COULD ANYBODY REALLY BE AS NOSTALGIC AND FOREVER BLUE AS CHRIS ISAAK? DOWN AT CHRIS'S FAVORITE SAN FRANCISCO DINER, SHOSHANA BERGER FINDS THE WELL-DRESSED CROONER, SUFER, BOXER AND ACTOR WEARING HIS HEART ON HIS SLEEVE.

TAKE 1 I've been circling back and forth, cursing my Dart's lack of power steering with every too wide U-turn. I'm searching for the "Irving Street Cafe" in San Francisco, where I?m supposed to meet Chris Isaak. Everyone I stop to ask either doesn't speak English or crinkles up their face perplexedly, looks both ways, then suddenly recalls that it's "three blocks that way..." and it never is. The backs of my knees are sweating. The Twilight zone credits scroll down as the "Irving Street Diner" eludes me like a musical chair. Finally, a fairy tale ending. I see the contours of a sun kissed pompadour as its owner climbs into a two-toned '64 Nova. I double park and bum rush the car. Chris Isaak peers at me, a bit unnerved. I could be a bad fan experience.  "Was I supposed to meet you?" He's puzzled. He's already eaten. 

TAKE 2 Enter the Irving Street Café. Note the signed poster for Isaak's last album, Heart Shaped World, hanging proudly by the bar. "This place has really good food," Chris trumpets as we pass by the proprietor. "Try the teriyaki burger, that's my tip." Isaak has been something of a ministering angel here and wants to make sure I'll get a plug in. I can see why it's his favorite haunt. Only a classy kind of family affair would offer you a piece of Wrigley's Spearmint after your meal. We take the table in the back. I assume it's his table. As coffee gets poured it becomes clear as day that he's put a spell on the two sisters who waitress here. They're destined to bring him burger after teriyaki burger with ever-bewitched grins. One of the sisters is good and one is evil, as the fairy tale goes, "but really sweet underneath," he whispers at me from across the table.

Isaak has a fictional quality and a retro-charm that are hard to ignore. His sky-dyed eyes sparkle with that  50s local hero blend of provincial gentility and scheming hooligan. Clearly he's cashed in on the mythology that surrounds the original rock & rollers. I'm sure he's passed as an Elvis sighting in places where Elvis sightings occur. On that note, does Isaak have a favorite Elvis movie? When I ask, he takes a lengthy pause and considers the question as gravely as if I had asked about a deceased relative. "What's that one where he plays Deke Rivers? Is it Loving You? Anyway, he goes up to a cemetery with a girl and says, 'I never really knew my mom and dad; I took my name off a tombstone.' He's got the drawl down pat. It's actually kind of spooky with his perfect hair and everything. "They say in a lot of literature that the heroes come from strange regions," he continues. "They don't come from normal homes, they come out of the woods. I just thought that was so cool y'know? Cause you're a little kid and you're thinking, 'I don't want to be who I am; my parents are square. I wanna be like Elvis.' You think, 'Yah, Elvis didn't have any parents, he came from nowhere, he invented himself. I'm like Elvis!" I can see why Isaak got into acting.

During the hour and a half we spend together, he impersonates a cast of thousands. Just now he has seamlessly slipped into an imitation of 13-year-old Richie Cunningham. He even pulls a fast one by asking me to feed his meter (using the line that he has a bad back from a surfing accident). Later, when I play the interview tape back, I find that he has spoken into the recorder in my absence, saying, "Now that she's gone I can tell the real story. Everything I ever did was stolen from an old Buddy Greco record." But it's not all-prefab self-generation with Isaak-like the way some actors always see to be in the middle of a hokey method experiment. No, Isaak is just showing his good breeding. As a boy in Stockton (a blue collar burb east of San Francisco), he was weaned on Elvis movies, and the melodies of Hank Williams and Roy Orbison were always his request, piping through the Silvertone radio he still plays at home.

