A Lighter Shade Of Blue

Live Magazine
November 1996
by Steve Pond

After the melancholy soul-searching of 'Forever Blue,' Chris Isaak heads south of the border and comes up with 'Baja Sessions'.

Chris Isaak, it is safe to say, knows his rock 'n' roll.

The cover photo on his first album, after all, copied a classic early shot of Elvis Presley. His band, Silvertone, was named after a vintage guitar. His early music was thick with the influences and attitude of '50s rockabilly, his hair thick with the grease of rockers gone by, his voice thick with the gorgeous loneliness of Roy Orbison.

And now that he's become a star with songs like "Wicked Game" and "Somebody's Crying", he continues to look and act the part. Sitting in his two-story house near the beach in San Francisco, he still wears his hair high and proud and his quietly rockin' duds with unaffected authority: black suede shoes, black jeans, a white T-shirt with no advertisements. He cradles a 1930s-era National guitar, a classic instrument celebrated on a Dire Straits album cover ('Brother in Arms'), in a Paul Simon lyric ("The Mississippi Delta/Was shining like a National guitar") and in the dreams of countless guitarists. And throughout the rest of his house, most of the distinctive touches are musical: the old Silvertone control box on a tabletop, the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, the stacks of CDs piled everywhere.

So when the subject of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame comes up, it's not surprising that Isaak wants to talk about it. What is surprising, though, is what he has to say.

"Pat Boone's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is he?" he asks, a frown on his face. He knows full well that Boone isn't, and probably never will be. "Then to hell with the whole thing," he says. "If Pat Boone ain't in, it ain't legit."

He gets out of his chair and walks to his dining room. Between the jukebox and his record collection, it doesn't look as if the room sees much dining. He pulls out half a dozen original Pat Boone albums, all lovingly stored in plastic liners.

"He had tons of No. 1 hits, sang great and represented a certain type of rock," he says. "It's a type of rock that people don't want associated with rock 'n' roll, because it ruins their merchandising. 'We're rebels. Buy your rebel T-shirt-it's $43.' But the reality of it is, Pat Boone is probably as responsible for rock 'n' roll having longevity as anybody, because he brought it to mainstream America."

He isn't finished. "And his strong work stands up. He was great at singing romantic ballads. Yeah, he wrote white shoes and he had a family. But to me, it's very unfair to say 'Oh, you don't exist, because we want to have a leather jacket in the lobby of the museum.'"

Take that, Hall of Fame. Isaak, who might have a chance of getting into the Hall himself someday, stops pacing. He sits down. He shrugs.

"But rather than curse the darkness, I should light a candle," says the guy whose definition or rock is a little more inclusive than some other people's. "I think we should just start a movement to get Pat Boone into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I think I'll get T-shirts made with Pat Boone's picture, saying, 'LET ME IN.'"

But that's enough about Pat Boone. Chris Isaak, you see, may be a big fan-but after he spends about 10 minutes talking about Pat, he starts to worry. He doesn't want people to get the wrong idea. He doesn't, you understand, want this article to be all about Pat Boone.

Besides, Chris doesn't have much in common with Pat.

Does he?

Well, he is clean cut. He doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, hasn't even smoked a joint in his whole life. He's not married (deduct a couple of Pat points there), but he did hire his mom to furnish his house (give back those points, and then some).

And then there's his new album, 'Baja Sessions.' It's an album of ballads, of mellow love songs and quiet arrangements. It includes new, relaxed versions of some old Isaak songs but also a handful of tunes your parents might have listened to: "Yellow Bird", "Sweet Leilani", "South of the Border", "Return to Me." Songs made famous by Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, Dean Martin. Crooner's songs, not rockers' songs. (There's one rock hit, but it's "Only the Lonely" by Orbison, the crooningest rocker ever.)

But it's not a Pat Boone album, and Chris Isaak isn't Pat Boone, and that's the last you're gonna hear about it. Chris Isaak, instead, is a 40-year-old rock 'n' roller of inclusive, expansive tastes, a guy for whom music is all-encompassing. Go back to that jukebox, or look at the CDs on the floor or neatly alphabetized on shelves, and you'll get a better idea of where he's coming from.

This afternoon, his CD player is playing an anthology of music by John Barry, the film composer best known for the James Bond theme. On a shelf near the door is a compilation of surf music, on the floor beneath it is a box of Hawaiian 45s. Scattered around the room are CDs by Eydie Gorme with the Mexican group Los Panchos, by the Big Three (Mama Cass Elliott's obscure first group), by alternative-rock band Filter. The jukebox redefines eclectic: Louis Armstrong, Ornette Coleman, Joe Tex, Los Tres Caballeros, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the Beatles, Abba, Rosemary Clooney. "There's a piano break in the middle of 'Come On-A My House' that is just, like, psychotic," he says.

