O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Chris Isaak: A High-Frisk Performance

As a spontaneous, offhanded aside, Chris Isaak started crooning “Misty” toward the end of his early show Monday night at the Coach House.

It could have been a wry gloss on his own high-humidity style of music making.

A key element in Isaak’s sound is the heavily saturated, tremolo-soaked tone of his longtime guitar sidekick, James Calvin Wilsey. If Wilsey played it any wetter, he’d have to be wrung out at the end of each show and hung on a clothesline to dry.

Thematically, most of Isaak’s songs also tend toward dampness. With his highly stylized romantic approach, the San Francisco-based rocker is always singing about dark, heated, ill-fated pairings. Isaak’s three albums conjure up images of sultry, sweat-soaked clinches, followed inevitably by lonely, tear-stained heartbreak.

But Isaak didn’t sing “I get misty” during his a cappella rendition of the Errol Garner oldie. He changed the refrain to “I get frisky”--not a word you would normally attach to his carefully developed sound and image.

This was, in fact, a fairly frisky show for Isaak and his four-man band, the first in a sold-out, two-night, year-end stand at the Coach House. They had reasons to be frisky: It was almost New Year’s Eve, after all, and for Isaak, 1991 was a year to celebrate--a year in which he finally broke through to a mass audience after being touted as a comer since his 1985 debut.

Also, Isaak and band might have been feeling boisterous after a long layoff. Isaak noted that he hadn’t done much since completing a summer tour with Bonnie Raitt: “We’ve been watching TV ever since,” he told the audience.

In any case, the mist quotient was down, and the frisk factor was way up.

That had its drawbacks. On album, part of Isaak’s appeal is his ability to hit a dark, sultry, twilight mood and sustain it. The pleasure lies in listening to him luxuriate in the sweet damnation of doomed romantic obsession. On stage, he didn’t burrow deeply into those obsessions for a sustained sequence of songs. A good, hearty helping of romantic agony would have gone down well as a prelude to any friskiness he had in mind.

Isaak did agonize wonderfully during “Wicked Game.” The song, which hit the Top 10 in early 1991, was one of the most unlikely hits in years. Disc jockeys began playing it late in 1990, about 1 1/2 years after it had flopped on initial release. They didn’t give “Wicked Game” a second life because a record company was putting on the hard sell, but simply because they admired the song. This turned Isaak into a star, and proved against overwhelming evidence to the contrary that there are still traces of intelligent life in the wireless universe. Isaak, in fine voice all evening, milked “Wicked Game” for all the graceful woe and drama he could extract from it.

There were other nice nuggets of romantic desperation sprinkled through the set: “Western Stars,” with its Patsy Cline-style wind-swept imagery, “Blue Hotel,” and “Don’t Make Me Dream About You.”

In between, Isaak got bogged down in some ill-advised whimsy, or tried to alternate the blue-mood music with sprightlier stuff that didn’t always click. “Gone Ridin’,” with its clattering, rockabilly train rhythm, was one of several rocking numbers that threatened to catch fire, but didn’t. Part of the problem was that Wilsey, who does a fine job with atmospheric riffs and accents, didn’t produce any daring solos that could spark a song the way a Dave Alvin might.

The band did muster good humor and abundant animal spirits for romping runs through “Diddley Daddy” and “In the Heat of the Jungle” late in the show. The latter featured Isaak helping drummer Kenny Dale Johnson bang out a tribal beat.

Among the whimsical touches were the garish, matching gold lame suits that Isaak and his band mates wore. Preserving musical inspirations from the ‘50s and early ‘60s is fine, but the same can’t be said for some of the period’s sartorial remnants. Isaak’s between-songs banter didn’t always serve him well, either. One bizarre, long-winded stretch found the singer rambling on about a fanciful subterranean encounter between poor, mild-mannered Wilsey and a dominatrix.

The show didn’t say much about where Isaak might be heading in the year to come (he hasn’t put out any new music since “Heart Shaped World,” the mid-’89 release that became a belated hit in ‘91). He played just one new song, an uncharacteristically sunny but lightweight notion called “Dance Little Sister.” From the title to Isaak’s vocal delivery, the song was little more than a good-natured collection of Presley-isms.

It will be interesting to see whether Isaak can add more developed narrative songwriting to his strong sense of musical roots and his knack for weaving sultry moods. Let’s hope he doesn’t have anything in the works about a subterranean dominatrix--as apt a symbol as that might be for his music of darkness, dampness and sweet pain.