![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/wicked_game_book.jpg\")
San Francisco and the Bay Area have long been fertile creative ground. Even confining the discussion to music, there\u2019s been a staggering volume of important music coming out of the Bay Area: jazz, psychedelia, folk rock, punk, metal, new wave…on and on. Among the long list of luminaries, the name Chris Isaak deserves mention. His haunting, roots-rock influenced sound has moved millions, most notably in the form of \u201cWicked Game,\u201d a hit in 1990.<\/p>\n
What many outside the region (myself included) may not have known is the extent to which credit for that song\u2019s alluring quality is thanks to guitarist James Calvin Wilsey. A masterful guitarist with a superb regional pedigree \u2013 he had been bassist in The Avengers \u2013 Wilsey created a remarkable sonic atmosphere on Isaak\u2019s records.<\/p>\n
That, in and of itself, might not warrant a book-length treatment. But Wilsey\u2019s life story \u2013 one filled with soaring highs (of the good and bad kind) and plummeting lows (albeit only of the bad variety) forms a chilling narrative. And that story is expertly told by longtime music journalist and first-hand observer\/participant in the Bay Area\u2019s music scene, Michael Goldberg. Across 400-plus pages, Goldberg\u2019s Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey<\/i> charts the musician\u2019s life, an ultimately doomed story line that runs from his troubled childhood to his punk years to his time with Isaak and beyond.<\/p>\n
There are many well-drawn and vivid characters in the pages of Goldberg\u2019s deeply-researched work. But perhaps the character (so to speak) that looms largest over the narrative is heroin. The destructive and highly addictive illicit drug casts a shadow over Wilsey\u2019s life (and ultimate death).<\/p>\n
So while Goldberg\u2019s Wicked Game<\/i> is a fascinating, engrossing and well-paced tale, it\u2019s also unrelentingly downbeat and depressing. As with Citizen Kane<\/i> and Orson Welles\u2019 unnamed reporter, Goldberg\u2019s approach to the story begins at the end, and then flashes back to the beginning. It\u2019s an inspired way to tell the story, but it lets the otherwise unsuspecting reader know right from the start that the story doesn\u2019t end well.<\/p>\n
Drawing at key points from the acquired wisdom of experts in addiction (doctors, researchers and actual addicts), Goldberg reinforces the narrative by placing events into the larger context of drug abuse. And if that weren\u2019t enough, he also dives into the seamier side of the music industry, with a brief but highly illuminating section dealing with the modern-day variants of payola, the practice of, basically, paying for radio airplay. (Hint: despite the indisputable virtues of \u201cWicked Game,\u201d its commercial success is thanks at least in part to that shady but widespread practice.)<\/p>\n
One need not be acquainted with the San Francisco punk scene, nor Isaak\u2019s body of work, nor the book\u2019s main character at all to find Wicked Game<\/i> a worthwhile read. Michael Goldberg has done a service to the memory of Wilsey, to his son (read the book and you\u2019ll understand) and to the musical and cultural milieu from which Wilsey sprang forth, flourished and ultimately departed far too soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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