Chris Isaak - Surfing in the Rain

Christopher Joseph Isaak was born in 1956 in Stockton, surf country, to a factory-worker father and a mother who worked as a waitress and hailed from Liguria. He had a brief past as a boxer, a career that left him with his trademark flattened nose; naturally a surf enthusiast, a pastime he celebrates on nearly all his records; a friend of directors like David Lynch and Jonathan Demme; but, above all, a great lover of sleep: around the time of his first and only Italian concert, in the early 90s, interviewed by Videomusic he confessed to sleeping more than twelve hours a day! A fundamentally solitary figure, calm and quiet, far from the spotlight, despite a parallel career as an actor and TV personality. And, perhaps because of his somewhat easy-going charm, tremendously underrated by critics, who have often dismissed him as a mere imitator of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, his two musical idols, accusing him of a lack of originality.

The musical imagination that shaped Chris Isaak is that of a typical, good-natured American boy, made up essentially of Elvis posters, Dean Martin films, Roy Orbison 45s, and Bo Diddley concerts. A world whose most melancholy and solitary aspects he has often captured and evoked. His lyrics overflow with lines like "I still love you", "I miss you", "She's gone" and all the usual motel rosary of Heartbreak, but never more than in his case does what Umberto Eco said about "Casablanca" ring true: "One cliché makes us smile, a hundred clichés move us". It is by reciting such a mantra of pop-song commonplaces that Isaak has at times managed to reach those "October countries" where nostalgia turns into cosmic unease.

The Eighties

After graduating from college and spending a period studying in Japan, in the early '80s Chris Isaak formed what would become the only band of his career, namely the Silvertones, made up of lifelong friends who are, to this day, still at his side as his backing band. All except for the invaluable guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, a disciple of Hank "Shadows" Marvin and previously bassist for the Avengers (one of the most influential Californian punk bands), whose razor-sharp style would leave a deep mark on the sound of Isaak's early albums.

A demo featuring "Gone Ridin'" – the manifesto song of the first phase of his career, the one most rooted in rockabilly – earned Chris Isaak a contract with Warner Bros. Records, who saw in him a potential new Elvis (the photo shoots from that period also played up the resemblance).

In 1985 Silvertone was released, the debut album by this mysterious singer so shamelessly vintage, who sings falsetto like Roy Orbison while also possessing the languor of Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" and the sensual charge of Elvis the Pelvis. At the very same time Nick Cave was metaphorically digging up the corpse of Elvis's dead twin brother, the far more well-mannered and hygienic Isaak was content simply to conjure the King's ghost on a suspended, haunted rock'n'roll record, bringing to life a gloomy Twilight Zone ruled by nostalgia and loneliness. The titles of a few songs are enough to convey the mood: "Voodoo", "The Lonely Ones", "Unhappiness", "Tears", and above all the programmatic statement "Funeral In The Rain".

The overall sadness is only offset by a couple of surf numbers ("Livin' For Your Lover" and "Pretty Girls Don't Cry"), the only relaxed, sunlit moments in a record otherwise dominated by dark, spectral tones (the trio of "Voodoo", "Funeral In The Rain" and "The Lonely Ones" is anthology material in this respect). A practically perfect debut, impressive for Isaak's ability to conjure up enormously evocative atmospheres in songs that all hover around the three-minute mark. The band backing him is every bit his equal, with guitarist James Calvin Wilsey standing out, deftly ranging across rock'n'roll, surf, country and western moods.

Critics are pleasantly struck, but the same can't be said of the public, who give the album the cold shoulder, condemning it to commercial failure. After all, the rockabilly revival, rather fashionable in the early '80s thanks to bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters (not to mention the crucial contribution of the Cramps in reviving the genre), had already fired its last shots; Isaak and his band thus seem to have arrived just a little too late.

Warner Bros. is even ready to tear up the contract, but providentially John Fogerty himself steps in (having particularly loved the record), and thanks to him the Californian singer is given a second chance. Another person to take notice of him is one of the greatest living admirers of Roy Orbison, namely David Lynch, who decides to use two tracks from Silvertone ("Gone Ridin'" and "Livin' For Your Lover") in his "Blue Velvet". For Chris, it's the start of a fruitful collaboration with the director from Missoula, one that will continue in the years to follow.

