Chris Isaak

BAM magazine
11/29/96
by Tom Lanham

Call it a ritual of sorts, a conscience-clearing task that usually guarantees a good night's sleep. No matter where he is, no matter how unruly the crowd, Bay Area crimson-timbered crooner Chris Isaak always--repeat, always--stops to scribble personalized after-show autographs. "And I always wait until everyone's done before I leave," he adds. "I don't sign 20, then leave, because it seems like, if people are gonna line up, you should sign until everyone's done. Then you can go." There is, of course, an exception to every set-in-stone rule. Such as Isaak's recent Halloween show at LA's House Of Blues, where the meet-and-greet routine was interrupted by an urgent backstage bulletin.

Isaak says he had Sharpie in hand when a crew member raced up to him with the news: Legendary white-bucks balladeer Pat Boone had caught the concert, and was now waiting in the wings, eager to meet him. You could've heard a pen drop. "I said, 'That's it, folks! If you wanna wait, I'll sign everything else later!' " bubbles Isaak, who suddenly felt like an awe-struck autograph hound himself. "Boom, I ran upstairs, and there's Pat Boone in my dressing room-- 'Hi, Chris! How ya doin'? Real nice show!' " What did they discuss? Archivist Isaak smiles proudly. "It was nice to have common ground, because immediately we just started talking records and music. And he knew more about music than anybody--you name it, he's done it. He's been in show business--he's been a major star as long as I've been alive. Literally! Pat Boone has been there, done that."

Boone was in town putting the finishing touches on his upcoming No More Mr. Nice Guy release, in which he warbles pop-metal staples like "Holy Diver," "Smoke on the Water," and "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)." And Isaak is quick to defend his longtime idol. "A lot of people say, 'Oh, Pat Boone did black music in a white style, blah, blah, blah.' But that's a really simplistic outlook. I think the reality is that lazy journalists and lazy TV reporters found it easy to pick him as an example, because they had it on film, him singing "Tutti Frutti." But nobody knows Pat Boone for "Tutti Frutti"--what made him famous is "Sugar Moon," "Love Letters in the Sand," "Don't Forbid Me." He's not some kinda phony guy who couldn't sing--he was an innovator; he had real talent and he should be in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. If you can see him singing live on his old TV show--compared to the quality of voices you hear today on live TV--the man is untouchable. He blows everyone's doors off as a vocalist! It's amazing!"

Your average '90s alterna-artist, when informed of Pat Boone's presence in their dressing room, would probably call security and cackle wickedly as the long-in-the-tooth interloper was carried out. That's the difference between Isaak and many of his self-serving pop peers. He has respect: respect for rock history, respect for all the oft-forgotten iconoclasts who've blazed this trail before him. It makes perfect sense, then, that the singer would choose to sculpt his new mostly-acoustic Baja Sessions (Reprise) around such dusty chestnuts as Bing Crosby's "Sweet Leilani," Lawrence Welk's "Yellow Bird," Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely," Dean Martin's "Return to Me," and Gene Autry's tumbleweed-perfect "South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)," (which was also cut by over 100 other vocalists, including Como, Crosby, and Sinatra). And where better to discuss this excavation than Isaak's private San Francisco digs, surrounded by his monolithic library of records. Know the man, know his obscure never-see-'em- again-in-a-million-years albums.

The pad is out in the Avenues, not far from the ocean. Which is convenient. Isaak, 40, is an avid surfer, and--entering his crackerbox of a house via the garage--the first things you notice are no less than 14 surfboards, suspended from the ceiling and the walls, in various states of waxing and/or assembly. Hanging from a peg is the actual SWAT-team hat the part-time thespian wore in his Silence of the Lambs cameo. The inside perimeter is lined with cases of healthy fruit drinks, allowing barely enough room for a wide-bodied '64 Chevy Nova. Strolling upstairs, Isaak jokes about his latest film role--the Svengali-ish Uncle Bob in That Thing You Do--and how director Tom Hanks, like Boone, is as nice and down-to-earth a fellow as his wholesome image suggests. Did they become pals on the set? "We're friends," says Isaak as he pours a couple of glasses of Gatorade, using the new refrigerator ice-maker his mother absolutely insisted he purchase, "but I'm certainly not invited to the barbecue or anything."

