In the mid-1980s the rockabilly
combo Silvertone emerged from the fringes of the San Francisco punk
scene with a sound steeped in American roots music—rockabilly,
country, blues, and old-fashioned American rock 'n' roll. The band honed
its chops in a grueling round of bar gigs, distinguishing itself with
a tight, lean sound; dark songs; and the charismatic, pompadour-topped
Chris Isaak as frontman. Influenced heavily by Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley,
and Ricky Nelson, Isaak developed a brooding vocal style to match his
exquisitely melancholy originals. He delivered the timeless themes of
love, betrayal, and heartbreak with enough conviction and clarity to
sidestep the pitfalls of pastiche or parody. He offset this propensity
toward nostalgic "sturm und twang" with a sunny disposition, unstoppable
energy, and a completely over-the-top wardrobe. By the time he recorded
his first record, Silvertone, in 1985, it was his show.
Isaak and his band went
on to record Chris Isaak and Heart Shaped World, which
included the hit single "Wicked Game." A slow but steady stream of singles
and CDs followed, including the mostly acoustic Baja Sessions.
In 1988 Isaak began an acting
career with small parts in Married to the Mob, Wild at Heart, Silence
of the Lambs, and a string of cameos on television. His thespian
performances garnered enough attention to land him his own cable program
on Showtime last year, The Chris Isaak Show. The offbeat sitcom
is loosely based on the real-life Chris Isaak, tracking the trials and
tribulations of life in a rock 'n' roll band. Members of Silvertone
and weekly musical guests play themselves, and there is a lot of music
on the show. Working on a set littered with guitars and instruments
of all sorts, characters are apt to pick up a ukulele and break into
a song at the drop of a pick, and there are scenes of rehearsals, jams,
and actual concert performances. The music has a lively clams-and-all
spontaneity that is rare in any medium.
Earlier this year Isaak
released Always Got Tonight, his eighth recording, and his first
with producer John Shanks. The album features all of the successful
elements of Isaak's previous efforts—songs of longing and hope,
Isaak's signature crooning, and shimmering layers of acoustic and electric
guitars. Now, with the acclaimed album hitting the charts, his television
series wrapping up its second season, a summer tour about to launch,
and a relentless string of guest appearances on television and radio,
Isaak is giving James Brown a run for the title of Hardest Working Man
in Show Business. I spoke to Isaak between takes of his TV show about
love and loss, recording in a pressure cooker, music on the tube, and
the joys of cheap guitars.
When did you take up
the guitar?
Isaak
I was in high school. My first girlfriend, Carole, had a guitar that
she let me borrow. It had a big daisy decal on it. I was always kind
of ashamed of that daisy. I had to tune it with a pair of pliers because
it didn't have any of the tuning heads on it. But I'd tune it up and
play it, and little by little people kept showing me things, and I eventually
learned to play.
What were you listening
to when you were coming up?
Isaak
I listened to everything: Hank Williams, rockabilly, Ernest Tubb, really
old country, and modern music, too. I'm still the same today. I'll listen
to Dean Martin from the Sands Hotel and then Coldplay or Radiohead.
Good music is good music. Usually it's the arrangements that are different.
Great melodies and good stories—that's really all there is.
Were there any guitarists
that turned you on as much as the singers did?
Isaak
Yeah, Cliff Gallup, who worked with Gene Vincent, was just great. And
Roland Janes, who worked with Jerry Lee Lewis early on, is one of my
favorite guitar players. While Jerry was banging the piano, Janes was
playing these great little two-string simple things. Of course, Scotty
Moore with Elvis was a hero. And I've been lucky to work with great
guitarists. Jimmy Wilsey and Hershel Yatovitz are both heavyweight guitar
players.
Aside from the change
in lead guitarists, the band's been really consistent over the years.
Isaak
I've been lucky because I got people who were pretty stable characters.
We all love being musicians more than partying. Some people really like
to party, and music is secondary. I know a lot of people who are great
musicians, but every time you see them, they're driving a taxi with
a broken arm. They're always boogered up in some way, and their good
instrument is always in hock, and they're playing some kind of Korean
knockoff. That's sad. If you're serious about it and you keep it together,
you can have a long run.
Every time we go out and
do a gig, I look at the guys and say, "Tonight, onstage, you're defending
your right to play. You're defending your job." All of us are. The audience
decides whether we're coming back or whether we're going to play Tuesday
nights at the corner bar. For my shows, I always show up, I'm on time,
we're rehearsed, and everybody's ready to go. We hit the stage and we
put out as much energy as we've got. We love the job. We don't want
to go back to putting tar on roofs. I was doing a photo session recently
and there was a guy moving lights who had a big hit song in the '60s.
