Chris Isaak - Goofball Romantic

The Alienated Lonely Lovesick Isolation of Chris Isaak A Lost Poet Adrift From His Own Beginnings - Like Otis In Mayberry

Musician Magazine
June 1993
by Chris Willman

Chris Isaak had a dream one night last year that he can't shake. It was a vision of such contentment as to make every conscious moment anticlimactic and dreary in its wake. His dream didn't involve untold riches laid out in small, unmarked denominations. Nor did it star the cooing background chick singers from "Wicked Game" showing up on his front doorstep with a dozen buck-naked friends as a birthday surprise. It wasn't a bedside visitation from Elvis, Ricky and Roy to bestow their providential blessing on his career. It wasn't about finding the lost tremolo chord or accidentally stumbling across God's own room for reverb. There were no dwarves talking backwards in a red-curtained room. "No," Isaak recounts, steadily and earnestly, "my dream was weird." In the dream he was 15 again, back in his hometown of Stockton, California, riding his bike with the baseball glove hanging from the handlebars like it always did. Down at the local park the boys were waiting. The afternoon was sunny. The dream was a period piece, set in that era in everyone's life when moments are connected by the soft tissue of sweet anticipation and there's so little of the bone-scraping, arthritic agony that follows. "I was so happy in the dream," Isaak says. "The dream is that feeling where you're just so happy, no worries, no business, things haven't gone wrong yet. And you wake up and you say to yourself, 'Well, I'm not that, but I do have all these other things'--"

Certainly, Chris. You've sold millions of records maintaining a strict musical integrity when the experts said it couldn't be done. You made the radio safe for pop classicism again. You're on your way to becoming a movie star. Your record company renegotiated your contract to give you a sweeter deal. People magazine named you one of the world's most beautiful people. Guys everywhere want to steal your perfect hair and your cool jackets and girls want to eat your flesh. Life doesn't get much more--

"--And then I thought to myself, 'Aw, I'd trade it.' If I could be 15 and going to play baseball down in the park, I would trade all that stuff."

Chris Isaak has a talent for irony, but when he comes to longing--as he does here, and as he often does in his music--not even the tip of a tongue gets lodged in his well-chiseled cheek. As close as a stranger can come to it, anyhow, this is the real Isaak: hardboiled cynic, lost naif. Such romantic dualism is a large part of his appeal, and the part of his personality that suggests that success will never really alter his moods. There will always be the high school sweetheart who got away to inspire a beyond-lonesome lament, the junior high ballgame he can't quite pedal his way to before the alarm clock goes off for that early shoot with Lynch or Bertolucci. As long as the things you convince yourself you want most are safely under glass in that most irretrievable place, the past, then you've got a potentially limitless supply of, as Dale Cooper might say, damn good song fodder.

"I think what makes people romantic is that they have a lot of longing for things that are gone, or for things that they don't think will ever really come to pass. And that can be where I'm coming from, thinking about those things that were so beautiful about that town growing up and stuff that I really do miss. And I would give anything if I could go back. I mean, really go back.

"But it's not good to think about things like that," he announces suddenly, perhaps stricken by the severity of his yearnings. "That's what got Oskar Werner in trouble in Farenheit 451. Remember?"

There's something definitely Lynchian--as in David Lynch, who used Isaak's music in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and directed him as an actor in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me--about the singer's wistful middle-Americanisms. With Lynch, it's impossible to tell for sure how much of the obsession with innocence lost is an affectation and what's heartfelt. But Isaak comes by his nostalgic covetousness honestly, unless he's putting on the world's greatest suckers' act.

We meet up at Isaak's favorite hangout, an inexpensive, out-of-the-way dinner spot in the place the singer has made his adult home, San Francisco's quiet Sunset District.

"Any dessert?" asks the terribly sweet waitress, as the other last remaining patrons file out, leaving us in a lonely but well-lit "Nighthawks at the Diner"--style tableau while the town rolls up outside.

"Nothing for me, I'm okay," Isaak tells her. "Gotta lose 100 pounds."

