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Singer-songwriter Chris Isaak says he was destined to make Beyond the Sun, his latest CD of mostly covers by such legendary Sun Studio artists as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis.
"I was born to Blue Suede Shoes," said 55-year-old Isaak -- whose 1950s look has long included a pompadour and flashy suits -- while in Toronto recently.
"My mom was singing Blue Suede Shoes when I was born, so the first thing I heard was a Sun Studios hit; isn't that funny?"
Still, Isaak took his sweet time before making the disc, which also includes one uptempo original song called Live It Up.
After signing a record deal in 1984, he broke through to the masses five years later with his signature song, Wicked Game, and has been entertaining audiences ever since with both music and side gigs as a bit actor in film and actor/host on TV.
"There's an order to everything in this universe," said the Stockton, Calif.-born Isaak. "I love all these artists but the first thing that they all did was they found their own voice. And I thought, 'That's what I've got to do. I have to write my own songs.' I went out of my way not to do Elvis songs on stage. Yeah, I had a hairstyle that looked like that and I was a huge, huge Elvis fan, a huge Jerry Lee Lewis fan, but I was doing Wicked Game or Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing or Blue Hotel and trying to establish my own thing. All my heroes were those Sun Studio guys and that's what I played at soundchecks and at home."
When it came time to record at the actual Sun Studios in Memphis, Tenn., at night -- it's a museum during the day -- the experience didn't disappoint.
"When you walk into that room you are very aware that you're standing on holy ground," said Isaak. "The piano player goes over to the piano and goes, 'Hey, there are cigar burns all over this.' And someone would go, 'Yeah, Jerry Lee played and he'd leave his cigar when he was playing.' And one time I'm playing and I look up and there's a picture of Carl Perkins on the wall and his eye line is looking straight down at me. And he's smiling."
Isaak worked with Cash, Orbison and Lewis and met Perkins, but never Presley over the course of his career. He said he's always been attracted to early rock 'n' roll because "it's honest and pretty.
"I've never heard many other musicians say that they wanted to hear things that were pretty or make pretty music. I want it to be desperately, to be that achingly beautiful pretty sound. All the stuff that I like not only did it rock but it had a real pretty edge to it. It's a rock 'n' roll band with a canary."
Suffice to say, a big moment for Isaak came when he was filming The Chris Isaak Show (2001-2004) in Vancouver.
Exhausted and hanging out in his rented houseboat on Granville Island, he read an article in Oxford American, a quarterly magazine about southern culture, in which Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who passed away in 2003, mentioned that he dug Isaak of modern-day artists.
"I read the whole article and I got to the end and nobody had hipped me that he had mentioned me or anything so it came out of the blue and it just was really important to me. That's why I'm a musician. His music was like I was wandering around and I found a key. Like, 'Hey, there's a way out of my small town.'"
Chris Isaak not only discovered his first Sun Records hit at Value Village in Stockton, Calif., but it's also where he got his vintage style from.
"My mom bought all our clothes at Value Village; we were always skint," said Isaak, whose dad drove a forklift at a box factory while his mother worked at a potato chip factory.
"At the time I would always wax the car and mow our lawn 'cause I wanted us to be more like middle class. I wanted us to look people on TV or something. The reality was I had draped slacks and Italian square-toed shoes and I'd go to school and people would like, 'What's that about?' Because I was dressing like everybody's clothes that they were throwing out, like the '40s or '50s.
"The good thing was they didn't tease me much because I was also boxing all the time."
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