Isaak’s Doleful, Romantic Songs Reach His Audience

After two well-received opening songs in his concert Saturday night at the Spreckels Theatre, Chris Isaak reminded the audience that his last gig in San Diego was at the much homier Belly Up Tavern.

“What you see here tonight,” he said, waving at the expansive stage that seemed to dwarf his three-piece group, “is a bar band with big gestures.”

Like others that Isaak would liberally sprinkle throughout his 90-minute set, the off-the-cuff remark got a big laugh and helped to mitigate the almost unrelievedly woebegone tone of his work. But it would have been more accurate to say that his is a ballad band that sometimes tries too hard to be a bar band.

From the music on his two albums, “Chris Isaak” and “Heart Shaped World,” it’s easy to define the niche Isaak wanted to carve for himself in the pop world: that of the romantic lone wolf driven by the quest for perfect love but psychically impaired by its inaccessibility. Doomed to chronic forlornness, he seeks release in songs that drip honeyed despair but at the same time send out a message in a bottle to the unknown woman who might rescue him. Judging from the response of Saturday’s largely female crowd, the singer’s strategy has worked almost to perfection.

If anything, the lure is more forcefully cast in a live setting, where Isaak’s Kurt Russell-ish looks and Elvis-on-Valium crooning put flesh on the image, and where his natural, frequently self-effacing wit neutralizes any pretentiousness. Dressed in a fashionably retro, loose-fitting, pink satin suit (the band wore ice-blue versions of same), and toting a guitar bearing his name and purposefully tacky, scrolled inlay (a la early Presley), Isaak embodied the Ricky Nelson-era ideal of the pop star as clean-cut lover boy.

With the deliberateness of a man setting traps, Isaak strode a linear course marked by the two basic song types on his albums. One is the plaintive, almost lugubrious ballad (or mid-tempo moaner) about the dark side of love; its opposite is the rickety locomotive rocker that is more reminiscent of the Stray Cats’ designer rockabilly than of Gene Vincent’s cruder, seminal brew.

Technically, live renditions of such doleful odes as “Heart Shaped World,” “Blue Spanish Sky,” and “Wicked Game” (Isaak’s current hit single) suggested that Isaak’s breathy, boudoir singing is better realized in the vocal-friendly confines of the recording studio. Although the women in attendance might disagree, Isaak’s voice was more impressive when he opened it up to unleash a strong, steady, full-throated tone, using the theater’s natural acoustics to his advantage as he reached for the high hard ones.

Nonetheless, Isaak’s lovelorn tunes, which are drenched in the sort of reverberant, rock-in-a-pond guitar tremolo that Angelo Badalamenti uses to such good effect in the “Twin Peaks” score, provided some of the most captivating moments in the show.

This is Isaak at his best: when he combines the tragic-aria balladry of Roy Orbison with the beatnik-cabaret moodiness of Tom Waits; gives it the fluid, surf-guitar-inspired tonal cushion of Bob Welch-period Fleetwood Mac; and frosts the mix with singing that bridges the effete melancholy of Bryan Ferry (in the lower and middle ranges) and the stigmata passion of the late Tim Buckley (on the higher notes).

The studied sensuousness of Isaak’s delivery was not lost on the squealers in Saturday’s audience, whom the singer successfully teased late in the show with an impromptu, dirge- like, a cappella verse from Gene Pitney’s 1961 hit, “Town Without Pity.” It was a harmless enough digression, a play on his fans’ servility. But the gesture’s obvious hokum quotient called into question the sincerity of Isaak’s overall approach.

When mopishness becomes as stylized as the shadowy tableau in a Calvin Klein ad, it connects less with the heart than with that part of the conscious mind that sorts through each day’s sensory stimuli for quick takes on complex ideas. There were points in the concert when Isaak seemed less a pop star than an actor playing one.

This was nowhere more apparent than in the up-tempo stuff that is Isaak’s Achilles heel. It’s not that such songs as “Don’t Make Me Dream About You,” “Wild Love,” and the as-yet-unreleased “Beautiful Homes” are bad, but that they’re merely serviceable, with nothing special in the way of lyrics, structure, melody, or chordal harmony to recommend them. It doesn’t help that Isaak is not a particularly skilled guitarist, and that his lead stringman, James Calvin Wilsey, is competent but lacking in the kind of versatility and improvisational vocabulary that can light a fire under average material.

Even more than on vinyl, concert versions of Isaak’s up-tempo tunes seemed mostly functional, positioned both to change pace and to satisfy the unwritten code that requires that a certain percentage of a rock star’s shows will actually rock .

Intentionally or otherwise, Isaak’s use of humor makes it difficult not to like him immensely. Twice during the show he embarked on monologues that joined the rambling absurdities of a Tom Smothers with the dry, Dada wit of a Dan Hicks. Such good- natured and frequently funny silliness probably endeared Isaak all the more to the house’s short-skirt-and-high-heels contingent. It definitely made it less satisfying to pinpoint his shortcomings.