Cat Power (13 page)

Before the legendarily unhinged Cat Power shows began in the late
1990s, Chan was already exhibiting unusual behavior onstage, and her fellow Atlantans didn't know what to make of it. “I went to the Earl, and I paid my ten dollars,” local journalist Chad Radford remembers of his first Cat Power show. “The place was packed with people sitting on the floor Indian style. She starts a song, and then stops. Then she starts playing again, and while she's playing, she starts crying. I'm just like, what the fuck's this? She's like, ‘I'm so sorry you people came to see me play, and paid all this money.’” Chad was horrified by the nonperformance he was seeing from this heavily hyped local artist. “I'm just like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” he remembers. “People in the audience were like, ‘You can do it!’ And I'm like, ‘God, what the hell did I just walk into?’ I stayed for about ten songs before I got so frustrated I just got up and walked out. I was just thinking and thinking and thinking about how terrible it was, but then it dawned on me that any artist that could make a person react so strongly has really created something special. If you can piss somebody off so much that they're going to storm out, you've done a good thing. That's punk rock!”

For someone like Owings, a promoter and well-versed rock geek with a low tolerance for bullshit, even before Chan started getting famous, Cat Power's shows seemed maddeningly disconnected from the recorded music. “She would just be onstage, doubled over with her hair in her face, mumbling songs,” Owings remembers. The
Chunklet
founder's love affair with Southern culture has been long and passionate, but he was never a Cabbagetown insider, and as such he was not part of the built-in musical family Chan felt close to. Around Owings and other nonintimates, Chan displayed a pathological shyness that her Fellini's coworkers and bandmates didn't see. “She was always sort of insecure, shy,” Owings remembers. “Any time you would ever talk to her, it would either end in her crying or walking off and then crying. When I first moved to
town, I was putting on a show at Under the Couch and she came to it. I was with
journalist and Chan's friend
Steve Dollar and I said something. I say a lot of semicrass things, but I mean them in the most respectful, friendly, jovial way. I was fucking with her in this way and I remember her tearing up and then walking away. She wasn't even performing. I mean, we were just talking.”

Over the years, when Cat Power would come back to Atlanta to play, Chan drew a wide audience of interested music fans, many of whom never heard her perform during her Cabbagetown days and were curious about what they had been missing. “The first time I saw her was opening for Liz Phair at the Center Stage Theater,” Steve Dollar, who works as a journalist, remembers. “I hadn't even heard about her. I just remember it being really, you know, offbeat, and people not digging it too much. There was a whole disjunction between a certain
buzz
about her that was completely not matching up with her performance.” Dollar has a reputation among his friends for dragging people to shows they later regret paying for, and his first Cat Power gig was a perfect example. Everyone he brought with him was pissed off by the end of the show.

As Cat Power became more successful, it would have been understandable if some of the musicians Chan left behind resented her for breaking free. In the eyes of Chan's hometown peers, other bands were equally if not more worthy of fame and glory. “All of us thought, ‘We're gonna be genius millionaires traveling the world, playing music,’” Bill Taft, who played in almost every important Cabbagetown band besides Cat Power, remembers. “She was right up there, she was like us. It was just like, There's Benjamin, there's Chan, you know, There's Kelly
Hogan
, there's Grace
Braun
and DQE. So for me the question is not so much, Why is Chan so successful? but Why isn't Grace? Or Glen?”

In spite of the fact that Cat Power was the only commercial success
to emerge from the Cabbagetown scene, Chan is mostly adored by her old friends from home, and even those who didn't know her personally respect her for maintaining her roots and not projecting haughty attitude when she comes back to town. “That's what's so fascinating to me about her,” Kemp explains. “There were a lot of people that really struggled musically here and that wanted to do more, but you don't find the kind of resentment that you find with the Black Crowes, for instance. You just don't come across people who have anything bad to say about her. That cannot be said for the few that made it out of Atlanta.” Jeff Clark of
Stomp and Stammer
agrees. “Everyone was always very proud and happy for her. There was not any hometown resentment. When she comes back to town she always hangs out with her old friends. It's not like she's on any kind of star trip.”

Chan has as much affection for her hometown as it has for her. After recording
Moon Pix
in the winter of 1998, the singer returned to Atlanta and rented an apartment, and later she bought the modest Cabbagetown home that she still owns and put it to good use entertaining old friends, letting her collection of nomadic new ones crash there, enjoying the closest thing to a real home she'd ever had. Kemp giggles remembering the time that Chan breezed into town, called everyone she knew, and demanded that they appear that evening at her place for an impromptu black-tie cocktail party. “She wanted all the girls to wear dresses and I kept telling her, ‘I'm coming straight from work and I have jeans on,’” Kemp remembers, giggling. “She kept prank-calling me and telling me it was the telephone company.”

The court jester in Chan first came alive in Atlanta. She was always a charmer, but as a kid she needed that charm to survive. It was in Atlanta that Chan first learned to enjoy the jovial side of her personality and to let her friends in on it as well. There are few people close to Chan
who don't comment on how funny she is and on how starkly that side of her personality contrasts with her public image as the indie princess of darkness. In the 2000s, Chan has spent more time on the road or camped out in other cities than she has in Atlanta, but in many ways the singer has never really left the city of her birth. Even after she moved to Miami in 2003, Chan kept her house in Cabbagetown, and she always comes back, even if it's just for a day or two at a time.

Lots of her local friends remember a particularly wild, comedic Christmas party the singer held in 2005. “We got a frantic phone call from Chan,” Taft remembers. “We
had
to come to her Christmas party in Cabbagetown, and I had to bring the children. So we go over there, and it's a great party. She spent an hour in her living room playing Frisbee with my daughter. It was totally fun and not at all, you know, ‘I'm an artist and I don't have time for doing anything except being creative.’ It was like a church social.”

Tradition is important to Chan. She was born in Atlanta, she performed her first show in Atlanta, and she still considers the city, and Cabbagetown in particular, to be a kind of home. She comes back when she needs to remember herself. “I saw people that we went to high school with at that party,” Kemp remembers. “There's something about the South that is so easy for her. Here in Atlanta, there's a comfort for her that can't be found anywhere else.”

As deep as Chan's connection is to the South in general and to Atlanta in particular, something drove her to leave. Chan absolutely could have made a career as a musician in Atlanta. Everybody else she knew there did. Though some of her former bandmates, like Glen Thrasher, are no longer playing, the majority of the scene's key personalities are still making music. Rock*A*Teens frontman (and Chan's former boyfriend) Chris Lopez now plays in Tenement Halls with Bill Taft. Kelly Hogan
is still releasing records as a solo artist, and Grace Braun is working on new music. They're all still playing music, but none of them has a modeling contract with Chanel or a condo on Miami Beach. For all her disgust at what Chan has called the “obvious” reality of starting a rock band and aiming for fame, there was something in her that propelled her to do exactly that, and to succeed at it where most of her peers failed.

“She's a product of this crazy little artist enclave and look at what it did to her,” Aaron points out. “She's an enigma. She's got a look. Atlanta has always been like that. It's never been about the music necessarily. The only thing that ever came out of the Atlanta punk scene were the drag queens. There's never been a good Atlanta punk band, but there's been tons of great Atlanta drag queens. RuPaul. Lady Bunny. They all moved to New York. They were all weird personalities acting out, kitschy, druggy, weird. I sort of see her as someone who was a child of all that but was really savvy about turning it into a more conventional career. I look at her as a real weirdo, but also as someone who moved to New York and crafted this persona for herself, like a torch singer who came out of this freaky underworld.”