Bonzai: Is it true you're extremely popular in France? 
Isaak: It is, to hear me tell it. [laughs] Actually, we've always done pretty well in France. Our first hit ever was "Blue Hotel," and that was in France. It's funny, you come from the States and you don't expect it. We played a show in Paris, and afterward we walked out and I thought, "What are all these people doing? Does the bus stop here?" And it was people who couldn't get in to the show, hanging out trying to get tickets. We didn't know what was happening, so we walked right out, and it was like Hard Day's Night. We had a ball.
Bonzai: You recorded Forever Blue at Studio D and at Dave Wellhausen Studios. Where are these facilities?
Isaak: The Wellhausen studio is right here in the Sunset District [of San Francisco], near where I live. Studio D is in Sausalito over by the Bay Model. You ever been there?
Bonzai: No, what's that?
Isaak: They've got a model of the whole Bay Area, an exact replica which they fill with water. The Gold-en Gate Bridge is about eight feet across. They fill this thing with water, and when storms come, they can tell where it's going to flood. They also use it to help find bodies. I guess they take a little Bull Durham sack and throw it in-"Looks like he drifted over here."
Bonzai: One of your albums has a photo of you and the band in what looks like an old Twin Peaks motel- where's that?
Isaak: That's my house, where we work up the records.
Bonzai: Is your recording style a lit-tle offbeat?
Isaak: I don't know if it's that differ-ent, but we're lucky to have a pro-ducer who's worked on all of my al-bums. Eric Jacobson is a part of the process from day one. It's not like he comes in at the end and says, "We have two weeks to make an album." He comes in at the beginning, and I'll give him tapes and say, "What do you think of these songs?" He'll point out the ones he likes, and we discuss things from the get-go.
Eric's the hardest working guy you'd ever want to meet. He's got a Norwegian background and brings that kinda uptight, ready-to-work-every day, preparing-for-winter atti-tude. We work things up at my house, and typically we get the whole band together from 1 o'clock till about 6 every day. We work on the arrange-ments, trying the song to see how it feels. And we can do that for six months, if that's what it takes. A lot of artists have to hire musicians to try the material, and then they have to hire a producer-they have to push through. Even though it may take them as long, or longer, they don't get to experiment as much. It's a help to me. 
Bonzai: I was talking last week with an engineer you've worked with, Lee Herschberg...
Isaak: What a nice guy. He's about the nicest guy there is. In fact, we were talking about going in and recording with him again to do some of the stuff we did on Unplugged. We thought we ought to just go in and knock out a record in a more acoustic form. He'd be the guy to do it if you wanted to do one-take recording. That's his forte.
BonzaL Lee mentioned that Eric had worked with Norman Greenbaum and Lovin' Spoonful, so I gather you're in good traditional company with your record-making? 
Isaak: Yes, Eric goes way back and has done a lot of good work. The nice thing is that he doesn't color everything with the "Eric Jacobson Sound." It's really all about the JOMg, and from there we work out what it's going to sound like. 
Bonzai: When you finally get to the studio, do you do a standard basic track setup with the band playing live? 
Isaak: We try to get as much done in a take as you can get done. Hopeful-ly, you get a basic track with rhythm guitar, bass, drums. If the lead guitar is ready, you have that on there, too. On some of these songs, I played lead guitar, so I'd go back in and do the lead guitar at the end. We just try to get as much as we can live. 
Bonzai: Do the vocals come down last?
Isaak: Usually, but there's some stuff, particularly the quiet numbers and ballads, which I do a fair amount of, that gives you a shot to actually sing it when you do it "Forever Blue" - I'm playing it, and I'm singing it. You can get most of it done because it's a quiet song, and you can actually hear well enough in the room to sing it. 
Bonzai: You have a young unknown, Jason Morgan, on the "Forever Blue" album. How did you find him? Isaak: He was playing in a guitar store and just jamming-very good player, very facile. I asked him what he was doing and if he wanted to shoot some sides down. He was all for it, came in and played real well. There's always that point when you look over at the producer and you can see it's going good. Afterward, something gave me a hint that it was his first session. When we went out for a dinner break, he tried to pay for his dinner. Then I knew, "He's green."
Bonzai: Why do you call your band Silvertone?
Isaak: My first guitar was a Silvertone, which I still play-on this album, too. So I named the band after the guitar. 
Bonzai: What comprises your per-sonal guitar and amp arsenal?
Isaak: Well, I've got a lot of mix-and-match stuff. I'll use some old stuff and some new stuff. There's a guy named Paul Chandler here in the Bay Area who has a guitar and effects company and makes a tube box that you can use for distortion, but it also warms up the sound. I also use his slapback-style echo on some things. Bonzai: Is it a tape device? 