Hanks wanted the musician to read for another more prominent part, Isaak adds. "A character who was a really handsome guy. But I said, 'Can I read for Uncle Bob?' He was only in it for like, a page, but I begged 'em, 'Lemme do that!' And I got teased by my band about that one." Casually sipping his drink, Isaak ambles around his cramped quarters, stepping over guitars, suitcases and freshly unpacked clothes strewn about the carpeted floor. He has just flown in for a quick tour break. In a couple of days, he'll be jetting off again, but not before he escorts his mom to a pending Connie Francis concert. And certainly not before he catches a few chilly Pacific waves, as he plans to do that very afternoon. He looks even more 'beach' than usual, in his workboots, black Dickies, 'Dive & Ski' T-shirt from Australia, and a pompadour gelled so immaculately it'd send Frankie Avalon scurrying back to the Woodie for his BrylCream.

Making his way toward the music nook, Isaak pauses to point out shelves lined with surreal objets d'art that he simplifies as "fish TV lamps," many constructed from large pearly seashells. It's just one of his many kitschy obsessions. "They're pretty trashy kinda fishy things, but some of 'em were designed by Picasso. And when you see 'em lit up--the only way I can describe it is, the kinda thing that a kid would never forget, a total Disney World fantasy that's very colorful and very sweet, with everything illuminated softly from inside with shadows, so it kinda looks like underwater with fish floating around."

This is just the beginning. In a tiny kitchen-adjacent alcove sits a grand piano, a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox (stocked with all of its owner's favorite oldies, naturally), and--I kid you not--a drawered Dewey decimal system of cassettes--a real-deal classic wooden number bought for a song from a renovated Stockton library. In a flash, Isaak has whipped out rare personal tapes: himself covering "Born to Lose," a traditional Japanese track called "So Lovely," even a self-penned honky-tonker, "The Eyes of Texas," which features him hammering away on piano, in one rollicking single take. He plays his work on a serviceable stereo system in the living room. It's framed by several racks of CDs, with a few telling titles that jump out at you: the Searchers, the Shadows, the new Lee Ann Rimes, even a still-sealed copy of the five-disc Jimi Hendrix box set (the rock 'n' roll equivalent of The Warhol Diaries--do you know anyone who's survived the whole damned thing?).

Isaak points to a weighty luggage-sized device occupying a chair. He started buying records in his hometown of Stockton when he was 13 or 14, he explains. "And this is my first record player. I bought it for $1.50. It's an Artone, and it's a radio/record player and it plays 78s and 45s." He runs his fingers along its ragged Close 'N' Play seams. "Look at the way this thing is made. It's so...cheesy. But I bought it at a second-hand shop. And I would go to the junk store, and because I was a kid and they didn't care about records, I'd buy just stacks of records--they'd sell 'em to me by the stack. I'd come up to the counter with 50 records and go, 'How much for these?' and they'd go, 'Um...fifty cents.' I remember every day you'd go down to the junk store, take your thumb and stack on 45s, as many as you could hold on one thumb, and flip through 'em looking for Dot, Chess, King, looking for the different labels. Then you'd go through 'em all and say, 'Scratched? Broken? Nope!' Anything good? Take 'em home. Take 'em back to your house and listen to a hundred 45s a day. I listened to a lot of music like that."

Returning to his little alcove, Isaak crouches down and begins going through a wall of retro LPs, from the bottom up. How did he sink so deep into the sands of yesteryear? As a kid, he says, "I listened to the radio, but I realized that the radio didn't play what I wanted to hear. They never really can. I just was way, way out, out on my own. I didn't like radio. People I used to know in high school say, 'It's so funny that you're on the radio now--remember how you used to always turn the radio off?' We'd be out in a car with a bunch of kids, driving around, and I'd say, 'Turn the radio off! I don't wanna hear this!' They were playing awful music. I wanted to listen to Hank Williams." Isaak can chuckle about it in retrospect. "I was a total freak. Totally out there on my own. And I don't think anybody ever went to see anybody live, because nobody ever came to Stockton. People listened to tapes or the radio--it was a pretty limited choice.

"And it's funny, because only now do I start to listen to things that other people took for granted, music you should know. Like the group America. I don't know that stuff. I don't know '70s music, I don't know a lot of the '80s. I know some stuff that I like, hit and miss, on the radio. And some groups I know really well." He runs down a mental roster for a second, then gets wide-eyed and excited. "I know Filter! I like Filter! Richard, the singer from Filter--we just saw him in Chicago, and then we saw him again on Halloween. They're really cool guys, really hilarious, and he actually has good lyrics."

