In Search of... Chris Isaak

BAM magazine (First appeared in)
9/11/98
by Denise Sullivan

It is with a certain reverence that one must approach the likes of a Chris Isaak, bonafide local rock star. The former Great White Hope of the squalid San Francisco nightclub circuit made it--quite awhile ago in fact--and we're all now so familiar with the story behind the legend that it almost reads like myth: simple, handsome college boxer from Stockton moves to San Francisco, forms a band, works hard for over 10 years and, finally, his beautiful song for the ages, "Wicked Game," becomes a surprise hit and Madonna starts turning up at his shows. Ultimately, the song would become Isaak's trademark, his personal favorite and the one that and would keep his hardworking band Silvertone in the business of making music right up through their current testament to the labors of love, Speak of the Devil.

But today, our golden-voiced hero of the broken-hearted is also an actor, a lonesome surfer and a guy who claims to sit around in his underwear and practice the guitar eight hours a day in his one-man home by the sea. We've collected images of the wise-cracking, fun-loving Isaak in our local psyche for more than 15 years now.

"When are people going to get that I am not this image, this persona that I've created? How can I ever meet anyone that doesn't think they know me from my songs and interviews?" Isaak asks. Uh, when you decide to tell us?

If they made a movie called "Chris Isaak," like ladies man/secret agent Austin Powers, its subtitle would be, "International Man of Mystery." Recently, rock insiders, neighbors and fellow surfers have been buzzing about Isaak's new Northern California beach-front home. Yet when I ask Isaak about it he snaps, "How many ways are there to say, 'It's not true.' I still live in [SF's] Sunset [district]." And who knows better than Isaak that he can run, but he can't hide.

"I was out surfing at Ocean Beach and this guy said to me, 'You were in The Silence of the Lambs on TV last night.' He didn't know me as a singer; he just recognized me as the guy in The Silence of the Lambs. I didn't even know I was in it that much. That was really weird."

Yet, I'm guessing that there are some people left on the planet who have not heard of Isaak, and then I remember, my grandfather had heard of Chris Isaak. We've all heard of him, for heavensake. Naturally, he is protective of his image, his privacy and the one thing he can call his own, his real self.

But in an effort to better understand the man, the myth, the musician, the mortal, Chris Isaak--the one who was so quick to eventually reveal rather personal thoughts on love and pain but more reticent when replying to questions about the nuts and bolts of making music ("Those would be really boring answers," he says)--like Leonard Nimoy, I go "In Search of..."

I ask Isaak's drummer Kenney Dale Johnson if he can offer any explanation of why Isaak would blow hot and cold during the course of our interview the previous night. Why would he regale me with road stories, memories of his great lost loves, his grandma's persimmon cookies and his thrift store find of the day ("I found a Pat Boone record that I didn't have, but the check-out lady dropped it. I asked her if I could have the cover"), rather than supply simple answers to a simple questions like "Why don't you guys do more secret nightclub shows?" or "Why were you so long in the studio?"

About the best Johnson can offer is "He's the hardest working guy I know" and "You're a journalist, right? Isn't it your job to figure him out?"

For 15 years now, Isaak's rock bottom rhythm section, Johnson and bassist Rowland Salley, have remained solid and devoted to their fearless leader. Following the recording of 1993's San Francisco Days, Isaak's original Silvertone guitarist, the ex-Avenger Jimmy Wilsey, master of that twangy, Duane Eddy guitar sound that Isaak came to be identified with, left the fold under what some describe as a parting that was less than amicable. Enter Hershel Yatovitz, another skilled axeman in possession of the requisite twang. I warily approach Isaak on the subject of Wilsey, asking whether he's "on limits" and he offers cheerfully, "Jimmy, sure. I just saw Jimmy the other day and he's doin' good."

For now, Chris Isaak the actor is on-location in Utah, playing a sheriff opposite Amy Irving and Tom Arnold in an independent production called "Shepard." When I ask if it's hard to slip into the role of plugging his new album Speak of the Devil after sundown, he answers with characteristic Isaak humor.

"No, it's actually an operation that can be performed quite easily, and you don't even have to be behind closed doors. They just tug on this little wire that's attached under the plate on my head and..."

I chuckle politely, but when I inform him that these Isaakisms--the kind we've come to know and love him for--are the exact kind of answers I am not looking for tonight, he seems a little put out; not angry, but genuinely flummoxed.

"So what do you want? For me to answer the questions the way you want? Quite honestly, I don't like to talk about my music and the only time I do is with journalists. To me, it sounds a little effete and intellectual. I'm just not comfortable with that ... So are we done yet?"

"No"

"Aw jeez. Why?"

"We have to talk more about the new album."

"No."

"Can we talk about Stockton?"

"No"

"That's too bad because I know a lot about Stockton."

"Prove it."

"Fat City."

"That is not a question."

So I ask the former light-heavyweight whether he and his boxing dad and brothers had read the book Fat City by Leonard Gardner (also a John Huston film), all about boxers in Stockton.

"You know, I boxed with that guy who wrote the book once; I didn't know it was him 'til after. You know that book is pretty true; if you've ever been to Stockton, you'd know that."

I have, so it would appear I'm back in the ring for round two, in which we actually get around to speaking of the devil, Speak of the Devil.

