Cat Power (12 page)

The name made absolutely no sense. First of all, Chan is a dog person. (Her chronic allergies kept her from having pets as a child, but she now has a French bulldog named Mona.) Secondly, the phrase “Cat Power” is conventionally associated with CAT, the logo and abbreviation for Caterpillar farm machinery.
CAT POWER
is displayed prominently, in all its yellow-and-black glory, on T-shirts and trucker caps (like the one worn by the Fellini's customer) advertising the company's tractors, bulldozers, and other machines. “Cat Power” represents hard labor, dirty fingernails, greasy-spoon diners at truck stops, long nights on the road, burlap, flannel shirts, dusty back roads, horse feed. It means early mornings, calloused hands, sweat, the smell of hay, Wrangler jeans, and country music. The name seemed impossibly ill suited to the enigmatic, fragile songstress with the dark soul who selected it.

Chan has since said she regrets naming her band so impulsively. “I didn't think about it,” Chan has said. “I never thought that this would be what I would be doing.” In fact, Chan says, she chose the name Cat Power out of defiance at being bossed around by her bandmates. “The guys said, ‘You're the lead singer.’ ‘Why am I the lead singer?’ ‘Because you're the girl,’” Chan has remembered. “I was so angry that I was just kidding
about suggesting the name
, kind of like, ‘Fuck you.’ But I wish I'd actually thought about it, because it doesn't mean anything.”

In hindsight the name seems uncannily apt; it's intriguing but reveals almost nothing about the artist behind it, which is perfect for a woman who wants to hide in the public eye. Cat Power has been both a straight-up blues-rock group and a willfully weird chick folk singer; it's been a Memphis soul revue and an austere guitar group. Even the name's gritty association with farm machinery, which initially seemed so incongruous with the ethereal elegies Chan was writing, now feels like a necessary representation of this sleek Chanel model's workingman past.

After a few rotating lineup changes, Cat Power became a trio with Mark Moore on guitar, Glen Thrasher on drums, and Chan on vocals. Though Chan was close with Moore (they allegedly dated for a while), it was her continued
friendship with Thrasher that propelled the band forward. Thrasher, a slight, pale, spectacle-wearing rock boy, was one of the most influential people in Atlanta's music scene and vital to Chan's development as a singer and songwriter.

His role as a local guru has largely passed, but Thrasher still acts as if he's behind an intellectual velvet rope. Numerous attempts were made to interview him for this book, and though he would respond to e-mails and suggest he might talk, Thrasher mostly just explained why I wasn't qualified to speak to him or write about Chan.

“Glen is a piece of work,” Henry Owings,
Chunklet
founder and longtime Atlanta scenester says, shaking his head. “He's kind of a throwback to that total weird agro artsy-fartsy confrontational asshole grating dick in Cabbagetown: For every real polite person like Ben from Smoke, there's a Glen Thrasher, where it'd be like, ‘Wow. You're a fucking dick.’”

It's unfortunate that Glen's bitterness has become so deep-seated, because his accomplishments are impressive. He grew up in Atlanta and began venturing into the city's derelict neighborhoods when he was a teenager, seeking out new music, new art, new material for
Lowlife
, the zine he published from 1984 to 1992. Gerard Cosloy, Matador Records cofounder and the man who would eventually sign Chan, admired Thrasher's writing and first read about Cat Power in an issue of
Lowlife
. During the 1980s, Glen also cohosted an experimental radio show,
Destroy All Music
, that featured expertly selected sets showcasing the local bands that were Cat Power's forebears.

Thrasher put on annual debauchery-filled
Destroy All Music
festivals, which allowed the bands he promoted on air to get together and play live. The gleefully chaotic, performance-art-meets-rock shows he hosted inspired many of the artists who shaped the Atlanta music scene in the 1990s. “Destroy All Music was three or four nights of noise improvisers,
and punk-folk groups would play,” Bill Taft, who played in both of Benjamin Smoke's bands as well as other local influential groups like the Jody Grind, remembers. “They'd sing their songs, they'd roll around on the floor, all their instruments were covered in fur, they'd eat glass—they wouldn't eat glass, but it was like that. None of their songs had verses or choruses, and they were all very focused moments of emotion, very intense dirges. It exorcised demons.”

Glen Thrasher had an uncommonly refined ear for scouting exceptional musicians like Chan, as well as the organizational skills to unite a handful of disparate groups into a genuine musical movement. “I really can't stress enough that Glen is very modest,” says Grace Braun, whom he also nurtured. “He can be quite curmudgeonly when he feels like it but unlike some people in the city, I've never heard him stand up and say, ‘I did this and I made this person and I am the reason why they are famous.’”

“The first time I saw her she had Glen Thrasher playing drums, which is basically how she started out—it was just her and him,” Jeff Clark of
Stomp and Stammer
remembers. “She had just been playing a very short time, a matter of months. It was in the basement of the Dark Horse Tavern.” The Dark Horse Tavern used to host Brunch That Hurts, a series of comically debauched events featuring hangover-curing cocktails and lots of local rock bands. “Everybody would play around two
P.M.
,” remembers Kemp. “Everybody was hungover, and whoever kinda showed up to play, played. There were people who showed up there who hadn't been to sleep.”

These early Cat Power sets consisted of a mixture of the spare anti-songs Marshall had been writing on her Silvertone, plus a collection of covers—mostly old blues standards and songs by Bob Dylan. “She didn't really play that many shows before she left, but she'd gotten a lot
of good press, and everyone started talking about Cat Power and Chan and how cool it was,” Clark remembers. “There was nobody else doing anything like what Chan was doing.”

Though Cat Power was jockeying for position amid a sea of other respected local bands, it's worth mentioning that with the exception of the Rock *A* Teens, who had a record deal with Merge and were somewhat known outside the Atlanta area, none of the major Cabbagetown rockers ever made it. The entire scene existed in a vacuum, with all the breakups, make-ups, and rises and falls in favor noticed only by those who were directly involved. “The Cabbagetown scene was more about being a freak on drugs, being an artiste smoke-and-mirrors jazz heroin freak something-or-another,” says another Southerner, Charles Aaron. “Playing music was only a small part of whatever your personal transformative performance and your freak-outsider persona is. The music produced out of that was very much of its time.”

Cat Power was one of the most interesting bands playing in Atlanta in the early 1990s, but Chan didn't serve as an emissary for the entire Atlanta music scene. In fact, though Cat Power earned a decent following before moving to New York in 1992, those outside of the Cabbagetown family (and probably some of those within it) had not made up their minds about Chan's talent by the time she left. To some she was still just the cute girl from Fellini's. “I remember buying the first single and then going to see her at the Atomic or the Shoebox in Athens in 1994,” Owings remembers. “It just didn't leave an impression. Shortly after that,
Sonic Youth drummer and Cat Power advocate Steve Shelley
put out
Cat Power's second album
Myra Lee
. I remember listening to it and I was like, I think this is great. But then she played here and in Athens all the time, and it never connected.”