The failure of the debut doesn't discourage Isaak, who tries again a year later with a self-titled album even more obsessive in its depiction of a world of broken hearts, unmade beds and lonely hotel rooms (“Blue hotel/ On a lonely highway/ Blue hotel/ Life don’t work out my way/ I wait alone each lonely night”, from "Blue Hotel").

Chris Isaak is his most guitar-driven, steely and brisk album, with a few light psychedelic touches (as in the slow, hypnotic build of "Fade Away"). A ride with the headlights off in the night between nocturnal rock'n'roll and dreamy ballads. Musically, it only catches its breath – though never lyrically – in the usual tributes to surf sounds.

The only light in the night is the little pop window of "This Love Will Last", one of the most hidden gems in Isaak's songbook. On an album that suffers only a slight dip in tension toward the end, the opening trio of songs is memorable, including a cover of the Yardbirds' "Heart Full Of Soul", which Isaak makes so completely his own that it sounds indistinguishable, stylistically, from the rest of his output.

Sales begin to look encouraging – thanks to the success of "Blue Hotel", Chris Isaak goes platinum in France – and positive reviews pile up: a small cult following starts to form around the ex-boxer.

1989 is the year of Heart Shaped World. The album featuring "Wicked Game", the song that would brand his career forever, is more varied than the previous two. Wilsey's enchanted guitar interplay binds Isaak's various sides under a single magical atmosphere, sides that otherwise seem to live separate lives, splitting between frothy surf-rock numbers, blues steeped in sweaty sensuality (the album closes with an irresistible, ironic voodoo suite, in which our man almost seems to be poking fun at certain Jim Morrison impersonators), and morbid ballads. The latter are obviously the house specialty, and here they form a chilling royal flush: the gripping title track, the suicidal-truckers mood of "Kings Of Highway", the hypnotic depression of "Nothing's Changed", the blues-tinged fatalism of "Wrong To Love You", the Tim Buckley-esque shipwreck of "Blue Spanish Sky", and of course the already mentioned "Wicked Game": unique, dreamlike, enveloping, a classic, the kind of song that comes along once in a million.

It's only when David Lynch uses the instrumental version of "Wicked Game" in the soundtrack to "Wild at Heart" that radio stations take notice of the song. The rest is done by the now-legendary video (which, in 1991, would take home three MTV Video Music Awards), shot by photographer Herb Ritts with then-reigning supermodel Helena Christensen, an inexhaustible source of forbidden dreams for an entire generation of young men. For Isaak, this is fame, certified by his first greatest-hits collection, Wicked Game, released in 1990, whose only new track is the aforementioned instrumental, and which, logically, would go on to become his best-selling record of all time. And, all things considered, it still works well as a calling card for the singer.

The Nineties

For his first album as a bona fide star, Isaak shuffles the deck a little, softening the sound and diluting his fiery sadness into a milder melancholy.

San Francisco Days, released in April 1993 and dedicated to the memory of sound engineer Louie Beeson, is a tribute to '60s pop (non-psychedelic) San Francisco. From its deliberately cheap-looking artwork onward, the record presents itself as a collection of diverse songs that, starting with the hook-laden pop of the title track, survey the city's musical imagination, moving through the usual surf-rock moments, acoustic ballads, blues-inflected jams, muted rhythms, country pop, Latin-tinged influences, and exotica atmospheres.

The ex-boxer also takes on Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man", strips away its Las Vegas glitz, and turns it into a heartfelt ballad all his own.

This is a period in which Chris Isaak intensifies his parallel film career, appearing in Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Innocents" (the director who had already given him his debut, in a small role, in the ironic comedy "Una vedova allegra… ma non troppo"), as FBI agent Chester Desmond in "Fuoco cammina con me" (the prequel to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks"), and above all, in a leading role, in Bernardo Bertolucci's "Piccolo Buddha".

Halfway through the decade, James Calvin Wilsey leaves the band. Left without a lead guitarist, Isaak turns out his most acoustic, least arranged album, one that strikes the right balance between the lighter mood of the previous record and the torments of his early albums.

