POP MUSIC : Chris Isaak’s Songs for the Lonelyman : Thanks to David Lynch, the singer finds himself with a surprise hit and a growing circle of fans

Chris Isaak’s brooding music is perfect for late-night, solitary driving--lonely, haunted and decidedly anachronistic, like a ghost signal from some long-defunct border radio station playing Roy Orbison, with a little bleed-over from the Ventures on an adjacent frequency.

If the reason for your post-midnight drive is that you just broke up with your girlfriend, and in your impassioned sulk you’re thinking of taking yourself out over a cliff, all the better. Romance usually equals tragedy in the Isaak songbook.

Combining the pop naivete and world-shaking longing from earlier rock eras with a dark, studied, surly cynicism that is entirely contemporary, Isaak’s post-mod nostalgic aura did not escape the attention of likewise inclined director David Lynch, who first picked two Isaak songs for “Blue Velvet” and then made use of three more in last year’s “Wild at Heart.”

One of the latter--the lonely, lonely “Wicked Game”--was used to accompany a memorable mood sequence on a desolate desert highway, in which apparitions from the past are visible among the passing sagebrush in the glow from the headlights, a teen-angel car crash waits up ahead, and a rock-solid relationship is beginning to unravel. This world is only gonna break your heart, indeed.

Through a series of delayed events that included an influential Atlanta Top 40 radio programmer’s seeing the film and deciding to give the long-forsaken single a shot on his station (See Pop Eye, Page 68), “Wicked Game”--first released on an album a year and a half ago, and as a single last August--has become the year’s unlikeliest hit. And it has turned Isaak, once considered a terminal critics’ favorite, into a bona fide pop star.

This is a big week for the San Francisco-based rocker: With the single reaching No. 7 on the current Billboard chart, he also has a small role in the newly opened “The Silence of the Lambs” and on Friday headlines the Wiltern Theatre, his biggest Los Angeles show. (He’ll also be at the Spreckels Theatre in San Diego on Saturday and the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim next Sunday.)

Like Lynch, Isaak projects a certain arch, self-conscious quality in much of what he does, especially on stage and in his carefully crafted visual image, which recalls the pompadour handsomeness of Elvis and Ricky Nelson with a perverse twist. But when it comes to these melancholy compositions of his, there’s no tongue planted beneath his pretty cheekbones or ironies in the fire.

“I went through a pretty tough time, and I can see it in a lot of the lyrics of my last album, what was going on,” says Isaak, 34. “A lot of times it’s just stuff that I can’t say to anybody. I’m not real good at that, when you’re one on one with somebody and you have something real important to say.

“Those ideas get stuck in my head and the only way I can say ‘em is in music. The way I write, I sit down with a guitar, and usually it’s in the dark, and I just start singing like I’m talking to myself. It all comes out at one time, the melody and the words.”

Of “Wicked Game,” he says, “I was thinking about the feeling when you really want to be with somebody and you already know it’s not going to work before you even are with them. That feeling of ‘The world’s on fire and no one can save me but you,’ that’s how it is.

“Love is amazing, man. Just makes you do stuff (when) you’re way smarter than that. You behave like you just got here. Makes bankers throw their money away. Makes athletes stay up late. Makes musicians sing off-key, man. No end of the power.”

Would it be safe to presume, then, from the downcast slant of Isaak’s brilliantly troubled, three-album oeuvre, that he’s suffered more than his necessary share of gal problems over the years?

“Well, maybe not so many women problems, but maybe one that’s just a problem that I dwell on,” he answers. “You don’t have to have a whole bunch of broken hearts. You just get hurt one time, that’s all it takes, you’re set up for life.”

Quality over quantity in the heartache department, then?

“Yeah. I got a gem.”

Isaak has said he’s not concerned with being “authentic.” This doesn’t mean his act is a put-on. Rather, he says, despite obvious nods to the classic tremolo guitar and tenor vocal sounds of his forebears, and a lack of faddish modern production values, he just doesn’t want to be identified as some sort of “roots” artist preserving the past, a la the curse of the Stray Cats.

“I’m sure to a lot of people, what I do sounds like the ‘50s, the ‘60s, whatever. To me, that’s not my goal. I just try to arrange songs in the way that is gonna sound the prettiest to me. And I usually end up having my voice way up on top, and I’ve got a guitar player who plays really melodic and pretty, and those two elements alone are enough for most people to go ‘Well, that sounds like the old classics.’ But if it sounds good with a synthesizer, whatever it takes, I say use it.

