Cat Power (11 page)

Chan's first job in Atlanta was as a dishwasher at Fellini's Pizza, the unofficial day-job provider for the city's would-be rock stars. “I worked at Fellini's Pizza for three years, six days a week,” Chan has said. “I learned how to make pizzas by watching the guys do it, and I always wanted to make it. One time they let me, and it was really inspiring.” Fellini's is now a thriving local chain that employs well-scrubbed high school kids in mall-punk attire, but when Chan was working there it was dingy, dank, and proudly seedy.

“Now you go into Fellini's and it's actually kinda fancy,” Jeff Clark, editor of the Atlanta-based music monthly
Stomp and Stammer
, marvels. “Back in the day, you would go into the one in Little Five and there was all kinds of graffiti on the walls. It was filthy. It was a little hole-in-the-wall shack.” The transformation Fellini's has undergone reflects the
makeover Atlanta experienced in the last twenty years. “These places were really just very lo-fi, but as they've grown and expanded,” Clark explains, “they make money. It's legit now. That's the way Atlanta has changed, too. Cabbagetown at the time was a very low-rent, run-down, forgotten neighborhood where a bunch of poor people lived.”

For Chan, working at Fellini's was like going to indie-rock college, a trade school for how to play music and also a social club, because everybody in the local scene came through Fellini's for a slice. Kristi Cameron, an old friend of Chan's who is now a senior editor at
Metropolis
magazine in New York City, first met Chan when she was working behind the counter. “I walked into Fellini's with a friend of mine,” Cameron recalls. “I don't know if it's possible for a person to be searingly friendly, but that's what Chan was.” Cameron, who has a reserved demeanor, was taken aback by the undiluted warmth and open confidence emanating off this counter girl. “She was completely imprinted on me at that time. I can remember weird tiny details, like cat-eye eyeliner, and that she was wearing a white thermal-underwear T-shirt that she had cut into a tank top, and she had a kind of twenties bob with bangs. Chan is not forthcoming, but she's very intimate with other people immediately.”

Fellini's (d)evolution from hole-in-the-wall dive to slick multi-outpost franchise means that the store's founder, Clay Harper, now leads a very nice life. One of the employees at Criminal Records, the local independent record shop down the block, suggests contacting the tattooed rocker turned mogul at his French chalet. Back in the early nineties, Harper was just another struggling musician, flitting from band to band, living paycheck to paycheck. Harper's music career peaked with the Coolies, a cheeky Atlanta-based group who in the eighties released
Dig?
, an album of all-Paul (Simon and Anka) covers. Harper found that
his business acumen outweighed his musical talent, started a chain of punk-rock pizza joints, and hired other aspiring artists to man the registers and bake the pies.

“Just about every musician in the nineties and late eighties worked at Fellini's. It was like a requirement,” explains Kemp. Fellini's was so grungy that one former employee and local rocker, who now works at Criminal Records, says that he dared eat only the cheese slices because he knew the guys who topped the pizzas—and was revolted by where their hands might have been. “She was in the right place, because everyone she worked with there had a difficult history,” Clay Harper has said. “She had a lot of life and character. And she was good for business because she was also cute.”

Chan started off as a dishwasher and quickly moved up front, where she served beer and slices and sweet-talked the customers. “The dynamic back then was that you had one girl running the cash register, and then had the guys making the pizza,” Kemp remembers. “It was very ‘keep the girls up front.’” This gig at the pizza store earned Chan her first fans, as word spread very quickly that there was a new, foxy girl working the register at the Fellini's in Little Five. Before Chan played a single note in public, before her lyrics altered the life of a single fan, before it ever occurred to her that music could be her future, Chan experienced her first brush with fame as the hot pizza slinger at Fellini's.

Eric Levin, the shy rock geek who founded Criminal Records, remembers dispatching his teenage clerk to Fellini's to see if Chan was working. “I would send Lillian down there to see if she was working before I would go down,” Levin remembers over coffee at Aurora, the local java house next door to Criminal Records. At the time, Chan was a younger, more tomboyish, less glamorous version of the rock vixen she is today. She dressed in battered jeans and loose-fitting work shirts, wore
her hair short, and had the cherubic flushed cheeks of a teenager, but the singer was already a heartbreaker. “At that point you know when somebody's out of your league,” Levin says, blushing. “She was the complete… like, ‘Oh my God, she's the girl at Fellini's Pizza.’ She was out of everybody's league.” Even in her late teens, her ears ringing with the sound of her mother degrading her femininity, Chan was already aware of her power over men.

