Seeing the number of times Chris Isaak was mentioned here got me to thinking that the man could use his own thread, so here it is.
I think **Big Bad Voodoo Lou ** has it absolutely right in the linked thread when he calls Isaak “the epitome of timeless cool,” and my slavish fandom is about the only time I’ve ever been significantly ahead of the curve on anything. I picked up my first copy of Silvertone in November 1985, whereas I think it’s fair to say Isaak didn’t really break big until 1989 or 1990 with “Wicked Game.”
The date: the night before Thanksgiving, 1985. I had just driven back to D.C. from school and was quite bummed out after having been dumped recently. The place: the 9:30 Club, where I had come to see the dB’s and opening act Holly Beth Vincent. The dB’s were great, but the key event of relevance to this thread was the playing at some point during the night of the video for “Gone Ridin’” - I was riveted. The sound just seemed so much cleaner, if that makes sense, than other music I was hearing at the time.
Anyway, I bought Silvertone the next day and must have listened to it at least once daily for the next six months. It’s my favorite album of the 1980s without a doubt and definitely one of my more frequently played CDs. Favorite tracks from his other albums include “Fade Away,” “Beautiful Homes” and “Goin’ Nowhere.” After moving to London, I was lucky enough to come across a pair of bootleg live CDs (*Wild Thing * and Sugar Hips, for anyone else who’s similarly fanatical) that I really like - the sound quality isn’t the greatest, but the energy definitely comes through.
Plus which I’ve seen the man live on three occasions, all of them great shows - he and the band really play their butts off. I caught two shows at the 9:30 in 1987 and one at the Bottom Line in 1989 and was very close to the stage on all three occasions. In addition to the music, they look great - at the 9:30 shows I saw, Isaak was wearing a shiny blue suit with oriental-style dragons stitched into the jacket with red thread and the band had matching gray fabric suits, while at the Bottom Line the band wore shiny gray suits and Isaak’s suit had an extravagant flowered pattern. And while some musicians might try to crack a joke or two on stage and fail miserably, Isaak can genuinely work a crowd, IMHO - I recall him telling these kind of extended jokes between songs in which the punch line was the title of the next song, that kind of thing, and not falling flat at all.
Sadly, my slavish fandom has not resulted in any of Isaak’s timeless cool rubbing off on me. :dubious: