wicked is chris isaak's wild card
old release is basis of recent success
THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
Tuesday, April 30, 1991.
Features/B-5 By: Gary Graff Knight News Service
"Wicked" is Chris Isaak's Wild Card
OLD RELEASE BASIS OF RECENT SUCCESS
It was a warm evening on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Mo., and Chris Isaak and his band were tossing around a Nerf football in front of the auditorium he would play that night. "It was funny," the 34-year-old rocker recalls. "We played 'til dark, and people were walking into the show. Maybe one out of 100 would go 'Hi Chris' so I don't think it's that big a deal."
It is Isaak's sudden and ironic ascent to pop stardom with a song that's almost two years old. "Wicked Game" first appeared on Isaak's third and most current album, Heart Shaped World, originally released during the summer of 1989. The record initially did little to boost Isaak's following, but that changed when director David Lynch used an instrumental version of "Wicked Game" in his film Wild at Heart. The song enchanted an Atlanta program director, who added Isaak's vocal version to his station's playlist and found that listeners agreed. Isaak's label, Reprise, which had declared Heart Shaped World history, released "Wicked Game" as a single and watched it soar into the Top 10. The album flew with it; now No.8 on the Billboard charts, it has sold more than 1.2 million copies - six times as many as Isaak?s first two albums combined. His video is a smash on MTV, and six years after the Stockton, California raised Isaak and his band, the Silvertones, began releasing records, Rolling stone ran his picture on the cover of its recent New Faces '91 issue.
And no one is more surprised by this surge than Isaak.
"I was already working on my next record, sitting on my couch (in San Francisco) watching Hawaii Five-O at three in the morning," he says. "That's when they first called me and told me my record?' being played. They said, 'Lee Chestnut (the programmer) is playing your record' I thought they meant at his house; I really did not think they'd play it on the radio. When
I found out who he was, I said, 'Lee must have some money put away 'cuz they're going to fire him for this.'"
Isaak's self-deprecating humor extends to the mostly favourable comparisons evoked by the moody "Wicked Game," with its haunting melody and palpable sense of sexual tension and anticipation. The Lost Angeles Times recently dubbed him the Roy Orbison of the '90s and he has had to weather a few Elvis allusions. "It's flattering that somebody thinks you're like people you admire," Isaak says. "It' s real though, too. I would never compare myself. When you stack what I'm doing against what they've done, it's like parking your little rubber raft next to the Queen Mary."
For the record, there's a true-story inspiration for the song that rocketed Isaak to star stature. The singer-songwriter-guitarist says he was sitting at home one night when his girlfriend called to say she was coming by for a visit. "Visit" he says dryly, "is a euphemism. I said 'OK' then kinda hung up and thought, 'Now I'm in trouble.' I shouldn't have done that.' In the time between when she was heading over, I wrote it."
After his own spring tour, Isaak will spend most of the summer opening for Bonnie Raitt, including an Aug. 10 date at Riverbend. During his time off, he hopes to start recording his next album and-after a brief appearance as a SWAT team leader in The Silence of the Lambs-he has Hollywood agents and studio chiefs clamouring to find a place in the movies for his striking good looks.
It's heady stuff, but Isaak says he's not overwhelmed. "My life really hasn't changed at all," he says. "But I'll tell you the truth: I was real happy (Heart Shaped World) before I sold any copies. And things were real good before this, too. Evening when people say 'Weren't you upset you weren't selling as many records as Madonna?' Who cares? I was getting to make records for a living...to have a band, to go out and play for people. I didn't know I hadn't made it."
