WICKED GAME – The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey
by Michael Goldberg
(Hozac Books)

Spooky, soulful, nitro-twang genius, James Calvin Wilsey, Chris Isaak's beautiful guitarist, who conjured up all those memorable Ennio Morricone spaghetti western, eerie “Twin Peaks” vibes, was born in the Midwest but did not stay there long. His dad was one of those real old time, no nonsense, hard knocks, military aggressors.

I had a lot of close friends who played guitars in my middle school early garage bands, who had fathers like that. Ex-military, real macho, gonna make a manly man outta ya, big game hunter, type o guys. So yeah, being from smalltown Kentucky, my grandfolks family who raised me, were all old veterans and I was not like my cousins. I was never gonna be a 4-H show cattle, play sports, go to war for college money, type of person.

Then, we moved to a town whose only industry was building tanks in Ohio. man, that was a disaster for a little kid like me who could not catch a fucking football. My grandma had gotten me into Elvis from like, birth, almost. I used to wear a pink Presley concert ticket from the Rupp Areana show he never played because he died around in my middle school fedora during my "Pretty In Pink" years.

For me, it all started with Elvis. From there, I inherited an aunt's Monkees records and started seeing their show reruns on WXIX TV. My mother was a school teacher who tried to get me piano lessons, drums in the school band, a folk guitar that got stolen at Baptist reform school, but I sucked as a player. When I discovered Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, I kinda decided I should be a loudmouthed frontman because I had all this feeling inside me, I wanted to express about the conflict I had with the sports and military culture I grew up in.

The authorities were always over disciplining my friends and me. They could paddle you back then, rough you up, grab you by the arm, leave big bruises, and put you in the history classroom closet as an example to the herd and no one saw anything wrong with that. They could put you in a detention hall isolation closet for weeks, and no one saw anything wrong with that. It was extremely fucked up. My first songs were all intended as confrontational Sex Pistols/Damned style fuck you anthems, but they all had the deeedly-dee-deedly-dee, weedly-wee,-weedly-wee, classically influenced metal overplaying on them, because my first friends who played guitar were all like into Ozzy and Quiet Riot. One by one, I ended up having to replace those guys, three of them were brow beaten into joining the Marines and that made me sad.

One of those dudes was a super natural guitar player who sounded like Gary Moore but looked like Billy Idol. So then, I'd be trying to write these romantic new wave songs about my first loves, ala New Order or the Smiths, but they all sounded just like the Ramones and Johnny Thunders, because that's what my replacement guitar players were all into. Finally, as I got a little older and more experienced as a songwriter, my songs were becoming more poppy and melodic, but by that time, the replacement guitarists split for college, so now I was trying to write this country and western, cowpunk influenced, torch and twang type stuff with a real primal, jungle instinct, hairy knuckled Steve Jones/Malcolm Young type sideman, and some of that became a bit promising because it sorta sounded a bit original sometimes, me tunelessly caterwauling my Beasts Of Bourbon, Gun Club, and Claude from Smack influenced street poetry over my main dude's Four Horsemen/Zodiac Mindwarp/The Cult/AC/DC styled, hard rock meat and potatoes riffage.

Few people would recognize how deeply, primarily influenced we were by Chris Isaak, because I do not look like a handsome ‘50s movie star, or sing in a breathtakingly angelic falsetto, but the stark and neon lit, romantic Isaak records were throwbacks to the old Elvis and Orbison music that was so dear to my grandmother, with a real star-crossed Sharks vs the Jets type feel, and the heartsick yearning love songs he did reflected my own feelings for a girl I fell hard for who went away. So yeah, I always loved that Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson and Rowland S. Howard kinda yearning cat call torch ‘n’ twang music. Big effect on me. Both Isaak's very romantic, sad, and sometimes funny lyrics, old show biz entertainer shuck n jive and sequinned cowboy suits, and the late great, James Calvin Wilsey's soulful, late night, bad side of town tone prose were immensely influential upon my collaborators and my whole outlook and worldview, really.

"Kings Of The Highway" meant the world to me when I was in my early 20’s ‘cause my smalltown rollin' buddies and myself were always making these desperate road trips, gas n go, flat tire, leaky oil, broken water pump, reckless misadventures in unreliable $100 vehicles. We were just so determined to make some kinda connection on the coasts so we could ditch our pizza jobs and relocate to the city, where gangs of apeish males were less likely to harass or harangue me for looking like Boy George and trying to become like Billy Idol.

"Trouble...in this town..."

Even in my late teens and early 20s I was STILL being targeted and stalked unrelentingly by these dumb packs of golf shirted goon squads and stonewashed metal mullets because I liked new wave and never could conform to their smallminded military standards of male hood or whatever, I was not a good little capitalist boy scout. I was always getting beaten to a bloody pulp in that state and even the women would act like it's right and it's proper, kinda like all the smiling white folks who used to send postcards of lynchings. It was some very real proto Edward Scissorhands shit growing up goth or new wave in the Buckeye stupid Midwest. My bass player at the time was a little older than me and way more pop-oriented, he got me into some stuff like Lone Justice, Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, Jason & The Scorchers.

Met a sax player in Boston who shared my love for old Elvis and Johnny Cash, Scotty Moore and James Burton, we'd spend many nights sitting there snowed in at our second-floor apartment drinking booze and talking about the Stray Cats and Chris Issak and the Cramps and Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch soundtracks, that "Jungle Exotica" retro fifties stripper music compilation CD I got from my job at Rounder/Ryko Records. We were integrating all those sorta sultry influences into our songwriting, but me and the AC/DC guy were both broke as a joke convenience store and record store workers so we had really limited recording equipment and could rarely find drummers who liked any of the same music we did. We kept running into all these idiot speed metal drummers who liked Metallica and did not understand where I was coming from, at all. At all. Much like now, most drummers just wanted to play for whoever had money and was already "popular", which is almost always code for rich parents paying for recordings and rehearsal rooms. We were into ‘70s glam, some Australian weirdo blues punk, and the romantic jangle-town troubadours of the Jacobites and Bounty Hunters and Snatches Of Pink. Sadly, it was the "Alternative" music era-all that Alice In Chains and Nirvana shit. My various former bandmates were way more into that than I was. I was still deeply immersed in my teenage new wave fixations during all that. When all the normal people were embracing Soundgarden and shit, I was still playing Echo & The Bunnymen, Charlie Sexton, Chris Isaak, Duran Duran, Lords Of The New Church and Hanoi Rocks, mostly. Some Nick Cave.