be a direct response to growing up in a somewhat chaotic household with bohemian role models.

I ask if his parents were offbeat.

"I don't know," he drawls. "Would you consider the Addams Family offbeat?"

Somehow, Dorothy Isaak always knew that her destiny--and perhaps that of her youngest son-- would propel her away from Stockton, California, where she grew up. When Dorothy married her high-school sweetheart, Clarence Isaak, whom she renamed Joe, money was tight. Joe worked the early shift as a forklift operator for a box company. Dorothy worked nights at a potato-chip factory. "It was rough, very rough," Dorothy recalls. They had three sons--Nick, Jeff and Chris, who was born June 26, 1956, the same year "Rock Around the Clock" caused cinema riots. Dorothy was a music fan, and her tastes ran to country and rockabilly and, of course, Elvis Presley. She calls herself, "liberal," while accepting the fact that almost everyone else sees her as eccentric.

Joe Isaak is described as witty and likable, but not exactly a Ward Cleaver type. "He was not always there," says a friend. "Dorothy pretty much raised the kids. She held it together." Dorothy acknowleges that her life was turbulent at times. "My husband and I fight like crazy. We do not have an ideal marriage. He always said he'd never divorce me--he'd kill me."

Out of adversity and financial uncertainty, creativity blossomed. "The home life wasn't all that Chris wanted as a child," says Reno. "There's a certain sadness about it. He uses that sadness now as a way to tap into emotions."

The Isaak boys all played guitar and sang. "They'd play sad songs to make me cry," Dorothy says. "They'd giggle and laugh like crazy."

Chris was bright, and he is remembered by teachers at Stagg High School as a prankster. "He did quite a few crazy things," one recalls. "He had that mind racing every minute," says another teacher. "What prank could he pull next?"

He was also a cheerleader and a gifted mimic. When a distraught relative telephoned the Isaak home needing to speak with Dorothy, Chris kept the woman on the phone for twenty minutes, doing imitations of W.C. Fields and John Wayne, oblivious to the emergency nature of the call. She finally hung up, drove two hours to the Isaak home and confronted Dorothy.

"THAT FUCKING CHRIS!" she screamed.

In his senior year, Isaak was president of the student body and valedictorian. Even then, he had a penchant for thrift-shop clothes, and he and Dorothy would spend hours scouring the "rinky- dinks," as she called them, for 1950s Hawaiian shirts. He was once sent home from school for wearing a double-breasted pinstriped suit, a flowered tie and pointy-toed Italian shoes.

"They said I looked like a joke," he recalls. "They wanted me to wear a cardigan, some Dads 'n' Lads Payless slacks. That's not the stuff I had in my wardrobe."

While the other kids had discovered drinking and drugs, Isaak chose to blow off adolescent steam by taking up boxing. He also had a steady girlfriend, Laurel Low, whom he dated for eleven years, he says, until they broke up in the mid-Eighties. ("Twelve years, but who's counting," corrects Low, who will say nothing more about Isaak.)

After high school, Isaak worked for a year and then enrolled at the University of the Pacific, in Stockton. (His mother attended the same university, earning a master's degree in education and counseling psychology, in 1977, and then a doctorate, in 1987.) He spent his junior year in Japan, where he learned to speak Japanese. When he returned, he began making serious plans for a career as a singer and songwriter. As Dorothy tells it, a young costume designer from San Francisco named Vikki Muzio was responsible for discovering Chris Isaak, in 1980. She and her boyfriend, drummer John Silvers, had driven to Stockton in their red Cadillac and were scouting out the Value Village when they ran into a white-haired woman in cha-cha heels. Dorothy struck up a conversation and, when she learned that Silvers was a drummer, invited the two of them back to the house to hear Chris play.

"It was incredible," recalls Muzio. "When we heard him sing, we thought, This is ridiculous. This guy was really talented--much too talented to stay in Stockton."

Muzio arranged for Chris to play a Sunday-night jam session at a small bar in San Francisco' s Chinatown, with Silvers on drums. Isaak became a regular. (Silvers was eventually replaced by Kenney Dale Johnson, and bassist Rowland Salley was added later.) Soon, he began to get bookings at other clubs.

Isaak moved to a tiny apartment in San Francisco, in which he hung his clothes from the ceiling. The mattress was in the closet. "When he first started out, I used to go down and stay in his apartment," says Dorothy . "He would play his guitar and sing me to sleep."

