Chris Isaak - Prince of the Lonely Song

Infashion
Nov/Dec 1987
By Laren Stover

Maybe you don't know about this guy yet. His videos are rarely shown on MTV and he gets almost zilch radio play. But San Francisco-based Chris Isaak - accused of curling his lip like Elvis Presley and singing like his idol Roy Orbison, released his second LP, titled 'CHRIS ISAAK', this year, giving up two film roles(in Blue Velvet and Something Wild) to do so. Just finishing a U.S.Tour with the Thompson Twins, the down- to-earth,off-the wall Isaak, the Honeyed Crooner with the devastatingly blue eyes,has shown he has all the right stuff to be a megastar - everything, that is, but the pretense.

His toiletries bag is full of the idiosyncrasies that add a twist to his nearly iconographic retro style- plastic glow-in-the-dark rosary beads, a powder blue hair brush (the kind you'd expect a child to own) and a piece of cardboard holding a cluster of clips lined up much the way he wears them on his vintage ties or suit lapels. And if Chris Isaak were to have cologne in there-"Guys who work for pawnbrokers wear cologne," he scoffs. "Car salesmen wear cologne. Pimps wear cologne. Men don't wear cologne, they wash"-it would be that old time classic,Williams Lectric Shave. "I found a bottle once, from the 50's. It smelled pretty good. Shows you how classy I am," he says, smiling.

His sense of smell isn't too keen anyway, damaged, like his nose, while on a boxing scholarship in Japan (from the University of the Pacific). "They say your sense of smell is your best connection for memories and stuff. The strongest link. Mine's terrible," he says.

For Isaak, music is the strongest link to the past. "They were throwing out a big stack of records from the roller link where I skated as a kid and I got them all," Isaak,31, recalls. "They were 45's with this organ music and a little bit of drum and some other instruments. Real chintzy. And what I did was take a 45 and play it on 16 speed and it changed my life. I must have played it 150 times. All of a sudden, instead of being real bouncy it was real laconic."

Isaak's music is not laconic, but it hardly sounds like the bouncy, discofied top-10 stuff you usually hear on the radio - probably one of the reasons it rarely gets played. At first listening, most of Isaak's music could almost pass as genuine oldtime stuff. His music conveys the quality of old veneer, the sepia tone of fading photographs, but as much for the mood and texture of his voice as for the guitar. And, in a sense, the retro feel of the music is a veneer. There is a power to Isaak's singing, a strong contemporary rhythm section and a charm in his live performance that transcends time warps. Isaak's voice has a melancholy vibrato that comes from a place so pained and sincere- and sexy-it can give you goosebumps. When you listen to the lyrics of, say, "Blue Hotel," it's easy to see how he got the reputation for being lonely and tortured:

Blue hotel on a lonely highway
Blue hotel
Life don't work out my way
I wait alone each lonely night
Blue hotel...
Every room is lonely...
The night is like a lonely dream....

"The music is sad," says Isaak. "A lot of things are sad. Life is good to me and lots of things have happened that are positive. But I realized a long time ago that my complaints and most people's complaints in life aren't their situations. They're kind of attitude. And my attitude is, I guess, always going to be a bit tough on me, you know. There are certain things that I was brought up not to share-not to give-and I was also brought up to work a lot, and I guess that makes for a real lonely kind of existence in a way."

So there's something very moving about hearing Isaak's really up moments. "If you want to dance just come by and I'll put on Perez Prado. Vaughn Monroe is great. Or Tito Puente. Xavier Cougat. You'll be in dance heaven," Isaak says. "I have a whole den downstairs with cedar wood paneling, like from the 30's, and I turn up the music and I dance. I giggle and laugh like crazy and just have a ball down there dancing around alone."

Even Isaak's upbeat songs seem to get overlooked by journalists, although his wacky sense of humor is hard to miss. His onstage chatter is more inventive-more beat-than just about anyone's. He's as far out as you can get and still relate. He talks about furniture "made of bones-human bones," gossips about the band and does a corny Moslem prayer posture in addition to a sort of Chuck Berry duck walk he calls the Isaak Shuffle. In concert, Isaak couldn't be further from Elvis, to whom he's often compared. No hip gyrations here. A formal Isaak-his hair stays infuriatingly picture perfect, and his shiny '50's-style suit is made of a patterned fabric that recalls dresses from China- town-gently enchants the audience, slowly, almost shyly warming up to them.

"I think he's going to win more people over with his live performances than by just his records being played," comments Geoff Dugmore, the drummer who toured with the Thompson Twins, the band Isaak opened for the past two months. "He's very endearing live." Isaak is endearing because he does "get down" eventually, taking off his jacket to do a savage drum session. He even throws off his shoes, revealing socks that blow the whole retro look-they might be chartreuse,for example. He hasn't bought the good old days wholeheartedly, though his image does seem at times a slick, contrived one, from the dark gabardine suits his whole band, Silvertone, wears to his nifty sideburns and moderate pompadour hairdo.

"Image is something I use because I want people to understand what kind of music I make. I want them to enjoy the show-so I choose certain clothes and things to wear. It's show business. Yeah, it's like packaging. But I believe in that...All the people I always liked, Elvis, the Beatles, everybody had something. You know, the image should match the music. But aside from onstage, when I'm by myself, my clothes are just a wasteland and I don't have an image really. And if I weren't doing music, I would have hair about this long," Isaak says, holding up his thumb and index finger to indicate the length of a crewcut. "But," he adds, deadpan, flexing his ears, "I have the biggest ears in the world."

Isaak may threaten to quit singing and take up surfing but he's in demand for more than his music. Jonathan Demme, director of 'Swimming to Cambodia' and 'Something Wild,' among others, is talking with Isaak about a part in his next film. Of the type of role he'd like to play, Isaak says, "I don't want to be in there doing something nice. I like characters. People say, 'Oh, you want to play bad guys and heavies.' I don't want to play bad guys. I want to play people with high moralities who are misplaced."

Talking about misplaced people gets Isaak talking about his father, who went to prison on a "bum rap," and then Isaak gets to talking about his hometown, his family. He's been called a man out of time, and in a sense that's true. In a time that pushes digitally and supersonically toward the future, when family ties are transient and fragile, Isaak's reverence for his hometown of Stockton, California, and his closeness to his parents and two older brothers seems decidedly old-fashioned.

"There are things about my hometown that I'll never be able to explain. They run real deep," he says. "My grandfathers and great-grandfathers are from there and there's a million stories and a million places. And even when I think about it now it kills me that I have to be away for a whole summer of my life."

His mother has kept his bedroom in their Stockton home exactly as he designed it. "This is my ceiling," Isaak says, pointing to a girlie photo collage photographed by Bruce Weber for an Italian magazine. "It's all posters and pictures of women and all kinds of little things. And that's one of the tables downstairs. Everything is like this. Just covered with stuff. "And see," he says, pointing to childhood photos on the table, "that's my older brother Nick. And that's Jeff and that's me. I look like a little angel."

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