Levin was a hard-core Fellini's enthusiast. In fact, it was thanks to the pizza joint that he moved to Atlanta from Daytona, Florida, in the first place. “Daytona was a culturally bereft tourist town,” Levin explains. “I came up here. I'd never been. The first weekend that I visited, I ended up at that pizza place at about two in the morning and they were playing Sonic Youth really loud. In my experience, the only place you would hear Sonic Youth loud was in my car or in my bedroom. It was really a cultural shock. I moved up two weeks later.” Kemp, Chan's friend from high school who also worked at Fellini's, remembers the job as an excuse to play your favorite records all day and hang out with your friends. “We got free rein,” she remembers. “During the day shift it was dead. It was bums coming in with one hundred pennies to get a slice.” Chan knew more about the blues and old soul than any of her friends, but she'd never been exposed to the do-it-yourself indie-rock ethos that her fellow Fellini's employees and the bands they loved represented.

Working at Fellini's was fun. Chan and her sister lived in an apartment nearby in Little Five Points, and Chan was able to walk to work. “She loved Little Five Points,” Lenny recalls. “I'd go to Fellini's. She worked in California Pizza Kitchen too.” At work Chan hung out with affably grungy dudes, charmed the customers, and socialized with the local punks and degenerates who lived on the restaurant's famous dollar slices. Once Chan was comfortable at work (and had heard enough Sonic
Youth, Big Black, and early Pavement records to develop a thing for indie rock), she started to attend her coworkers' gigs. She soon realized that her father's approach to living and working as a musician wasn't the only way to go about it. Some of her new friends were trained musicians, but most were like Benjamin, proudly unschooled. Benjamin's philosophy, which he imparted to Chan, was the polar opposite of Charlie Marshall's. “Just because I couldn't play or sing didn't mean I couldn't be in a band,” Benjamin once said.

Through these new friends, Chan started to view the life of a professional musician as respectable. She admired her friends' dedication to playing music: They may have been self-taught, but they worked at it like they deserved to play, like they loved to play. A local Atlanta band might play two shows a night, work on melodies or lyrics while baking pizzas during the day, then do it all again the next evening. The more time Chan spent with her rocker coworkers, the more conceivable writing and recording her own music started to seem. “My friends would be like, ‘Let's play music,’ but I really didn't know how to play,” Chan has remembered. “We'd jam drunk, in the living room, like people do. It was fun. It didn't mean anything and it didn't make any sense, but that was perfect.”

In 1992, after living and working in Atlanta for more than two years, Chan purchased a used Silvertone guitar from her friend Flat Duo Jets frontman Dexter Romweber. It came with an amp, which could have been useful if Chan ever picked up the instrument. Instead she used the instrument “like a vase or a plant,” she has said. “It'd just sit in my corner like, Oh, it looks really great,” she remembers. “Then I'd call my friend or go to work. I didn't feel like it was me to play music.” For an entire year the beautiful guitar sat in a corner. Eventually Chan picked it up and plucked at it for a few minutes, humming a little before promptly returning it to its spot in the corner. Gradually the few minutes
that she spent tinkering turned into hours, and before long she had written a handful of songs.

Living out on her own and working at Fellini's gave Chan confidence. Soon she even mustered up the courage to play some of her songs for her father. “I had no idea she was even getting into music until she sent me something,” Charlie remembers. “She was always scribbling on papers, and Miranda and Chan were always playing their music and singing together, but I never knew that she was writing songs.” Charlie reacted to his daughter's guitar playing by telling her to get better at it. “I said, ‘If you really want to develop as a guitar player, you need to learn to chord and to pick with an acoustic,’” Charlie recalls. After giving her this minilecture about the value of professional musicianship, Charlie handed his daughter a Takamine (sometimes called a “baby guitar”) that had been sitting in his music room for six months and that he thought Chan would find easier to write on than the grown-up Silvertone she was toting around. “I said, ‘This is such an excellent way to write, because you can take it anywhere.’” Chan gave the guitar away.