“People are gonna make comparisons to Elvis and all that, but I think if they buy the records and listen to ‘em a while, that comparison doesn’t run real deep. To me ‘Wicked Game’ doesn’t sound like something old, it sounds like something new.”

Still, it isn’t as if Isaak doesn’t invite these comparisons. The cover photo of his 1985 album debut, “Silvertone,” was meticulously modeled on a famous Presley portrait. A more apt link, though, is Orbison, whose lonesome material and pristine voice established a tradition of pure, aching longing Isaak is only too happy to carry on.

Beyond the obvious touchstones, Isaak grew up on the country music he heard coming out of his dad’s pickup truck in Stockton, and acquired a taste for crooners like Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Connie Francis and other “white music” shopping for records at thrift shops.

“I think right now I’m probably the only guy out there who’s got some of those influences,” he admits. “I don’t know too many other people who want to cop any Pat Boone riffs, or at least who are crazy enough to admit it. They only get on Pat Boone’s case because he made a terrible mistake--he sang ‘Tutti Frutti’ and let ‘em film it.

“Well, that wasn’t his greatest song by a long shot. ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ was his thing. You’ve got to give Pat credit. He did some cool stuff.”

Certainly a moodier, bluer soul than the white-buck king, Isaak attributes some of the sense of distance and isolation in his own music to his personal geography.

“I think physical location, what your town looks like, has a lot to do with how it affects you,” he says. “Stockton is really flat around the outside of town. You can park your car out there at night and see way out through the grain and over the farms, as far as you can look. It just goes on and on forever, flat.

“Stockton had those real hot summers where you’d end up out there at 10 at night and it’d be 80 degrees, just standing out there in the middle of nowhere looking out. And that gives you a real sense of being out there on your own.

“The other thing is, a lot of times the radio stations and TV, everything that was called the media, didn’t talk so much about Stockton as it talked about the rest of the world. You got the definite feeling that you were listening in but it wasn’t intended for you, that you were way on the outside.”

In college, at the University of the Pacific, Isaak was more interested in boxing than a career in popular music, but wasn’t about to be mistaken by any of his peers for Jake LaMotta.

“They thought I was a totally oddball personality, and they were a pretty perceptive bunch, come to think of it, because I was definitely on the outside. Part of me wanted to maybe shock people in some way. I remember getting dressed to go to school, and my hair was all up and greasy and short in back, and everybody else looked like Farrah Fawcett. And I had draped pants and these big draped jackets and pointy-toed shoes and pink socks and these outrageous things I’d get at the junk store.

“I’d get dressed at home and think, ‘God, I love the way this looks, this is really cool.’ And then I would get to school and cringe, because it was embarrassing to me; it made another part of me awful uptight to get that attention. I went into class one time and the whole class turned around and looked at me, and this debutante girl walked up after class and said, ‘I love your outfit!’ I thought, outfit? Outfit? “

Isaak might be more likely to run into those same alumni in the thrift stores now that the retro look is all but requisite.

“Yeah, it’s kind of funny. Time changes everything, Bob Wills said.”

Duds revivals aside, the retro sound was given less chance for a popular comeback. Critics have opined in near-unison for six years that Isaak should be a popular star, but few would have placed sizable bets on its actually happening until the Atlanta phenomenon reaffirmed faith that the public, given the opportunity to actually hear this stuff, would respond.

It’s not clear how long Isaak would have been kept on as a loss leader. After three albums on Warner Bros. that received virtually no radio play on any format, there were whispers that the company should at least find a new producer to replace Isaak’s longtime partner Erik Jacobsen (who produced the hits of the Lovin’ Spoonful in the ‘60s).

So this last-minute hit--off a down-for-the-count flop album--comes as sweet vindication for Isaak, Jacobsen, the critics and the record company that hadn’t yet given in.

As for what this unforetold success actually proves, Isaak is just a little less than philosophical. “It reminds me of a statement I heard in (“Jules and Jim”): ‘Scum always rises to the top of the barrel.’ So I knew my day was coming. I think it’s gonna make me a less sarcastic and bitter person.”

He ponders this a moment. “Well, maybe less bitter.”

And less lonely? Don’t count on it.