Despite his successes in two major corruption-breeding industries (his most recent film found him in Katmandu, acting with Keanu Reeves and Bridget Fonda as father to the Little Buddha), neither the good nor the bad things have changed Isaak all that much. He still lives a quiet, solitary life. He doesn't keep in touch with many people. Most days he spends playing the guitar by himself. In suits him to live in the Sunset District, a place where one is always in danger of fading, always suspended on that fiery ledge between dark and light. He surfs late into the night at the beach just a few blocks from his home and he makes records in a studio just a few blocks from there. He respects his retired neighbors here in the Sunset, far beyond the throbbing heart of downtown. Chris especially digs the local grocery. A 1930's prototype of the modern supermarket called "Bucks" "They don't have many chain stores around here y'know? I kinda like it. I like going to places where it's run by people who are always gonna see you there-they treat you better." I suggest that it's a Stockton sensibility.

Do you know Stockton very well?" I confess that Stockton was somewhat of a cliché where I grew up. "It's a drive-by town," he nods, but then pride wakes him up. "I guess it could be really crummy if you just drove through and you didn't know anything about it, but there are some real nice parts of town, and the fact that my parents, their parents and my great grandfather lived there makes for a lot of history. It makes you behave yourself in a way, people who move around and never stay in a place, they don't behave. If you're from a town where you have history, you try to fit in. I mean, we weren't particularly well-behaved, but we tried."
Does he remember the first song he ever wrote there? "No, I wrote a lot of songs in high school. They were all derivative, pretentious, and goofy; pretty much sound like the things I'm doing now. I still have tapes of them. In fact, I still have the tape recorder I used. Remember the T-Bar controls they had? That's before your time. As a kid, I saved and saved to buy one. I still have those tapes." I tell him he should release one-like the Beastie Boys " Same Old Bullshit. It's so bizarre to think of writing songs at that time. I didn't even play guitar, just a little bit of harmonica. I'd sing, tap along, and play a harmonica tune. I used to listen to late night radio. It was a small town station that used to play a lot of oddball '40s, '50s, and '60s music and I used to call up to talk to the DJ." He must have been like a secret friend. "Yeah, I'd ask him the name of the last song and if he'd play it again and he'd say, 'Sure.' I never got a busy signal."

Retrospect is the governing vision in his lyrics and unrequited love is the black cloud that casts a pall over the scene. The songs on the new album, Forever Blue, savor the arrested moment between two people when everything was still possible; the stubborn hope that gets tattooed in your head by memory. "Walkin Down There" and "Graduation Day" sound as if they sprang from much-fingered photos that are yellowing with time. We are captive listeners because we can insert ourselves in these scenarios. Like horoscopes, good pop songs always speak directly to us. I sense that there's a juicy tale behind "Graduation Day," and figure now's my chance to live up to that bone-picking, scandal-chasing, rock journalist stereotype. I ask him to open the proverbial photo album. "No, won't tell you that," he retorts, wearing a stern poker face that requires a double take to be sure what I see there is sarcasm. "Graduation Day, there are two ideas intertwined in my mind in that song, which is more than I can handle! When get an idea, it tickles. Someone said that once about fashion models: when they get an idea, it tickles-'Ooh! Something's in there!?' Clearly the goofy alter ego is the dominant gene today. "They're playing "Pomp and Circumstance", and We shall never pass this way again is the big banner. You're looking at the people whom you had your first love affair with; the guys that were your best pals. Then everybody breaks apart. It's a rites of passage day. I began to think about that when I went back to a reunion in my hometown." I imagine he must have been something of a tourist attraction at the Stockton High reunion. "No, actually. Dwight Yokam and Tom Cruise both went to my same high school, so I went unnoticed." We both get a chuckle out of this. "Yah, I was sort of the only person,I brought my album cover and was holding it up, y'know? Hey it?s me! Anyway, I was driving back and thinking about how much things have changed since then and how at that time you think, 'I'll keep in touch,' but it doesn't work that way in real life."

"The other idea in the song, which I'm sure everybody gets is that it's a metaphor for growing up and the realization that all your dreams don't come true. You say to yourself 'I'll be a film director', or 'I'll be the heavyweight champion', and when you're 16 you say and you can just keep dreaming, but when you're 40. It's the realization that you graduate because you're with somebody and naively you believe it will last forever and then you realize that your dreams have all gone, it's not gonna happen. So every passing day is a graduation day of sorts. Yeah, you know people get wrinkled and grey because life beats the hell out of them. If life were all wonderful and every dream came true you wouldnt go grey, know what I mean?"

