Tag: The Rattler

I love instrumentals and this one and the complete album has some great ones. 

I told CB when he sent me this link…I would not know his name but I would know it was Chris Isaak’s guitar player by just listening. He had a unique sound all his own which I admire. I would know his guitar sound anywhere…I listened to his album El Dorado this week along with the Chris Isaak album San Francisco Days. These instrumentals are great and I wish I could have said this first…but a reviewer said the album is Wilsey paying homage to the cinematic soundscapes of the American West…and I totally get that. This song has such a fantastic sound.  

His guitar playing really helped make Wicked Game such a fantastic and popular song. He used a 1965 Fender Stratocaster and reverb, delay, and slight vibrato. You could tell he was influenced by Duane Eddy, Link Wray, James Burton, and others from that era. 

He grew up in Indiana. In the late 1970s, he joined The Avengers, a punk rock band from San Francisco, where he played bass. They would go on to influence The Dead Kennedys and others. They released two EPs and one album in 1983.  The self-titled album was made from studio takes because Wilsey had left the band by then. He joined Chris Isaak’s band The Silvertones in 1980. In the late nineties and the 2000s, The Avengers would release 4 more albums that were live and studio cuts with Wilsey. 

He made four albums with Issak. Silvertone (1985), Chris Isaak (1986), Heart Shaped World (1989), and the last one San Francisco Days (1993). He and Isaak would soon be estranged and Wilsey went his own way. One of the problems was Wilsey’s growing substance abuse. 

He formed an instrumental band called The Mysteries (they never recorded an album) in the late nineties but it was in 2008 that he made his only solo album of instrumentals called El Dorado. In 2018 he would pass away because of substance abuse.