"I like fooling around with a lot of different ideas, different music," he adds unnecessarily. "Otherwise you pretty quickly run out of anything new. So you take Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Connie Francis and Nino Tempo, and blend that with a little Nirvana and a little bit of Filter and a little Radiohead. If you don't, it's like saying, 'I just like barbershop quartets.' Well, that's great, but after three or four years, aren't you gonna get worn out?"

He grins. "Speaking of which, I do like barbershop quartets. I just ordered a bunch of records, because they've got these great harmonies. You're not gonna do a whole album like that, but someday you might come to the point where you need a harmony. And if you've been listening to that stuff, then it'll be there."

On a clear day, Chris Isaak can see the ocean from the living room window. There aren't too many clear days in San Francisco, of course, but that doesn't discourage him; every morning he gets up, grabs the pair of binoculars that sit near his sliding glass door and looks out to see the condition of the surf. If it's decent (or sometimes if it's not), he grabs his board and his wet suit and heads for the beach, 10 blocks away.

This is San Francisco's Sunset district, an area that runs just south of Golden Gate Park and stretches from the celebrated Haight-Ashbury to the Pacific Ocean. Most guidebooks either ignore or dismiss the Sunset, which is almost entirely residential, comprising block after block of two-story row houses built just after World War II that sold at the time for about $5,000 each. They've been known to fetch a hundred times that now, but it's still one of the city's more reasonable neighborhoods-and it suits Isaak, who likes it because he can walk to the market, to a couple of restaurants and to the woman who cuts his hair. She charges him $9-and no, she didn't hike her price when Isaak's hair became famous. In fact, she's only vaguely aware her client is a singer.

This is fame, Isaak style: cheap hair cuts, a modest house, a Chevy in the garage and secondhand '50s furniture his mother picked out after "Wicked Game" became a hit. He's affable, self-deprecating, glib, a little guarded; if he puts on an attitude, it's generally for comic effect. But then, you'd hardly expect him to bask in conspicuous, stereotypical stardom, because he didn't achieve it in a typical way.

Isaak grew up in Stockton, an arid farming town an hour inland from the Bay Area. His parents were music fans, as a child, he remembers buying stacks of used 45s for a nickel apiece. In his early 20s, he spent a year in Japan as part of an exchange program at the University of the Pacific; he served as a tour guide there and did some amateur boxing, but he also brought along his guitar and heard Elvis Presley's 'Sun Sessions' LP for the first time.

"It wasn't 10 guys playing, with overdubs," he says of the album, a compilation of the first recordings Elvis made for Sun Records. "There was just a stand-up bass, one electric guitar, one acoustic guitar and a little bit of brushes. And Elvis' voice. And as a kid who had just your garage to play in, you could say 'Gee, with my guitar and my voice, I can cop this sound.'"

He copped the sound first in Stockton, then in San Francisco, where he moved and formed Silvertone. He stuck out among the would-be stars who populated Bay Area clubs, but in a way, his Stockton-bred cluelessness helped. "I was so na�ve, it was almost embarrassing," he says. "I had no idea what musicians looked like, so I thought I should dress up in a suit. I looked so different that people remembered me."

Besides, the other musicians he met just weren't as driven. "They were chasing women and getting high, you know?" he says. "And I didn't really have a girlfriend, I didn't know anybody, I didn't have a job, and I played every gig I could get my hands on." He says he never did drugs and opted not to drink; he was focused on music, not women. "I don't remember a list of phone numbers on my wall," he says. "I remember a list of bass players."

By the early '80s, he'd gotten attention on the local scene; in 1985, he released 'Silvertone', his first record for Warner Bros. By then, the rockabilly affections had been replaced by a sound less derivative and more original; you could still hear where he was coming from, but it was also clear where he was going.

He learned some humbling lessons-one of them after he went on the radio and sang an old country tearjerker called "New Black Suit": "I have a new black suit in a box on a shelf/It's the first new suit I ever bought for myself/If it was blue or gray, I would think it a prize/But the new black suit brings tears to my eyes/Mama's dying and I just can't face the thought/How can I wear it, how can I bear it?/That new black suit I bought."

He performed the song tongue-in-cheek-"I kind of did it sarcastically, almost to comment on how smart-ass this whole thing was"--then visited the same show a year later. "This guy called up and said, 'You sang a song about a funeral on the show before. Do you remember that song?' I said, 'Yeah, I remember it.' And he said, 'You know, my mom heard the show. We were in the hospital, and she was dying of cancer, and it just brought her such relief and pleasure. It really spoke to her, and I wonder if you could play it again, because we never got a tape of it or anything.'"

Isaak's voice drops. "I played it real straight," he says softly. "And I thought to myself, 'Be careful that you know what the hell you're doing.'"

Despite the many predictions of impending stardom, and despite occasional airplay for songs like "You Owe Me Some Kind of Love" and the European hit "Blue Hotel," the first two Isaak albums didn't sell very well. Neither did the third, 'Heart Shaped World', until David Lynch used the instrumental track to one song in the movie 'Wild at Heart'. Deejays tracked down Isaak's version of "Wicked Game" and began playing it, and suddenly the year-old album had sold 2 million copies. The video also turned heads, landing Isaak on 'People' magazine's annual list of the 50 "most beautiful people."