Thematically, Forever Blue is an album literally obsessed with loneliness, a sort of "Spoon River" of dead love affairs. The record opens with the sly menace of "Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing" (which Stanley Kubrick would use in a key scene of "Eyes Wide Shut") and closes with the serenity of the suicide in "The End Of Everything", with eleven tracks of top-notch songcraft in between.

Even in the rare moments when the tempo picks up – like in the catchy "Somebody's Crying", a fairly successful single, or in the sweeping "Go Walking Down There" and "Goin' Nowhere", with our man's voice front and centre – the setting is always that same desolate landscape of empty beaches, dying bonfires and treacherous mirrors in hallways. Intuitions that would go on to anticipate the distinctive style later claimed by Lana Del Rey.

For the following Baja Sessions, released a year later, new guitarist Hershel Yatoviz enters the picture, more refined and less abrasive than his predecessor. The fine-tuning of the renewed band results in an evocative acoustic collection, blending older tracks reworked in softer, more relaxed versions, elegant vintage covers (Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Roy Orbison, old-time country, traditional Hawaiian songs) and just three tentative new tracks. A charming, soothing, languid record that celebrates "a place called Baja – more cactus than people", as Isaak himself describes it in a liner note.

In what was probably an attempt to update his sound and escape his own clichés, two years later Isaak sets aside some of the nostalgic, old-time moods and tries a more modern approach, while still working with his usual stock of old-school rock'n'roll and ballads. The main point of reference seems to be Tom Petty and his adult-oriented folk-rock, with a touch of the dreamier R.E.M. (the gorgeous "Black Flowers").

Speak Of The Devil is his most contemporary, nocturnal and urban record, the one that in a sense sounds most "normal". It takes a while to get going, stalling on "Breaking Apart" (a syrupy power ballad, the worst thing Isaak ever wrote, and yet he'd still be trotting it out on his 2009 album), but from the blazing title track onward the album finds the right gear, taking the listener on a small black-and-white journey through turn-of-the-millennium America. The instrumental closer "Super Magic 2000", à la Tarantino, complete with gunshots and whistling bullets, is both meaningful and bitterly prophetic.

The 2000s

From 2001 to 2004, with his usual heavy doses of self-mockery, Isaak plays himself in a fun and successful cable TV sitcom, "The Chris Isaak Show" (which also aired here in Italy on Rai Due in the dead of night). The commitment slows his already relaxed recording pace down even further.

In the midst of his new television venture, the Californian singer nonetheless finds the time to record Always Got Tonight. The glossy extreme close-up of the artist on the cover mirrors the content: crowd-pleasing pop. Likely seeking a middle ground between the radio-friendly sound of the previous record and songs with a more recognisable style, Isaak instead turns out an album with no real character. This time around, class is more a matter of empty elegance than genuine charm, and rather than working his clichés to his advantage, for once he seems to fall victim to them. This is especially true of the arrangements, where he bends his signature sound to a certain radio-friendly blandness.

At its best moments it almost sounds like a Bangles record, but without their infectious cheerfulness. On the whole, the material is as pleasant as it is unremarkable. The folk-rock of "Courthouse" and the fake remix of "Notice The Ring" stand out as redeeming moments, the latter probably the most modern song Isaak ever recorded. It's no coincidence that, in the end, the only truly memorable moment is the saddest and most downcast one, the one closest to his early albums: the gorgeous "Life Will Go On".

In 2004, as if to be taken even less seriously by critics, Isaak indulges in a good-natured bit of silliness: Christmas. That is, Christmas classics reinterpreted in restrained surf-rock versions, tongue-in-cheek and not overly sentimental. Perhaps too little tongue-in-cheek, or perhaps not sentimental enough. Among the four new Isaak-penned tracks, all Christmas-themed, two gems shine through, "Washington Square" and "Brightest Star", which outshine the traditional classics and recapture that distinctive charm so sorely missing from the previous album.

Confirming a rather lackluster musical period, a second greatest-hits collection, Best Of Chris Isaak, comes out in 2006. But unlike the 1991 compilation, this new one comes across as fairly incoherent and messy, hardly representative of his career. The record contains three new tracks, including a competent but by-the-numbers cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" and a convincing "King Without A Castle", yet another tribute to his mentor Orbison, one that would have deserved a better record to call home.