Some albums Isaak has pulled from mothballs: Rock And Roll Dance Party, Featuring Bill Haley and His Comets ("I thought it was worth a shot for ten cents"); Bill Haley and the Comets--Rockin' the Oldies ("His rhythm section was like a tank, a tank that could turn on a dime"); Where the Action Is '60s anthology ("You're not gonna find the singles on this anywhere"); Dick Dale and His Deltones-- Surfer's Choice ("I had this before the comeback!"); Nino Tempo and April Stevens ("They sounded like the Everly Brothers--he sang the high harmonies a lot of times and she sang the low ones"); and various other rareties from Ray Price, Turk Murphy, Johnny Horton, Herman's Hermits. There are, in fact, only two nods to relatively modern times--an old Holly and the Italians disc on Epic and Cat Stevens' teen-pleasing Teaser And The Firecat on A&M.

"Ah-hah!" Isaak barks. He's finally hit paydirt, dredged up the most glittering gem from his vault: The Key Boys, on Oasis Records (aka the Korean Beatles). "I wonder where the Key Boys are today?" he muses, staring at the mop-topped, matching-suited whippersnappers on the cover. "They do 'Ticket To Ride,' 'A Hard Day's Night, ' 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And look--the drummer's the cutup, see? Then there's the sexy one, the friendly one, the serious one, and the ambivalent one with the microphone who just likes to sing." Isaak puts the albums away, opens his drapes to reveal one helluva panoramic view of the sea (reason enough, you figure, to grab the boogie board and go just about any sunny day of the year), and pulls up a comfy chair.

Does this true believer wistfully look back on any bygone musical era? Isaak shakes his head. "Not really. I think that rock 'n' roll now is different, and some parts of it I remember fondly, but probably not the things that people might think. I wouldn't wanna be doo-wop or rockabilly right now. That'd get to be really boring, and we already had that kind of music. Somehow, you've gotta get past that onto something else. For instance, I think it's very interesting that Nirvana came about. I can see where it came from and I'm glad it happened. I'm glad that punk rock happened, too. God, that was a real necessity! I don't know if most people recall what things were like before punk rock--it was really square-sounding, horribly controlled stuff. We needed something to break it up. For me, with the kind of singing I like to do, anything that's built around singers--I like that kind of situation, I guess. But it would be awful boring to be doing it with some of the constraints that they had back then. There's a lot more freedom today."

Like a smoke alarm, Isaak's sense of humor is always switched on and pulsing. "Plus, as I understand it, certain people in the record business are getting paid today!" he deadpans. "Not me, particularly. But I've seen pictures of big houses and fancy cars--they show 'em to me every once in a while when I go to Warners." But his Orbison- evocative, subdued-rockabilly efforts--starting with his ethereal '85 debut Silvertone, through his haunted but sultry breakthrough single, "Wicked Game" ('90), to last year's thematic masterpiece, the all-heartbreak Forever Blue --are no joke, no revivalist novelty acts. When Isaak and his remarkably empathic producer Erik Jacobsen make music, it's as serious--and studiously crafted--as it comes. And when he combed through the classics for Baja Sessions covers to pair with seven of his originals (including new stripped-down versions of "Dancin'," "Two Hearts," "Back On Your Side," and "Pretty Girls Don't Cry"), he didn't do it lightly.

" 'Yellow Bird,' " Isaak explains, "goes way back for me. I heard that when I was a kid--my parents had the single by Lawrence Welk, and one one side was 'Cruising Down the River' and on the other was 'Yellow Bird.' " There was just one problem: " 'Yellow Bird' had this really bitchin' arrangement, but it didn't have any lyrics. And I always wanted to sing it--I'd play it on the guitar and hum the melody. And then I found out that the Norman Luboff choir had a version with some lyrics." Problem number two: "The lyrics kinda sucked. So we took the best lyrics and put together our version, and I was really happy with my band [bassist Rowland Salley, guitarist Hershel Yatovitz, drummer Kenney Dale Johnson] when we got done with this record. I thought, 'I gotta pay these guys someday!' because everything we did on the record we cut without overdubs."