Other than buy the furniture for his house, he didn't do much with the money. His next album, 'San Francisco Days,' was less successful, and then his personal life took a turn for the worse. In October 1993, his girlfriend of three years walked out. He was devastated, but between long sessions spent listening to the mournful country songs of the Mavericks, he found the time to write an album. 'Forever Blue', which came out in 1995, was a bluesy, rocking, desperately sad album-and a big seller than put Isaak back on the radio.

Some of it is echoed in 'Baja Sessions' as well. One of the last songs on 'Forever Blue' was "I Believe," in which an initially jaunty Isaak sang about hope: "I believe if we just trying it will be all right�/I believe in a beautiful day." Then the buoyant music stopped, and Isaak turned out the lights: "But not for me/ And not for you."

"I Wonder," from the new album picks up the story: "When I was younger I believed that dreams come true/But now I wonder." When he talks about the song, though, Isaak emphasizes the affirmation rather than the doubt. "I think anybody who's hung around in life a little bit could say, 'Yeah, I started off thinking everything was Disneyland,'" he says. "And at some point you get disappointed and start to wonder, 'Is any of this stuff going to happen for me?' I like that. It's guarded optimism. It's not saying that it's not going to happen. It's just saying, 'I wonder.'"

And that, in a way, is what passes for cheer in Isaak's world. "I'm kind of a downbeat guy," he admits. "That's just my personality. But I am happier now, I think. I don't look back and say, 'That didn't happen.' It happened, and it was a tough time, and I wish it would've never happened the way it did. But I can't change that."

Though he can change his romantic goals, at least for the time being. "After the last breakup, I vowed to keep it light for a while," he says, grinning. He pauses, then adds, "So my surfing has improved."

He remembers the dream vividly-it came while he was in Nepal, filming his part in Bernardo Bertolucci's 'Little Buddha.' The role was the biggest of a sporadic film career, Isaak has had small parts in 'The Silence of the Lambs,' 'Married to the Mob,' 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,' and Tom Hanks's 'The Thing You Do!,' but in 'Little Buddha' he had the central role of the Seattle businessman whose son is thought to be the reincarnation of a revered Buddhist teacher.

"They had me driving a Saab and wearing a suit," he says. "And my hair was cut short with no grease in it, and they'd blow-dry it, and it just looked very square. I looked in the mirror and thought, 'God, I look like a yuppie,' which I guess I was supposed to be. And I remember in the middle of the film, in Nepal, I had a dream that I was walking the main street in my hometown, looking into the pawnshop windows at guitars, and I had a bunch of grease in my hair. And I couldn't wait for that film to be done, to put grease in my hair and go, 'I'm a musician-all right?' I'm not a yuppie. I don't drive a Saab, I drive a Chevy.'"

So now Isaak is back to being a musician (though he won't rule out more movies). And once again, he's got grease in his hair. And he's rocking and rolling again-albeit gently, playing music that owes its inspiration to all of the records he likes, not just those old Elvis singles.

Or, more precisely, he's playing music that owes its inspiration to the beaches of the Baja peninsula in Mexico, where he cooked up the blend of covers, redone Isaak oldies and new songs that is 'Baja Sessions.' Initially, the plan had been to do an 'Unplugged'-style live album, but Isaak doesn't like live albums and didn't want to redo his best-known songs. So he talked the record company into sending him and his band to Baja.

"I said, 'I'm going to go down there to get the inspiration for an album,'" he says. "Mostly, I went down there and surfed, and Warner Bros. paid for it." He laughs. "Call it an vision, call it a scam."

Warners got some video footage out of it, and Isaak got an idea of what he wanted to do when he went back into a studio in San Francisco. "It's amazing, when you put yourself in the right setting, what songs all of a sudden come to mind," he says. "'Yellow Bird' is Jamaican, I think. 'Return to Me' is part Italian. 'South of the Border' is English, talking about Mexico. And yet they've all got this common ground: They seem like palm trees and the ocean would be a good background."

So he's gone from an album inspired by a heartbreak to one inspired by a vacation. "I'm getting smarter," he says simply. "The last one was good music for having broken up with somebody, probably. This is good music for being with somebody."

Isaak tries to think of what else to say about his new album, about his career, and he comes up short. In the end, he decides, it comes down to the basics-the same way he judges every piece of music on his shelves, in his jukebox, on his floor.

"There's no real story to this album," he says. "It's just me singing pretty songs, and I hope you like it. But isn't that what music is supposed to be? I mean, when you go out to a restaurant, you don't need a story with your dinner. All you want to know is does it taste good, and do you like it? That's what matters."

--Magazine note: "As a voter for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, senior writer Steve pond promises to cast his ballot for Pat Boone, should he ever be nominated."--

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