The record was recorded in San Francisco and Los Angeles over the last year with Isaak's longtime production collaborator Erik Jacobsen at the helm. It's darker and more dense in tone than past Isaak efforts, though there's a moody, reverberating atmosphere that runs through his catalog, from 1985's Silvertone through last year's freewheeling Baja Sessions.

Speak of the Devil's keynote is grittier rock 'n' roll though anyone who's watched the band's live evolution knows they were always capable of cutting loose. "I'm Not Sleepy" is a kind of roots-rock rave-up (wherein Isaak lyrically quotes John Lennon's "Oh Yoko!"). the title cut is an eerie celebration of love lost and found. Yet, some of the loungey-vocal touches in "Flying" and the final instrumental track, "Super Magic 2000," would be right at home on a (gasp!) indie rock record. And of course there's plenty of that thing that Isaak does best: quintessential love's-gone-wrong-and-let's-make-it-right songs, as on the loping country-tinged "This Time" and the teary jingle "Walk Slow."

A grab bag of session people were at the ready for the making of the album, a custom which Johnson in particular refers to as industry standard; any necessity toward the use of other percussionists or songwriters and producers is according to Johnson, just a sign of the times, technology and Isaak's desire to experiment with new sounds. And though Isaak rarely co-writes his songs with anyone, he wrote the soaring ballad, "Breaking Apart" with the queen of the soaring ballad, Diane Warren, writer of mega-songs like "If I Could Turn Back Time" by Cher and "Unbreak My Heart" by Toni Braxton. "She added something that I couldn't have," says Isaak. "I like it."

The album kicks off with "Please," a polished, yet contemporary-sounding straight-ahead rock song, from its acoustic/electric /soft/crash structure, guitar line and mellotron, to the '90s soundbyte lyric: "What's the problem, what's the question, what's the answer, where's this headed?" He offers up an answer as to what's exactly going on in the effective, kitchen-sink track: "In there, there's this answering machine message that plays when the song breaks down and you can hear it. It says, 'Chris it's me...just calling to let you know, um...that I love you...'"

Is this a real answering machine message and does the woman in question know her voice has ended up on a Chris Isaak record?

"Yeah, it's real. Of course she knows!" He repeats the phone message in the whisper again to demonstrate, two more times: "Chris, it's me...just calling to let you know, um...that I love you..."

This exercise in self-affirmation really seems to please him and I express my congratulations to the happy couple. Can we talk?

"I don't want to talk much more about it. I don't want to jinx it."

According to Isaak, the scenarios and portraits of women he paints throughout the record are for the most part real, rather than a product of his imagination--in particular the role call of lost loves he conjures in "Talkin' 'Bout a Home." Isaak's ode to settling down includes a spoken passage where he addresses, by first name, the women that he once shared a dream with, letting them know in no uncertain terms that he loved them then, but he's found a new leading lady for his life. It is a show stopper, but it's a song that Isaak almost left off the record, simply because there were so many songs from which to choose. He paraphrases the lyric: "I like the idea that a shadow's lifted off of me and 'I'm a brand new kind of man.' I keep looking at wedding rings and girls will pass and they'll see me and they just know, forgeddaboutit, that guy's in love."

Does he worry that domestic harmony is the bane of the singer-songwriter--the widely held critical belief that bliss does not make good fodder for a serious artist's repertoire?

"First of all, I don't care what critics say. You show me one instance where that is true. It just isn't. Look at John Lennon, when he sang, 'In the middle of the night I call your name, Oh, Yoko.' That's what it's all about.

"All those women are real exes," he continues. "They know who they are. I want them to know that it was real and that we could've had a home but that I found someone new."

So they were the big ones?

"Yep. They know that. My ex, could make me laugh more than anyone," says Isaak referring to his last breakup, which left him down for the count and resulted in 1995's Forever Blue.

"I wrote a whole record about her but she never listened to it. At first I was kinda hurt, but I realized it might have hurt her to listen to it. I talked to her since and assured her everything was [written] in admiration.

"She could just make a face and I would laugh. You know the cover of San Francisco Days where I'm smiling so big? That's because she was there. I told her to come to the photo shoot and she said, 'Why?!' and I said, 'because I want to smile.'"

And now I'm the one who's taken aback with what I perceive to be responses to questions I didn't even ask. I wouldn't have thought to dredge up a recent breakup that was already covered exhaustively in the press, in deference to his celebrity right to a personal life, yet he continues.

"You know when you're feeling so bad, like you can't even walk or you can't think and you don't even know what to do next? That's what it was like for me when we broke up. And I'd tell my older brothers and they would usually cook up some reason why they had to be in San Francisco and they would just come and sit with me or take me out. I just didn't want to be in my house alone."

"Having been through that, I find I have a little more compassion for humanity. Any time I see someone in pain, even if it's in a movie, I really think I know what that feels like. If you don't, it's really a little inhumane."

We wind things down and I think, though I'm not sure, that I finally got that little glimpse of the real Chris Isaak for which I so foolhardily went looking. And because I am truly touched by his attempt at what sounds like some very honest appraisals of the human heart condition and have gratitude for his effort to make things right when we started this thing so wrong, I offer with utmost sincerity, "Well, thank you for the time. You're a very nice man, Chris Isaak."

"I can't tell if you're lyin'! But I hope I answered the questions the way you wanted me to, Miss District Attorney."

Found at Music Universe

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