Isaak: No, it's electronic, but it's about as close to an Echoplex sound as you can get, without having the hiss. But you can always add the hiss if you want it. Usually, if it's an acoustic gui-tar, it's a Gibson J-200. If it's me on electric rhythm guitar, I try to bring in different oddball stuff, like an old Sil-vertone, or an old Kay guitar. By doing that, I think it gives a little dif-ferent texture to the songs. For the lead guitar, a lot of the time I like to go with a Stratocaster or Telecaster. Buddy Holly was right.
Bonzai: What do you think about this big resurgence of surf music? 
Isaak: It's funny, we just played with Dick Dale, and I'm surprised that so many people now are discovering him. Seven or eight years ago, peo-ple were asking me who I was lis-tening to, and I'd answer, "Dick Dale." They'd go, "Who's that?"
But now, all of a sudden, it's Dick Dale-"Oh, he was in the "Pulp Fiction". Yeah, but he had records out before that. We just jammed with him over in Australia. We were on a TV show with him, and he came down to our gig, and he came up and jammed and pretty much set the place on fire. Believe me, he's one of a kind. 
Bonzal: What is the equipment, the amp and the reverb that you need to get that roJJing, boingy sound? Isaak: You need a Fender amplifier, an old Fender. I don't think you're gonna get it without one. I never saw anybody playing surf music through some kind of digital setup. You go back to what Dick Dale was playing and what the Ventures were using. Bonzai: What's the connection in your life between surfing and music? 
Isaak: Very little, really. I wouldn't say my music is surf music or influenced too much in that direction. If anything, it's that surfing is my release, my break. I'm working all the time, and it's like an hour of Zen or whatever you want to call it. You're on the phone, you're working, you're doing promotion all day long, and then you go out and sit on the ocean for a cou-ple of hours and become normal. I'm from a farm town, Stockton, California, and we're landlocked. Ac-tually not-we have a port, but we're a hundred miles inland. Explain that to people. But, we don't have surf, so when I came to San Francisco, I dis-covered surfing much later on in life. Now I see what all the fuss is about. Bonzai: How do you like this title for your next album: /M"? JM^/fM'?
Isaak: B/"<? J"?/m:-there ya go. Surf instrumentals-I won't have to work on the lyrics.
Bonzai: Why do we human beings write songs?
Isaak: Why do we make art? You've got something to say, and you're try-ing to communicate on some level. It's funny to me-if you just take a look at artists, they're not necessarily the most communicative people in real life. Maybe it's people who have a hard time saying these things one on one, so they put it on a record or in a movie.
Bonzai: I understand you met Roy Orbison? 
Isaak: Yes. 
Bonzai: Lucky guy.
Isaak: I had a good time, too. [laughs] Roy was a great guy. My drummer, Kenny, and I went backstage when we were playing this winery, a vine-yard where they had shows out in this field. We were jamming with Roy backstage in a little house, just playing our new songs, and he was playing his new stuff. I'll never forget it. It was a ball. Later on, we got together again, and he and I were trying to write something together. I went to his house and played all the songs I was working on. And he was playing me some of his stuff. Then we just started singing songs that we both knew, which was surprisingly a lot of stuff.
It was just weird-every once in a while I had to pinch myself and go, "You know, I'm sitting here with Roy Orbison." The first ten or 15 minutes, I was in awe and unable to get past thinking, "It's Roy Orbison. I'm singing with Roy Orbison." And then at some point, you go on just having fun singing. It sounded so good, and we sang together and it was pretty. You know what I mean? He'd say, "Ya know, I used to do this song. You take the low part. Buddy used to take the high part." Later on, I was think-ing. Buddy? He was talking about E"(&(y/A)//y. Yeah, I guess he did call him "Buddy."
Bonzai: What did you learn from Roy?
Isaak: A lot of little things. He said to always have a little bit of hope in your songs. He told me that even though a lot of his songs were about lost love, he always tried to put something in there that was hopeful. Bonzai: I've noticed that in your work.
Isaak: Well, I think it's a good point. You have "Pretty Woman''-no, she's not gonna care for me, but then at the end: "But wait." There's a chance. There's something in his songs that say you don't give up, because may-be tomorrow something will happen. He had been around for a long, long time, and you could learn from just watching the way he behaved with people.
Bonzai: Did he give you any advice about hitting the high notes? 
Isaak: He's very self-effacing, but he made it seem as if there were a secret or a trick. He told me that he didn't really sing so high as people thought. He said, "It's actually that I start real-ly low." Sure. It would be like Mike Tyson telling you the secret to hitting hard: Just take a deep breath first. I remember watching him play live. It was outdoors, and I stood off by some trees. It was just getting dark, and I was watching him and thinking, "He makes it look so damn easy." The best live show I ever saw. The most moving performance I ever saw. There was no reliance on any kind of trick. I go out and do a live show, and I'll run around, I get the audience going. I'll wear a shiny suit, I'll make jokes-you know what I mean? Try-ing to entertain. And you watched Roy, and you realized the guy had so much talent that there was really no need for him to do anything like "en-tertaining," except for singing these songs which he'd written. You know that song, "It's Over"? When he did that song live-unbelievable. Best per-formance I'd ever seen.