Between 2008 and 2010, two live albums hit the shelves: Live In Australia and Live At The Fillmore. Isaak is the quintessential stage animal, quick with a quip and rock-solid of voice, even if the dreadful stage outfits he insists on wearing whenever he takes the stage are probably one of the main reasons he's held in such low regard as an artist. Luckily, the music comes off better than his jackets. Live, the songs sound much as they do on record, just leaner and more energetic. The covers of these two complementary live albums reflect their respective contents well: the Australian concert is flashier and more glittery, while the (excellent) concert at San Francisco's famous auditorium is more surf-inflected and tight. Few hits ("Wicked Game" does appear on both, of course) and plenty of second-tier tracks brought back into the light.

After eight long years, Chris Isaak returns with an album of new material. Mr. Lucky is a thorough portrait of the former boxer's world as he turns fifty, weighed down by a few dead spots (a couple of irritating duets with the warbling Trisha Yearwood and Michelle Branch) and a production still a bit too glossy, but on most of the tracks Isaak proves himself to be in fine form as a songwriter. Inspiration may have finally given way to craft, but he's never sounded so much like the great Roy Orbison, and armies of far more celebrated songwriters would give a kidney to be able to write a trio of killer songs like the ones that open the album. A record, in short, of beautiful songs — nothing more, nothing less.

After the Christmas album and the live records, a covers album was bound to come next. If fifteen years earlier Baja Session had been a refined, guitar-driven exercise through which he pulled a handful of American classics into his own dreamlike world by blending them with his own songs, on Beyond The Sun the opposite happens, with Isaak letting himself get pulled into the world of these classics from the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis. He'd probably always dreamed of paying tribute to his idols with devotion and scholarly precision, but dreams like that tend to interest only the dreamer, and risk boring everyone else. And indeed the album does risk being a bit of a bore, not least because at more than one point it's hard to see what the point is of listening to Isaak perfectly impersonating Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and the whole pantheon of early rock'n'roll saints, rather than simply listening to the originals. Granted, these are still great classics, and the album ends up being a perfect primer on 1950s rockabilly (with the occasional detour into the 60s), played and sung with love and style — but it's the kind of record you really could have lived without.

With First Comes The Night, on the threshold of sixty, Chris Isaak instead delivers what could be called his mature-years record, and certainly his best post-2000 release. By now the famous dreamy falsettos have given way to virile, swelling high notes, and the Californian singer has long since stopped being that lethal mix of Elvis and Orbison filtered through Jim Morrison that defined his unrepeatable 80s, nor is he still the languid, melancholy-soaked crooner of the 90s. He's now a calm rocker devoted to the craft of the well-made song. He says he no longer wants to write songs like "Wicked Game", and that what best represents him at this point is a bare, minimal country ballad like "The Way Things Really Are".

The covers album from five years earlier seems to have brought him back to a leaner approach, stripping away the radio-friendly sheen that had muted the two previous albums. In a February 2016 interview with the magazine Buscadero, an almost resigned Isaak says he writes and plays every day, but that there's so little money left in music these days that even a fairly well-known artist like him struggles to get into the studio to record.

This inability to record as much and as often as he'd like is evident in the sheer variety of the material. There are the makings of at least three or four potential albums packed inside First Comes The Night: there's the classic Isaak, still able to pull out two or three ballads that wouldn't have been out of place on his old records, there are honky-tonk atmospheres and meticulous homages to early rock'n'roll, and the usual old-fashioned pop polished with great craftsmanship. The best moments are perhaps the slightly more oblique tracks: the driving "Insect", the gospel manifesto "Down In Flames", the almost Balkan-tinged "Baby What You Want Me To Do", somewhere between Willy DeVille and Leonard Cohen. All of it blended and unified by a vaguely country vein. The album, after all, was largely recorded in Nashville.

Ultimately, it can't be said that his most recent releases — which have gone largely unnoticed — have added much to a career that nonetheless deserves to be rediscovered and reassessed. Anyone who appreciates the mysterious art of creating entire little universes within a few minutes of music should dig into at least the three albums Chris Isaak released in the 80s, while retromaniacs and fans of the most melancholy strain of pop should hold dear the first two records of the following decade.

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