Baja Sessions wasn't recorded in Baja, nor was it written in--or about --the sun-drenched peninsula getaway. It was rehearsed in Baja, simply because the bandleader wanted to get his crew to a sunnier, more inspiring clime. What he ended up with, at recording's end, was a soothing antidote to industrial/alternative mayhem, the ideal tape for a top-down twilight cruise through scenic California. "And it should be calming. It should be pretty," Isaak insists. "I don't hear very much music that's pretty or calming right now. And I thought, 'These are songs that I've known and sung for a long time,' and I kinda wanted to put together a package like that. Like, if you sat around my house and I was playing guitar, that's probably the kinda stuff I'd play. Plus Forever Blue was too dark, totally focussed, like, 'Please describe, as it's amputated, how your leg feels.' "

Sit around his house long enough, the Roy Orbison records are sure to be dragged out of the collection. Isaak has often remarked how, when he was young, Orbison's gorgeously sorrowful voice would let him know that there was another forlorn, misunderstood loser out there in the world. Ergo, it's no surprise that he hits every falsetto note of the vocally challenging "Only the Lonely." "And it was fun to try doing that. I had never done any of his stuff before, the reason being that I don't do a lot of Elvis, Beatles, and certain things, even though those are a huge influence on me. You don't do a lot of it, because it's been done perfectly in my mind; it's not something you feel like you could add something to or improve. But the version we did of 'Only the Lonely' I felt happy with, because if we had done a full rock band with orchestra and four background singers, then I wouldn't have done it, because he already did that, and his voice was incredible on it.

"And 'Sweet Leilani' and 'South of the Border' were more pretty songs that I thought were appropriate as the album took shape. 'Sweet Leilani' means a lot to me. There was a 78 of it in Stockton when I was a kid at, I think, the Hardingway junk store, Bing Crosby's killer version. And I remember getting the 78 and walking around the store with it in my hand and not buying it because it was a buck. And I didn't have a buck. I had 63 cents, so I walked around for two, three hours until the store closed, thinking, 'If they don't sell it today, I can come back and buy it tomorrow.' " Even as an adult, he still winces at the sting of it all. "I came back the next day and it was gone!"

For the layman, the key to understanding Isaak is realizing how much of a synthesis he is, a melting pot of every single one of those thrift-shop 45s. His sleek, Presley-pitched tenor. The hushed, Everlys-jangled chords he wrings out of his arsenal of archaic hollowbodied axes. How much history has he assimilated? Listen to "I Wonder," one of Isaak's new Baja compositions. The lilting shuffle of a melody, the gentle brushstroked drums, a fluid but firmly restrained vocal, and a strangely grim and moody lyrical outlook. It's pure deja-vu Orbison when Isaak murmurs "When I was younger I believed that dreams came true/ Now I wonder/ 'Cause I have seen much more of dark skies than of blue." Its author knows the song is special.

"That's the best piece of work on there," Isaak sighs. "And I like its lyrics--to me, it's where I am right now. Which, after the last album, isn't that you're better yet, but you're looking around at where you are in life. The 'Believed that dreams came true' line--I keep on searching for the old me, looking for the way I used to feel, and you keep on thinking 'I can change, I can change myself.' But at a certain point in life you've gotta go 'Am I ever gonna change? Am I ever gonna get it figured out who I am?' " What else can you do, he concludes, but write more music and keep on wondering about it.

Isaak is resting his injured leg (he pulled a muscle surfing) on a big rubber ball, given to him for limbering pre-cawabunga stretches. "But in actuality, my niece comes over here and throws it," he sighs, kicking it into a corner and heading back into the living room for a final tour through his museum. "It's a game we play--she throws it, and I say, 'Don't!' And guess who wins?" More shelves are lined with over a dozen Bammies. "I won five last year, an embarrassing amount," he humbly assesses.

Recalling again the meeting with Pat Boone, he's forced to conclude, "Life is just so nice! Pat was at my Halloween show, then later on people were telling me that Rick James was there too with a couple of beautiful women on his arm, and Kelly Slater, the world's surf champion was there as well. I thought that was one full house of fun."

Outside the window, waves beckon. Isaak is anxious. Pulled muscle or not, he's diving back in as soon as he can. But there's one piece of the puzzle missing. When did the gawky Stockton misfit switch from collecting music to playing it onstage? Isaak thinks about this one for a bit before responding. "Like a lot of kids, I put a big separation between me and the people I really liked. I had a real kind of respect, and I thought, 'Those people are professionals. I don't know how to write songs, wouldn't know how to make a record.' It was a big, awe-inspiring thing.

"So the only thing I can think to tell people is that, yes, there are people who are really into it, really driven by it. But making records isn't difficult, and it's not unattainable." And one final Isaak-droll gag before he hangs ten: "Any idiot can do it, and I can prove that!"

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