Bonzai: You mentioned Mike Tyson. Did you break your nose boxing? 
Isaak: I used to box, and it comes with it. I wish I could have grown up surfing, or if my parents had had some money they could have taught me how to golf or something. Unfor-tunately, it comes with being white trash in a small town".Gee, what sport can we do?" "Hey, let's beat the hell out of each other!"
Bonzai: You know, we share some-thing in common, something very im-portant in our upbringing. We were both busboys.
Isaak: Yeah, I think a lot of people were. I've done a lot of that kind of work. I also did a lot of roofing. Bonzai: What a terrible job.
Isaak: It is a terrible job, but it's one of those jobs where you make enough money, you have enough work and you keep doing it. You work up there on the roof all day, and then you start thinking you can fly. At first you're real careful, and then four or five hours into it, you'll walk right up to the edge. You start to have this attitude like it's no big deal. Then you slip and you go back to where you started. 
Bonzai: Do you have any business advice for musicians who are green? 
Isaak: Make sure the boss is real happy with your work, and he won't fire you. And if you don't know who the boss is, take a look out from the stage. That's the boss. If you think you can cut corners, you're nuts. The boss is gonna check it out. I do a ton of preparation so that I can have fun onstage. I work hard, we do rehearsals, and we'll do the two-hour soundcheck even when we're dead tired so that it sounds good when people get in there. You think you can have a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, party all night and then skip sound-check? That kind of attitude shows up, and the audience catches it. Pretty soon they fire you. Sometimes they fire you a little at a time. You got a thousand people coming, then you've got 800, then 600, 400. Pretty soon you're playing on Tuesday night.
Bonzai: One of my favorites is your "In the Heat of the Jungle." What is that horrendous wild beast sound at the beginning?
Isaak: That's me screamin' over at Fort Funston. It's an old military fort out here where I live in the Sunset District, and it's right on this big cliff overlooking the bay where the ships come in. Most seaport towns have these big guns from World War II- great big turrets built in with under-ground bunkers. The walls are 16-feet-thick concrete. They were built be-cause they thought the enemy planes were going to come and bomb night and day, and they wanted to have a place where they could sit down and have a cup of coffee, you know? With walls that thick, when you go in there and sing, every bit of it comes back. I went there with my engineer, and he sat with the recorder on one end of a block-long hall and I stood at the other end, and I hollered. It's dark in there, pitch black. It's nothing but a dark, abandoned place, and people go in there to make out, or maybe just to walk through. I told my engineer, "I only have about two of these screams in me, so get it." I screamed, and then screamed again. Then we walked out, and about 30 people came pouring out in a hurry-it just freaked 'em.
Bonzai: Who's your engineer?
Isaak: Mark Needham. He's worked on most of my records, or in other cases, Lee Herschberg. They've done all the engineering. Mark has gotten to that level where he can operate the recording machine with his feet. I'm not kiddin' ya. He can hit the but-tons with his knees. A guy who's been in the studio ten hours a day for 15 years gets to another level. Mark will be talking, and he can keep a conversation going while he bumps Rewind with his elbow and he's wrapping tape with his hands.
I once asked Lee Hershberg if I had too much bottom end on one of my records, back when we were mixing down to LPs. He said, "Well let me see." Then he took a test pressing and looked at it, put his eye close and tilted it in the light and was looking at the sheen. I said, "What are you doing?" He told me he was checking the bottom end on my record". It looks pretty good," he said. He was looking across at the grooves. He explained, "Originally, we'd have to mix these things and look at the grooves and check."
Basically, you do anything for 40, 50 years, and you learn something. Guys like Lee...once he's out of the business, retires or whatever, I don't think there will be a generation that comes up and learns as much. He went through the system from the time when they made up engineering.
Bonzai: If you ever get your romantic life together in a totally beautiful way, what are you gonna write about?
Isaak: I can imagine lots of good things to write about. I like love songs. In many of them, the basic story of the song is simply, "I love you." I think that can be written again. One of the most romantic and beautiful songs ever, one that I've been singing this year, is a Hawaiian song written in the 1890s. It has the most basic lyrics: 

When the dew from the night is falling
glistening on the flowers loved so well
then my heart to thee is call-ing
from our little meeting place with-in the dell
My heart is there for you for-ever
It thrills with love for thee alone
It's constancy fades never
I'll be true to thee and thee alone.

What's the whole point of that song? It says, "I love you. I'll never forget you. I think about where we met, and I'll always be true to you, always love you." That's somebody who's got somebody. The guy who wrote that song had his lover. I think there's plenty to be written about being happy.

Roving editor Mr. Bonzai's pompadour days are long gone.

The Fool/Eeep (Stock 1977)
	Robert (Private Stock 1977)	Fresh F(Private Stock 1978)
Rock Billy Bo	Bad Boy (TS, 1980)	Are you gonna be A 1981)