He got all drugged out, lost all of his equipment, lost his band, and
now he's moving lights. You look at the guy and realize it's easy to
lose your place in line.
What are your tour plans?
Isaak
We're going on the road this summer, and I can't wait. We're so jonesing
for a tour bus. We're in a film studio now wearing makeup every day,
and I can't wait to wash off the makeup and do a whole set in one take!
How much hassle is it
to take Silvertone on the road?
Isaak
I don't have a ton of people. It's not one of those 14 buses kind of
things. We've been doing it since the bass player, the drummer, and
I would take turns driving, and we'd sleep in the van and split a room.
We did a lot of those tours. When we finally got a tour bus we were
like, "Damn! You can sleep in this." Now, we put the band and the management
on one bus and the crew on the other bus, and that's pretty much all
we need. I try not to have 50 backup singers. I like to have a rock
'n' roll show. I want to make it a good, big show with lots of lights
and everything, but if you get more than 33 people onstage you're in
trouble. "Wait a minute, this isn't rock 'n' roll."
Has working on a TV show
changed the way you work on your music?
Isaak
Yeah. I used to think that being a musician was hard. The hours you
put in on tour or in the studio used to seem hard to me. Now I realize
that there's no job tougher than being involved in a TV show that films
an hour-long program every week. You've got to get the script together,
the songs together, you've got to learn all your parts, and do this
now, this week. It's a huge amount of fun, though, and at the end of
the week we've got these cool little movies.
There's a lot of music
on your show, and it all seems to be real playing, no faking or lip-synching.
Isaak
We don't fake it. Early on we had a big—I wouldn't call it a fight,
exactly—but a big discussion. They said, "We can't do it live.
There's no way to record you live." And I said, "Oh, yeah there is.
Because when we make a record, we record that live. Don't tell me that
we can't. This ain't my first rodeo." Then they were worried about how
to match different takes. I said, "How do you think studio people cut
two takes together for a record? All this stuff can be done. It's going
to match. Just always go for a good take." If you try lip-synching,
it just really lacks energy. You go, "Why am I pretending?" I want to
do what I'm good at, which is making music. Green Day comes on and we
just sit down in the living room and sing, and they film it. They don't
have to try to match us with a playback or anything. It works a lot
better this way.
Who chooses the musical
guests?
Isaak
I get to choose the guests. I've been really happy because we get such
a wide variety of people—Green Day, Shelby Lynne, Third Eye Blind,
Pam Tillis, Everclear, Gavin [Rossdale] from Bush. Every week it's somebody
different and every week is a musical jam session. You see a lot of
musicians photographed together backstage at a benefit, but they aren't
really jamming together. On my show, the people come on, they act a
little bit, and then we get to play two songs together. What's amazing
to me is that you think, "Oh, I'm in this business, I'm doing OK, I've
got some talent," and you just realize that there's a lot of
talent out there. Every week somebody comes on, and you go, "Sheila
E.! Amazing." She can play percussion like you wouldn't believe. She's
a freak! She's great and she's so nice. And Green Day comes on and people
have this impression that it's just this punk thing, but then Billie
Joe can sit there and sing "I hope you have the time of your life,"
and you realize that it's a great song and he's a great singer.
There's a reason these people are famous. Each of them has a tremendous
talent. And that's what makes the show really fun.
I can't help but compare
the funny, easy-going, seemingly happy Chris Isaak of the TV program
and the Chris Isaak of the songs, who seems so familiar with heartbreak
and melancholy.
Isaak
It is an odd dichotomy, but both exist and both are real. When it's
three o'clock in the morning and I'm in my bed looking up in the dark,
I feel like the Queen Mary is sitting on my chest. I think a
lot of people have that feeling, and it gives you a little help to know
that you're not the only one. The TV show is an escape from all of that.
I want to make it fun to watch, I want to make it as funny as I can,
and I want to make it safe, like you're in Mayberry. When I turn on
the Andy Griffith Show, I relax and know that nothing bad is
going to happen. It's a safe place with characters I like, and they're
just having fun and trying to entertain me. And that's what this show
is about.
The music can be heavy and
furious, but the show itself isn't to be taken seriously, and you'll
never see anything violent on it. At one point they'd written in a scene
where a bad guy was chasing somebody with a knife, and I made them change
it so that he was chasing them with a pepper grinder. It's a comedy
show, and we shouldn't make anybody cringe.
With your hectic schedule
of TV production and promotion, do you still get a chance to hang out
and play the guitar?
Isaak
I play my guitar every day.
When did you find time
to make Always Got Tonight?
Isaak
Late at night, weekends, between takes and rehearsals. When other people
had their summer vacations, when other people were getting together
for the family picnics, and other people were sleeping, I was working
on the album.
You're working all the
time?
Isaak
Pretty much. That's what I do.
