Retro rocker prefers lower key

By Joe Brown

Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Chris Morris

Hey ladies: If you really want to get broodingly handsome retro rock ’n’ roller Chris Isaak’s attention when he plays the Orleans this weekend, don’t fling panties, as you might for other sexy singers.

Toss him some art supplies. Isaak goes crazy for felt-tip pens.

“Most people don’t know about this, but I like to do cartooning and I draw every day,” says Isaak, 52, who notes that the basement of his house looks like Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon factory. “The band guys all know this about me — every place I go on the road, it’s like a compulsion to look for pens and arts supplies. When I get back home from a tour, I’ve got like 2,000 different kinds of pens.”

Isaak offers some of his “scribbles” on his official Web site — he did the cover art for his upcoming album, “Mr. Lucky,” which is due out Feb. 24.

And he might be describing his music as well when he says his artwork can swing “from crazy to sweet to sexy to weird.”

Drawing appeals to him, he says, in part because there’s never been any deadlines or market pressure, nobody to tell him he can or can’t do anything with it.

“That’s kind of the attitude I take about the music, really,” Isaak says, chuckling. “I’m gonna do exactly what I want, and at the end, when I’m done doing what I want, I’ll hope very much that I can find people that enjoy it.”

A lot of Isaak’s admirers have an image of the artist burned into their minds by his videos and album covers: He exists in black-and-white, first of all, and he’s shirtless or just about to be shirtless. Brooding and broken-hearted and only you, the listener, can make it better.

That image cracks him up.

“When you’re in real life, nobody is the image, because they have more dimensions. And sometimes I just have to laugh, ‘Boy, this is totally not the Chris Isaak image.’ ”

He launches into a hilarious, rambling recounting of a recent example, in which his aging parents told him to clean out a vacated house in his Stockton hometown, which led to Isaak standing outside in the winter rain for four hours, waiting for a Roto-Rooter guy to show up.

“I tell my mom once in a while, ‘Mom, you realize I’m a rock star?’ It doesn’t carry any weight with her.”

Rock fans know him as a mirror-suit-sporting singer-songwriter with such hits as “Wicked Game” and “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,” but he’s also a movie actor (he co-stars with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke in the long-delayed “The Informers”), a sitcom star (“The Chris Isaak Show,” which also starred longtime bandmates drummer Kenney Dale Johnson, bassist Rowland Salley and guitarist Hershel Yatovitz) and now, talk show host: Isaak was tapped by the Bio Channel to do a new weekly show called “The Chris Isaak Hour,” which debuts Feb. 26.

“We’ve had all the big ones on the couch,” Isaak says. “Glen Campbell, Cat Stevens, Michael Buble, Billy Corgan, Stevie Nicks ...”

He confesses that the most personally “scary” episode was when he interviewed members of ’70s Chicago.

“In my mind they’re legendary,” Isaak says. “I think they have the biggest amount of radio hits of any American band, ever. And I don’t want to be that guy who screws up and asks somebody in the band the wrong question.”

Isaak’s music nimbly jumps genres and musical eras, but avoids jumping on trends — which means he’s never had to jump off of one.

“I try to do what feels right for each song,” he says. “So I never have to go, ‘Well, no more disco for me.’ ”

He recently recorded a yet-to-be-released live album in Australia, and just finished the 14 songs for “Mr. Lucky,” which he says includes “everything from big ballads to kind of romantic stuff to rock ’n’ roll. The song titles range accordingly from “Mr. Lonely Man” and “You Don’t Cry Like I Do” to “Very Pretty Girl” and “Big Wide Wonderful World.”

“When you do a record you don’t want six songs in the same key,” Isaak opines. “You want a couple of ballads, then something upbeat, and then something different and then a slow, sexy song, and then a fast song and then a crazy song. I want that on a record. If I pick up somebody’s record and the whole thing is like, (he jokily croons) ‘I want to kiiiiiiill myseeeeelf,’ I guess those records are good for certain occasions, but I need a mix — part John Lennon, part Ernie Kovacs.

“My test has always been, if I can put it on in my car and I want to drive around and listen to it, I’ve got a good record,” says Isaak, who estimates that his new one, “will probably take you about 150 miles, easy.”