On Chris Isaak’s 70th birthday! The importance of Chris Isaak as a musical figure in general and in particular for the rockabilly renaissance cannot be overestimated. While Stray Cats brought back the spirit of primordial rebellious fun to rock music, and Paul Fenech created violent lurid monsters with the dream of his psychopathic mind, so reminiscent of a black-and-white horror movie, Chris was in a different weight class altogether. A full-fledged pop artist, without any subcultural overtones, his figure on the musical Olympus is as close as possible to Roy Orbison. But other authors of our magazine will sing similar and well-deserved praises to Chris. I want to tell you about what this sweet-voiced artist has brought to the world of neo-rockabilly and who, consciously or not, is following his cool path.
“Cool” here is not only a literal translation of the jargon Cool, but also quite a tangible feeling. Chris allowed the rockabilly to be calmly sad, to fall into melancholy, which refreshes the soul, as a good conditioner refreshes the body. Was everyone just having fun before? After all, there are many beautiful ballads sung by Elvis Aaronovich Presley or the same Ricky Nelson. But, for all its aesthetics, it’s often a completely different kind of quiet sadness. For an evening, not for a lifetime. Chris made this sadness truly timeless.
At the same time, we are not talking at all about the sin of despondency, which post punks and long-haired heavyweights are so fond of extolling. It’s about eternal quiet sadness, like in Ray Bradbury’s stories. Such feelings are most often generated by life experience, but in Chris’ case it’s more of an inner existential longing. Yes, it’s all about the mysterious sad handsome guy, it’s this archetype. Let’s take a look at the followers of this chilled path.
Fatboy
A reasonable solution is to look for coolness on the Scandinavian peninsula. An example of such melancholy is the delightfully stylish Fatboy team. The name itself, somewhat cursed in the realities of modern streaming, reminds not of an overweight boy and his suffering, but of the atomic bomb that destroyed the city of Nagasaki. All the team’s creativity, like an endless Bergman film, is filled with stylish cold grace, bitter self-irony and the feeling that any sandwich will surely fall butter down, without losing its sense of sandwich dignity.
The track A Touch of Blue from the Diggin’ the Scene album reminds me the most about Chris in their work.
Fatboy – A Touch of Blue
Foggy Mountain Rockers
Central Europe also did not stay away from such an influence, although things took a slightly more roundabout path there. The German reenactors of teddy boy culture, the rockers from the misty mountains, as they call themselves, are much less elegant and more straightforward. In particular, their second album Angel Heart is filled to the brim with the doomed and cleansing sadness of leaden skies, like the rainiest day. Hold Me Tight and Teenage Paradise are the most concentrated of this dankness.
Foggy Mountain Rockers – Hold Me Tight
Top Cats
Let’s return to Scandinavia and the Swedish Kingdom, where a new metamorphosis awaits us. Top Cats are not as moody as previous heritage representatives. No, there’s a lot of minor, but they’ve captured another facet of Chris, namely the popular sound. Everything is high-quality, well-done and completely easy. At the same time, unlike the German scene, the pop singer here is much more … intelligent, or something. There is no feeling of table fever, and this is very good.
Top Cats – Well Well Well Well
Hard Fall Hearts
I also want to go through my personal oldies, the ones I wrote about earlier. And the first of them are the fighting whiners of Hard Fall Hearts. In sunny California, they also like to be downbeat with taste. I would like to mention my favorite song At the Bar separately: the fatalism and melancholy in the chorus of this song have an incredible concentration.
Hard Fall Hearts – At the Bar
Digger Barnes
At the end, let’s move away from neo-rockabilly a bit and take another look at one wonderful country artist. If all the previous examples took Chris’s general orientation, vocal melisms and, so to speak, vibe, then Digger Barnes took a much less obvious path. In some of his tracks, such as Long Way, the instrumental part resembles Isaak in half with Badalamenti. In itself, there is a completely different kind of melancholy here, but you can imagine how Chris’s lyrical hero has aged and moved away from the world into the wilderness. Then the hit will be very accurate.
Digger Barnes – Long Way
Red Elvises
Calm down! I’ll explain everything now! Yes, those same Russian-American merry men from the Six-String Samurai were also influenced by Isaak. Just listen to their most powerful ballad, My Love Is Killing Me. But it doesn’t stop there: there’s a Romantic Junk cover on the same album. Yes, all this seems very far from Isaak, but the fact is that here his trademark melancholy is passed through the longing of the Russian. Imagine if the yard guys had decided to play Isaak instead of Kino or Grazhdanskaya Oborona. It feels the same here, but the guys are also playing well.
Red Elvises – My Love Is Killing Me
These are not all examples of Mr. Isaak’s influence on the modern rockabilly scene and its neighbors, but these are the first ones I remembered. In many more songs, you can find traces of his music, following its own melancholic path and leading a small army of inconsolable and hopeless romantics. I hope you don’t mind taking a walk.