The waitress does a pretty good double take, falling easily into her role as foil. She knows this leather jacket-, pink shirt-wearing guy's a card; hell, the goofball's eaten here some 200 times in the past year alone, by his estimation. Quite an accomplishment, considering that two months out of said year were spent in the Far East, acting in the movie Little Buddha with the esteemed director Bernardo Bertolucci. Before that, Isaak spent long, happy stretches holed up in a recording studio just a short bike-ride from here, where--when he wasn't playing hooky during technical setups by pedaling a few blocks to the ocean to go surfing--he recorded his fourth album, San Francisco Days, his first release in almost four years.

The habit-forming qualities that would move Isaak to cheerfully chow down at the same glorified diner nearly every evening are well in evidence on the record, too. No radical stylistic departures here: Unwavering to the core, Isaak isn't the type to have taken the surprise mass success of his last album as some sort of mandate to branch into previously unexplored avenues of pop. Then again, neither has he tried to reprise that success by coming up with an entire LP's worth of "Wicked Game" clones. "Can't Do a Thing to Stop Me" (the first single) is the sole number with that familiar haunting groove, complete with an impossibly soft, reach-out-and-taunt-someone female backing chorus.

Within the reliable neo-roots rut he's spent years making uniquely his own, though, San Francisco Days probably does offer more track-to-track variety than any of Isaak's previous long players. The title track is smoother 'n silk, with kind of a Glen Campbell vibe. ("I'll take that as high praise," Isaak says at the suggestion, breaking into a verse of "Wichita Lineman.") "Round and Round," conversely, is a fast, sleazy blues. There's a countrified tune and an acoustic ballad or two and plenty of rockabilly to go around. What it all has in common, besides Isaak's perfect, plaintive croon, is timelessness--of a sort connected to a specific era, mind you--and, inevitably, lonesomeness. Of course, it all sounds very pretty.

"Some of the stuff now that I hear, the drum is really complicated or it's a machine drum and it's the loudest thing on the record. That doesn't move me much, " Isaak says. "I like hearing drums, but I want to have the voice on top. Like my grandmother's friends are always telling me"--he feigns impending decrepitude--"Can't hear the voice. How come the voice isn't up loud? I can't hear what you're saying."

Old Fartiness aside, he's serious. "Like Bing Crosby or Roy Orbison or the Ink Spots, anything that I like has gotta have some pretty edge to it. To me, it seems like if you're gonna be a guy who prepares food, the number-one thing is, does it taste good? With music, does it sound good? Is it pleasant? Does it make you have a nice feeling?

"Sometimes I read all these things, people talking about what it means." A slightly disdainful pause. "It's pop music, man."

While Isaak's ambitions may seem simple, his methodology is painstaking. Studio work on San Francisco Days commenced three years ago, only to be rudely interrupted by the story of Isaak's success. When he began in 1990, his previous album, Heart Shaped World, had already been out for a year and a half and was with good reason presumed dead. Then the corpse started banging on the casket lid. After hearing the use of "Wicked Game" as an instrumental in a second-run showing of Lynch's Wild at Heart, an influential Atlanta program director went back to the station, pulled out the vocal version and put it into rotation. A nation of rock jocks soon followed suit. The single zoomed into the Top 5, while the better-late-than-never smash album soared past platinum status. And Isaak, finding himself called to the road to promote the resuscitated project on a hastily booked year-long concert tour, was forced by happy circumstance to perform an act of studius interruptus.

"It was like having the laundry call and say, 'We found a lottery ticket in your jacket, and oh, by the way, it's a winning number.' You know what I mean? You weren't even thinking about whether you were gonna win or lose at that point. I was worrying about the next record."

Erik Jacobsen, who's produced all of Isaak's records, points out that about half the songs for the fourth album had already been laid down in the wake of the apparent failure of the third. "But the big hit after 10 years of trying--to be interrupted with that was something we felt we could put up with. Actually it was great, because then there were a lot of expectations on us for the next record, and to have six great tunes already in our hip pocket gave us a real feeling of complacency."

The break was also fine by Isaak: "I think it's been pretty good for the record, because I had time to write more songs, and the ones that weren't as good I set away. It's gotten to be kind of a greatest-hits."