In 1980, while appearing at the city's premier punk club, Isaak met sound man James Calvin Wilsey, who soon joined the band as a guitarist. The band, called Silvertone, came to the attention of Warner Bros., which offered them a contract, and producer Erik Jacobsen, who had last handled the Lovin' Spoonful, agreed to manage the group. Isaak approached the negotiations with his usual sense of the bizarre. "We had something called the Science Club," says a friend. "We were always looking in junk stores, trying to find weird things. Chris found this device that you plugged in. It had an electric prod on it. When he was scheduled to meet with (Warner Bros. President) Lenny Waronker to negotiate his first contract, Chris took this thing to the meeting. 'Before we start,' he announced, 'do you have any ailments?' He had plugged this thing in and was giving them little shocks from the prod."

Later, at a company picnic held at the Calabasas petting zoo, Isaak grabbed a microphone and told the assembled employees and their children that if his records didn't start selling, the animals would have to be put to sleep.

James Wilsey's twangy, Duane Eddy-inspired guitar riffs combined with Isaak's melancholy vocals to produce a distinctive sound, and soon Silvertone developed a cult following. Early supporters included Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty and Bonnie Raitt, whom Isaak and the band later toured with.

While they didn't crack the mainstream, the band garnered good reviews for their second album, "Chris Isaak," and by the time their third album, "Heart Shaped World," was released, in 1989, Isaak was earning raves for his live shows. The album had been out for about a year when David Lynch chose its tribute to unrequited love, "Wicked Game," for the sound track of "Wild at Heart." After an Atlanta radio station started giving the song heavy airplay, it caught fire, and "Heart Shaped World" went double platinum. The "Wicked Game" video, directed by Herb Ritts, was also a hit, featuring a brooding Isaak romancing a topless, sea-drenched Helena Christensen on a Hawaiian beach.

"Now, I think that video's pretty innocuous, but that's because I'm in it," says Isaak. "I remember seeing the first cut of it, and it seemed really sensual and pretty. You see a lot of videos where their idea of sexy is a woman in high heels and garter belts and big bosoms pushed up in a bra." He wrinkles his nose in distaste. "But it's not that kind of song. It's more dreamy. Romantic. I was real surprised people thought it was so sexy."

In what proved to be a publicist's dream, it was rumored that Isaak and the model were an item. "We were an item in people's minds," he says dismissively. "You'd think people in modern times are pretty sophisticated. That is you break open the TV a lot of little cowboys and Indians don't run out into your living room. You'd think they'd realize that every guy in a band on MTV is not dating the woman in the video." He pauses. "Only about 90 percent of them."

Isaak keeps mum about his real love life, a silence that fuels his moody, romantic image. "I know he's had bad relationships with certain women," says Marina Strong, a London-born model who has been friends with Isaak since 1986. "His first love is his music. It's like therapy for him. He can be very selfish in his career. Which you have to be. You know the line at the end of 'Wicked Game'--'Nobody loves no one'? He's talking about himself."

That it's taken Chris Isaak this long to be "discovered" by Hollywood is not surprising. Nor is it of concern to the artist himself. "I got just about what I wanted when I wanted," he reasons. "I've had a good time getting to where I got to." His voice trails off. Ironically, the new album comes at a time when he and guitarist James Wilsey are parting ways. "It's not been a good time. It's been more and more of a separation," says a mutual friend. (Wilsey declined to be interviewed.) Reno confirmed the estrangement, saying only "There's a definite secrecy about it."

To do more films, Isaak will likely have to curtail his singing career. And while observers have blamed lack of ambition or, more precisely, lack of promotion for Isaak's less-than-comet-like ascent, he pursued the role in "Little Buddha" as if it were the chance of a lifetime. As Dorothy Isaak says, luck favors the well-prepared.

Reno says his friend is simply getting all his ducks in a row. "He's very cautious. He takes his steps very deliberately. Every move is well-thought-out."

Caution is also the watchword when it comes to romantic entanglements. "The marriage part doesn't scare me," Isaak says, suddenly becoming animated. "It's the divorce. I don't want to get divorced from anybody. I'm very careful. I would take it real seriously. To me, when they say 'Til death do us part,' there's a way out of this marriage, and that's it. That's what I believe. 'You wanna leave, honey? I wanna leave? Either one of us can go. Till death do us part. You hear that?'

I'd make the preacher repeat that, maybe. 'Uh, Mr. Isaak has asked that I repeat "Till death do us part," and then show you a picture of this gun.' "

Back to Articles