![]() When the director found himself again, in the “strange world” of Blue Velvet, he also discovered Isaak’s music, and he used an instrumental version of the song “Gone Ridin’” to underscore the scene where his Dorothy (Vallens, the doomed nightclub singer played by Isabella Rossellini) is trapped in a wild nighttime car ride with her young lover/stalker, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan, in his first outing for Lynch as a kind of detective), under the duress of the dastardly Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Right around that time Lynch lost his way in the shiny blockbuster deserts of Dune, after initial successes with the underground cult hit Eraserhead and the steampunk tragedy of The Elephant Man. But Isaak had trouble finding an audience for his music when he showed up in the 1980s, a decade marked by New Wave’s futuristic, electronic sheen. The crooner was blessed with Roy Orbison’s voice and a young Elvis’s matinee-idol looks, and he has attributed some of his retro musical tastes to his mother, Dorothy, a name with special significance to David Lynch. But Isaak comes by his nostalgic covetousness honestly, unless he’s putting on the world’s greatest suckers’ act.” “With Lynch, it’s impossible to tell for sure how much of the obsession with innocence lost is an affectation and what’s heartfelt. ![]() about the singer’s wistful middle-Americanisms,” Chris Willman wrote in a 1993 profile of Isaak for Musician magazine. As the director made explicit in Blue Velvet-where he first used Isaak’s music-there are some nasty bugs churning under the white picket fence, and that duality is personified in Isaak’s brief but memorable turn as FBI Special Agent Chet Desmond in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. But there might also be something deeper and darker to their affinity for midcentury culture than these kitschy idiosyncrasies suggest. ![]() ![]() ![]() As a young director, Lynch famously didn’t curse, and the young rocker didn’t drink or do drugs. On the surface, they share a seemingly unironic obsession with 1950s Americana: the coiffed hairdos, the rockabilly radio, the “peachy keen” attitude. David Lynch launched Chris Isaak’s career, arguably, and there’s a strange kinship between the two artists. ![]()
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