Does your commitment
to the TV show change the way you make recordings?
Isaak
It does. You can make a record where you make a sketch and then refine
it and go back and rerecord it and try different instrumentation. Or
you can go, "Here's a live recording, a sketch. That's it! Got it!"
So it's more of a quick, going-for-it-on-the-day type of thing. This
record was closer to going in and trying to get it right away, get the
feel of it. When you have a lot of time, you can do a lot of detail
work on a thing, but you lose some freshness. We worked quickly but
for a long time. We recorded a lot of songs. There are, what, 13 songs
on this album? I think we recorded 25.
You worked with producer
Erik Jacobsen on all of your previous records. Why the switch to John
Shanks?
Isaak
I would work with Erik Jacobsen again tomorrow. He's the best, and just
a great guy. And his attitude is that it's not a business so much as
it's art. It's his passion. He spends time working on songs that probably
aren't going to be hits, but he'll still work on them. That's probably
why he was able to produce things like "Wicked Game" or "Baby Did a
Bad Bad Thing" that weren't hits right off the bat. But I'd worked with
Erik for so long that I thought it would be a good idea to try someone
else. It's like if you were a painter and you said to yourself, "I've
used this brush and this paint on every painting. Let me try charcoal."
When I decided I wanted
to work with somebody else, I thought John Shanks would be someone I
could get along with. I thought he was a very funny, very smart guy.
I really didn't know what his sound would be, but I just hit it off
with him. Working with him, I discovered that there was a lot of passion
there. It wasn't just about going in and cranking out some sides.
John is a player, right?
Isaak
Yeah. I like the way that sounds. He's a player. Yeah, he likes
the ladies [laughs].
Let me rephrase that.
He's a guitarist, right? Does he play on the record?
Isaak
He played bits and pieces on lots of different things, but that's not
his main thing. He's a great player, but his overall thing is facilitating
the artist in the room. I never would want to be in the studio with
a producer who was always going, "Let me grab the banjo and put it on
this song. OK, that's done. Next!" I don't like the idea of anything
going down without me there. They push the Record button, and I've got
to be there. It's not a democratic process when I'm around. I love democracy,
but I hate it in artistic events.
Even though you worked
quickly and went for early takes, Always Got Tonight has a very
lush, almost polished sound.
Isaak
If you are working with good musicians, you can get things done quickly
and more efficiently. I don't mean to give you the impression that we
did things in one take (although there are some things on there that
we caught the first time), but it's a matter of whether you're going
to cut the song efficiently or not. Are you going to cut the basic tracks
on Tuesday, do the overdub vocals on Wednesday, and be done? Or are
you going to find yourself three weeks later still working on the basic
kick drum sound? People spend $3 million doing that, and they get lost.
You only have so much energy, and you start to lose the thread and find
yourself asking, "What was I trying to say?"
How much of the CD was
written ahead of time?
Isaak
I always go in with a batch of at least three or four songs, and then
I keep writing and bringing up other songs as we go. You can't go in
with 25 songs or you'll never get out. In this case, I had ten or 11
songs started when I went in.
There are some great
guitar parts on this record. Are they in your head as you write, or
do they evolve in the studio?
Isaak
When I write a song, I'm usually just brushing chords and singing the
main melody. When I go in the studio, I'll grab a guitar and say, "Here's
where I hear a riff, and here's what I'm hearing it sound like." Or
I'll sing a part to the lead player. If you're lucky, you get a great
player in the studio, and he'll play with a style or a liveliness that
you never thought possible. The only thing to do in that case is to
take credit for it [laughs]. When you hear genius, stand next
to it!
Heartbreak is still the
big theme on this CD. Are you constantly getting your heart broken?
Isaak
I think the biggest thing that people look for in this world is love.
You look at drug addicts, they want love. They don't want heroin, they
want love. In the background they're going, "I didn't get love and I'm
self-medicating." You go down to the bar and you see some girl stripping
or picking up the wrong guys, she's not looking for sex, she's looking
for love. You look at an older businessman and he's buying a Maserati
with snakeskin upholstery and going out with a 20-year-old hostess.
He's looking for love. All these songs I write, that's the number one
thing in my mind—where you get love and how you get love. I think
God should have put numbers on us, so we could identify one another.
You'd go up and say, "207?" They'd go, "No, no, 204. Wrong number."
"Are you sure, 'cause you look great." "Nope, go find 207. I'd just
bring you heartache."
"Cool Love" on the new
record is downright hopeful. Is that a new point of view for you?
Isaak
I like the idea that you finally look around after a tough time and
you've got a friend who's been there for you. And you realize that here's
somebody you can trust. That's the best thing of all. I keep hoping.
In spite of all the heartache, hope springs eternal.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, August 2002,
No. 116.