Though they may not be evident to the ear of the casual Top 40 listener, there were a few new wrinkles during the recording of Days. The album's chock-full of keyboards, especially vintage organs, from the majestic Hammond B-3 to the classically cheesy Farfisa, played mostly by Jimmy Pugh (of Robert Cray's band), about whom Isaak can't wax ecstatic enough. There's also a little less of lead-guitar sidekick James "Jimmy" Calvin Wilsey, supplanted to some degree by country hotshot Danny Gatton, not-so-spring-chickenish country steel player (and ex-Buckaroo) Tom Brumley and, most surprisingly, Isaak himself.

Of Isaak's one-man dirty blues jam at the tail end of "Round and Round," relates Jacobsen, "I heard somebody say it was the best thing Jimmy ever played--which made Chris feel good. He really burned on that sucker. But don't forget Chris played the acoustic guitar on 'Blue Spanish Sky.' He's played some great shit over the years, but he just had a little more chance this time and we wanted to do it consciously. You want to have Jimmy on there, and he's a great part of the sound and the success of the whole thing, but as long as he was on every tune, that didn't really give Chris a chance to do something on his own."

It's no secret Isaak and Jacobsen have used studio players on every album to supplement the crack touring unit. What's less known is the extent to which they employ every tool of musical science know to modern man to get a sound that essentially evokes the '50s. They may like the old records better than what's coming out now, but they're far from purists in their approach to arriving at the feel they're after.

"On the one hand, half of the record was made with no separation in the recording whatsoever and no earphones, just playing live in the studio with Chris lip-synching, with all the leakage. Half of it's like that. And on the other half of it we have just totally computerized and sampled. Yeah, we used every trick in the book. Who wouldn't?"

Maybe we need to turn the hearing aid up, then: Where are some of these myriad fakeries on the record?

"I don't even want to talk about what's sampled," says Jacobsen, who prior to Isaak was most famous for producing the Lovin' Spoonful's hits. "We had an Akai sampler in there and made all our own samples. If you would say, 'I noticed it on this song or that song,' I would just say, 'I take the Fifth.' But we use everything there is. It's not a foregone conclusion that anything that's on the computer sounds shrill or doesn't feel right. It's just like a player that's there with great time, on one level...We wanted it to be like an analog record. That said, we immediately jumped into digital, you know what I mean?

"It's a total case of two perfection-minded guys. Both of us know what we think a good job is and we don't fool ourselves. We're retentive in every way."

Isaak had an older brother who turned him on to Hank Williams records at a precocious age. But the Silvertone radio that used to sit in his bedroom became his private turntable, thanks largely to the unhealthy hours he kept. Instead of doing his homework, he'd stay up till four or five in the morning listening to the local all-night oldies show. Since he seemed to be the only one in sleepy Stockton cogent enough at that hour to be safely operating the controls of a rotary telephone, his requests always got played.

"I'd always think, 'Just 20 minutes more.' I called up and requested stuff like Jan and Arnie, before they were Jan and Dean. Remember that song they did, 'Gas Money'? 'Well if you really want to go, you better come up with some dough, I need some gaaas money.' I heard that at four in the morning and I'm going, 'Yeah!' Listening to the Orbison stuff was really cool like that. It was my way of making contact with some other knucklehead someplace. In Stockton, you don't know what else is going on, but you hear this music and you really feel like there's somebody else out there who has some kind of shared feeling. And from there on it gets poetic and heavy, but there is some kind of big communication going on there. That's why I guess so many people like this stuff."

Isaak kept a writing tool ready by the bedside, to mark the name of key songs for future thrift- store tracking. "Everybody else at school used to listen to modern pop music. I had a stack of 78s and oddball things like Hawaian records. It was so fun to find those things. You hear a record and it's like you got a message from 30 years ago that maybe nobody else has heard in years, and nobody you mention it to knows that record, and yet it made contact with you--boom-- one one one, it totally moves you. What a fantastic feeling that is."

At the time he had no inclination toward being a rock star or even just bottling his own messages. When he did catch the performing bug, moving to San Fransisco after post-Stockton detours studying at the University of the Pacific and boxing in Japan, he says he was "embarrassingly naive" about what entertaining entailed in real life: "I went into biker bars when I first started off, and I would sing romantic ballads. I thought you could do that because in the movies, Elvis would go in and sing a romantic ballad and the place would quiet down. I had never been in bars before and didn't understand how the whole thing works."