He's engrossed and I can tell he wants to flesh this one out. So I shut up and just keep nodding. "I don't think I ever kidded myself that I'd be happy if I had a big hit record. The happiness I got out of making that album, I've already reaped all that. I listen to it at home and think, 'Hey, I made a whole album again.' The biggest thrill of all is when they hand you the finished package. Five albums, that's a lot of songs to write. Kinda cuts into your social life," he grimaces. Now I'm suspicious. I mean, every record Chris Isaak makes seems to be competing for the "best break-up album"  title. They're sent out into the world to soothe us little lay people, we forsaken ones whom have failed at love over and over again. Fuck the chicken-and-egg analogy, you have to establish a relationship before you can have a breakup. His social life can't  be suffering that much. "Okay, this last one definitely is a breakup album," he cuts in, swiftly dodging my efforts to pin him down. It figures he used to be a boxer. I can't imagine writing something that was more fresh in my mind or that I took more seriously. I had a relationship that I thought was going to last. We didn't really break up, we exploded. It happened right at the end of a tour and I'll never forget the feeling. Y'know you've been on touch for six, seven months? and I came back home and the house is cold like you left the air conditioning on, and there's clothes strewn everywhere. I sat down in the middle of the house and thought, 'Here I am, all alone in this house, what the hell am I doing??' He takes a moment to digest that last one, his gaze fixed on something far away. "The fact that I survived it means I'm made of impact resistant Chris, in a crush proof box."

As if called into being by his cereal-box hero banter, the sweet sister makes a cameo appearance: "More coffee?" "Just a half a cup," Chris is holding his cupped palms for her to pour into. "You won't sue me like McDonald's for burning you, will you?", she asks, batting her lacquered lashes. "Never." Now there's a straight-ahead contract for you: Will you betray me, making me regret trusting you? No dear, scout's honor. Too bad things just aren't like that outside of this little haven. "I don't know." His head is hung in a mope.

Suddenly I'm the saltshaker and he's the open wound. "You know one song I wrote on this album, called
"Believe" speaks to my philosophy about that. It says I believe that someday we're gonna find our way, that there's angels and they hear us praying. I believe in all these things. But, if someone were to ask me, 'Do you believe it for yourself Chris?' I'd say, 'Well, not me.' There's not a hint of smile to relieve the gravity of this last statement. Our fairy tale hero steps our from behind the curtain like an all too human Wizard of Oz. "It's not gonna happen for me, but I believe in it and want it so bad for somebody. The fact that it happens for somebody is enough. Y'know, I walk down the street and see a guy and a girl holding each other and they're the most dopey looking couple, but they look like they're in love and she's looking at this short little guy and thinking, 'Look, he's better than Alec Baldwin,' y'know what I mean? And even though she may not be appealing to everyone he thinks, 'Doesn't she look like a movie star?' As soon as I get off work, I'm gonna go by and see her'  When you see people for whom love conquers everything, you get hope from that."

It's sort of hard to hear Chris Isaak say these things. After all, he's doing what he loves and making money at it, he's one of David Lynch's favorites (infact, it was the soundtrack to Wild At Heart that propelled the song "Wicked Game" into the top ten, earning Isaak his pop-icon status), People magazine named him one of the most beautiful people in America, and he made a virtual Blue Lagoon video with Helena Christensen. How many of us would give up a limb to be able to stake such claims? Still, Chris Isaak indeed seems somehow "forever blue."  Like Kurt Cobain's death, it's a sobering message this man relays: be careful what you wish for; you might just get it. I'm up to five cups of coffee now, and begin to feel my nervous system short out. So I turn off the tape and tell him we're through. "Okay, you can make the rest of it up. The best stuff always comes out when the tape's been turned off anyhow. Why don't you say, 'Chris had a full length bear and was wearing a robe. When the food came, he picked all the meat even though he was wearing a robe, he was packing a handgun'  Imagine a .45 hanging out of your robe pocket."

As we get up to go, we're both laughing pretty hard. I'm laughing at Chris Isaak turned Buddha killer, laughing with coffee jitters, laughing with relief that I didn't pull up just a moment later, and laughing because, ultimately, laughter is our best defense against being forever blue, the ultimate .45 hanging from the robe pocket of each and every one of us.