One of the first people who ever heard Chan's original songs was Jody Grind bass player Robert Hayes, who worked with Chan at Fellini's. Hayes needed a roommate, so Chan moved into his place in Cabbagetown, which meant that he was around anytime she felt brave enough to play for someone besides her plants. Hayes was intrigued by his roommate's songwriting style, but immediately noticed her debilitating shyness. “I remember Robert saying, ‘Well, Chan wants to be a singer,’ or, ‘Chan wants to write songs,’ but there was something very hesitant about her playing,” Bill Taft recalls. At this point Chan's music sounded a lot like the early Cat Power recordings, particularly the “Headlights” single and
Dear Sir
(out in 1995). The tracks were very elemental, featuring just a few simple chords and a repetitive, almost
droning lyrical refrain. Chan would play these songs sitting in a chair with her body folded over the instrument and her gaze fixed firmly on the old man's dress shoes on her feet.

“Robert would describe it as, ‘Well, Chan sang another one of her songs,’” Taft remembers, laughing. “‘She set up in the kitchen and I had to stand in the living room, she wouldn't let me be in the room with her. I thought it was pretty good, then she just put down her guitar and went for a walk.’” Chan's spare near-dirges were performed in a sort of trance, as if the singer were channeling the woes of generations. By comparison to this early material,
Myra Lee
, Cat Power's second album (which contains such uplifting tracks as “We All Die”), seems sunny. To everyone who heard Chan play, it was clear that this girl had a singular voice and that she wrote remarkable songs—but since she initially wouldn't play outside the confines of her kitchen, it took time before Chan found herself in a position to work constructively on honing her skills as a songwriter.

Even at the precipice of Chan Marshall's career, when she was playing songs for an audience that consisted of her roomate and a couple of alley cats, the singer wasn't sure she wanted to be there. “I always felt like, ‘Me? No.’ It always felt pretentious,” she said later. After enough time spent tinkering with her guitar on her own, and a few silly, drunken jam sessions with her Fellini's friends, Chan became slightly less horrified by the notion of playing music in public. But as her initial hang-ups faded, new ones took their place. “All my friends were in bands, but none of them were girls,” the singer has remembered.

Grace Braun, frontwoman of the rootsy punk cult band DQE, describes the marginalization that came with being the chick in an Atlanta rock band. “It's hard to be the girl that's at the front of the stage because there are expectations,” Braun explains. “She's a girl. She's gonna sing all soft and pretty and quiet, we can turn her all the way down. She
won't be able to play guitar. She's a girl, so we'll just turn her guitar down in the mix. It's not just me, it's a lot of women in the city.”

In spite of her chronic shyness, deep-set insecurities, and the fact that she was female, Chan persevered and started playing regular gigs with a couple of friends. Her first real bandmate was drummer Glen Thrasher, a local musician, tastemaker, and founder of the influential
Destroy All Music
fanzine. Benjamin Smoke inspired Chan to shrug off her father's rules about music, but it was Glen who really showed her how to defy them. “He was my mentor,” Chan has said of Thrasher. “He looked out for me and protected me and told me things about life and he liked me and respected me not sexually. I really looked up to that.”

Thrasher's laid-back but serious approach to musicmaking eased the paralyzing effects of Charlie Marshall's influence; with Glen in her corner, Chan began to see performing as requiring neither the formal training she felt ashamed of not having nor the desire to be a famous rock star, which she found distasteful. “He didn't know how to play drums, but he'd play,” Chan explained. “It encouraged me because I didn't know how to play. With the other boys there was a real agenda to have a band, and it was almost embarrassing to me. It seemed so small-minded to me. Like, ugh, how obvious, how corny. So we'd just make sounds.”

With the confidence honed through practicing with Glen, Chan quickly added a few more players to her makeshift band including guitarists Mark Moore and Damon Moore (who are not related). With a couple of gigs booked for this yet-unnamed group, Mark Moore called up Chan at Fellini's and demanded that she, as the lead singer and frontwoman of this casual collection of players, come up with something. “There was a line of people,” Chan has recalled. “Mark was yellin', ‘We need a name!’ This old man came in wearing a Cat Diesel Power cap. I was like, ‘Cat Power!’ and hung up the phone.” That was it. Cat Power was born.