Understanding, and experience, haven't affected his lifestyle much. For one thing, Isaak's never even sampled drugs: "I don't do marijuana or cocaine or any of that stuff, and I never have. It's not a big deal to me--I didn't pick my band members and give 'em a drug test. Some of those guys drink a lttle beer or something, but they're pretty straight. You don't want people messed up around you when you're trying to work."

The first night he ever fronted a band in San Francisco, Isaak recalls, anxiety inspired each player to get plastered, except himself: "I thought, 'If I go out and get drunk, I'll be drinking every night I play. And I plan on playing a lot.' So I didn't, and I was nervous as all hell. And then I realized, your'e supposed to be nervous. It's not natural to stand in a spotlight in front of 300 people and sing. So go ahead, be nervous, just live with that...

"Although," he adds, quick to be reasonable, "I do consume over 15 to 20 bottles of cough syrup a day. But I have a real bad cough, okay?"

If fellow Bay Area-type Huey Lewis hadn't already blown it by making it square to be hip to be square, Isaak would surely have a socially acceptable lock on this New Traditionalism. Even now, he maintains, "I'm still a hick in so many things. I make big mistakes." He tells of being out to eat with Lynch and some Hollywood types, and of asking an honest question about the tiny food portions and having everyone laugh because they thought it was oh that Chris, being a card again.

Not that he seems a bit insecure about such faux pas. Not when he tells you that mass acceptance hasn't raised his self-esteem or healed his inner child all that much because "my mom always liked the records. Serious, every time we made a record, I'd play it for my mom, and I would trust what she'd think. And I always had a lot of fun. I make more money if there's more people, but if there's 50 people or 5000, the fun is about the same."

Isaak's self-effacing shtick comes off credibly, but there are just enough stray quirks and weirdnesses poking out from under the edges of his rube rap that he still doesn't quite strike you as the natural byproduct of Mayberry.

"I'm like Otis," he retorts, deadpan. "A lost, lonely poet, adrift from his own beginnings."

The looks thing is a less comfortbable topic. Isaak is profusely apologetic about the famous Rolling Stone tank-top beefcake cover shot of a couple years back, which he says he did at the end of a long photo shoot under duress in order not to offend the photographer. And he continues to insist that he looks "goofy, a lot of people do, so I don't worry about it. I comb my hair nice and wear clean clothes and stuff, so that helps to make me presentable. But before anybody saw me singing or on a magazine, nobody ever made any big deal. I didn't notice girls coming out of the woodwork. And I don't look any different now than I did then."

Jacobsen has a spin on Isaak's almost exaggeratedly humble persona: "I think maybe what you're sensing is a guy who's not afraid to act like he always wanted to act--a guy who really is just not taken with himself, and maybe a guy trying to make a conscious attempt not to be taken with himself. He didn't just get handsome yesterday; he wasn't just a star yesterday--he's been a star in San Francisco for 10 years, and he was king of France with a big hit there six years ago. He's more concerned with the type of job that he does on his work. That's what he lives for, really. What more could you ask for?"

What indeed? "I'm not Mister Zen about guitar," Isaak says, "but I'm pretty much focused in on what I do. You can still have your personal relationships. But you gotta be careful letting your personal life get in the way of your guitar playing. Don't want to let that hang you up, man. It's called priorities."

But doesn't finding the winning lottery ticket in your laundry shatter the mood required to write song after song of unrequited desire and alienation, lovesickness, loneliness, isolation?

"Being alone is always there for everybody," Isaak observes reassuringly, his stock in trade safe from stardom. "Being alone is always available. That's pretty easy."

KENNEY JOHNSON plays Pearl drums with Zildjian cymbals, Regal Tip 2BN sticks, Calato Blasticks and Remo drumheads. ROWLAND SALLEY plays a Modulus Graphite Basstar, GHS Boomers strings, a Boss TU12 tuner, an SWR SM400 amp, a Samson wireless system and two SWR Goliath bass cabinets. JIMMY WILSEY grooves on a Fender Strat and GHS Boomers strings, with help from his Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal effects pedal and Ernie Ball volume pedals, through an Alesis Quadraverb and a Fender Twin.

CHRIS ISAAK plays various Gibson guitars and Gibson strings through a Fender Twin. He is currently "between" microphones.

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