Album: Always Got Tonight.
Year: 2002.
Let’s pour one out for The Chris Isaak Show. Gone for over a decade now, The Chris Isaak Show – running from three seasons from 2001 – 2004 on Showtime, of all places – was as agreeable and as friendly of a TV show as you could imagine. But it’s nowhere to be found: because of what I’m assuming to be rights issues over the original musical performances featured every week, it’s not on DVD, not on streaming, and you can’t even torrent it (or so I’ve heard.)
It’s a ghost show, and that sucks, not because The Chris Isaak Show was great, but because it was fun and funny and highly watchable. Each week, Chris, the actual guys in his band, and a comic actor ringer they brought in to pretend to be a hipster doofus keyboardist would face some kind of low-stakes crisis involving either Chris’ career, a girl or both. In the end, it would all be resolved in time for everybody to play a song with whomever the musical guest was that week.
I really enjoyed it at the time, maybe because in the early 2000s, the San Francisco locations helped me get over some of the sadness I felt over leaving The Bay Area.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #195: Chris Isaak – “American Boy”