only way to deal with it is to be silly.
"
Photo: Supplied
Heartbreaker, joker, troubadour: can ageing romeo Chris Isaak be for real? Guy Blackman reports.
These days, Chris Isaak's media schtick is as well-rehearsed as any seasoned stand-up comedian.
With drummer, trusty sidekick and comic foil Kenney Dale Johnson in tow, he traipses from interview to interview, guitar in hand, launching into amusing anecdotes and serious.
At the Park Hyatt in Melbourne he is doing exactly that, counterparts with roguish tales and self-deprecating humour. When it's my turn, Isaak and Johnson burst into a traditional German folk song, apropos of nothing, then crack jokes about Ritchie Valens in reference to Isaak's recent greatest hits CD.
"I've always felt sorry for him," he says with a grin at Johnson. "He got killed so early, there's really only one record. I always used to say 'I can't wait until I have three records out, heartache and yearning, this clown act is clearly just that - an act.
Even Isaak's dark joke about Valens suggests the way his mind might really work. But after more than 20 years in the media spotlight, Isaak knows the best foil for probing questions is humour. "Much better than not," he quips about turning 50 earlier this year.
"Any birthday I can get, I'll take."
This is not to say he has a witty reply to everything. And take a less vaudeville-like turn.
After a minute or two of joke-free conversation, he wanders off with his tambourine and brushes, mumbling something about getting a soda.
"I think it's a way of creating balance," Isaak admits once the drummer is out of earshot. "Everything in this world seems to reach for balance, and I have a very dark view of a lot of things, so I'm silly.
Because life is so deadly serious in some ways, to me it seems the only way to deal with it is to be silly."
The youngest son of a working-class family from Stockton, California, his father a reformed criminal and his mother a factory worker, Isaak grew up with few prospects and only two ways to release his frustration: music or boxing. "If they'd had a golf club I'd have played golf, but in my neighbourhood everybody However, ever since he was a young kid, when he would cry along to the saddest songs on the radio, Isaak has had a melancholy was the only cure.
The singer admits now that his most morbid preoccupation is with mortality.
"The fact that we're only here for a brief time, it's so limited and so precious," he says. "And that everything changes - it's hard to hold onto love, it's hard to hold onto your family.
These things are always taken away from you."
The death of his childhood sweetheart, Carole Lowe, from cancer in 1999 has probably only increased this fixation. When his mother told him Lowe was sick, Isaak called her straight away.
"I said 'What's your prognosis' and she goes 'Well, it's terminal, but I'm doing good . . .
' and just went on with the conversation," he recalls. "You look at this world and there's so many crummy people who live to be 90, but she was a nurse to children."
written across it, although these days the name on his guitar is his own.
Now at 50 he is the eternal bachelor, with a lifestyle bordering on the monastic, having sworn off drugs and alcohol as a youth.
"I've never smoked pot once, I've never smoked a cigarette in my whole life, and I never get high," he says. "Plus I came from a family with a lot of alcohol, so that didn't look like fun.
That just looked like something you did before the cops came."
His non-stop touring routine, or more accurately the discipline he imposes on himself, allows for little in the way of romantic entanglement. "Sing, sing, sing, get done, sign autographs, grab some food backstage, head back to the hotel," is how he describes his daily lifestyle.
"And then I like to draw, so I'll sit in my room and I'll draw cartoons."
modern classics, Isaak has no illusions as to his level of artistry. "I take a lot of pride in songwriting, but maybe I'm not John Lennon," he admits.
shows. I'm happy with my work ethic. You buy a ticket to my show, I show up on time, I'm sober, I'm dressed and I'm really going to give it my best shot.
"
can be forgotten for a couple of hours. His ready wit and comfortable rapport with Silvertone, his band of more than 20 years, is more than just a clown act when he is on stage performing. But even when discussing the benefits of his lifestyle, death.
living, I'd imagine what it would be like to be famous," he says. street, with the same sun on your face, and in the end we're all going to be pretty equal."
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