Cat Power (16 page)

Chan didn't know it at the time, but before she'd ever released her first Cat Power single, before she'd signed a record deal or entered a recording studio or been on tour or headlined a show, she had already converted one of Cat Power's most ardent and influential fans in Matador's cofounder. Cosloy first heard about Cat Power in Glen Thrasher's zine,
Lowlife
. Before Chan relocated to New York from Atlanta, Gerard and Glen developed a grudgingly respectful relationship based on their mutual involvement in fanzine culture. “I had a correspondence relationship with Glen,” Cosloy recalls. “At first it was kind of adversarial, and then over time kind of more, ‘Well, this is what you do, and this is what I do, and I kind of like what you do even though I wouldn't do it myself.’ I got to know him that way and he moved to New York and I remember hearing from him that he moved here and that he had a band. And his band was called Cat Power. So I was instantly curious.”

Cat Power's first New York show was held in a huge loft that doubled as the apartment of the label head's former bandmate Michael Pavlak. Gerard's then-girlfriend, Vicki Wheeler, booked all Bicycle shows—most of which were held at Michael's pad. “She put on a lot of good shows,” Gerard remembers. “Many people who are today super-duper famous played some of their first New York shows in Michael's apartment, and Cat Power was one of those shows. Glen was playing drums, I think Mark Moore was playing guitar, and Chan was playing guitar. My first reaction to it was they were doing something extremely skeletal. Kind of intense. Kind of spooky. The material was definitely very good and very interesting.”

“I was completely terrified,” Chan said later of this show. “We played in an art gallery, and everybody was a part of the old no-wave
scene in New York. So they're all experienced and intellectual and talented and I'm really dumb. I don't know anything about music. So it was pretty miserable, actually. Then
Glen
introduced me to his friend Gerard from Matador, but I didn't know anything, so I was just like, ‘Nice to meet you.’”

Even at these early Cat Power shows, Chan was already projecting a mysterious charisma. “It was really hard to get a handle on what was up with Chan,” Cosloy remembers. “She had a presence but it was sort of like an accidental apologetic presence, because she didn't make a lot of eye contact with the audience, she turned away from the crowd a lot, didn't make much conversation in between songs. But it really worked. I mean, I thought they were really, really good. And it was definitely a band that I wanted to see again ASAP.”

Charles Aaron didn't agree. “I was at that show and she was terrible,” the
Spin
editor remembers. “It was ridiculous! She didn't turn around. Stood next to the drummer. Didn't face the crowd. There was no music happening. She was the first or second person on the bill. This weird girl from Atlanta. Yeah, whatever. Here's yet another thing that Vicki and Gerard are going to tell me I have to watch out for before there's even any evidence that it's worth a shit. It took her a long time to develop into something.”

Matador Records was founded in 1989 by a nineteen-year-old New York rock geek named Chris Lombardi. After working on the fledgling label by himself for a few years, he asked Gerard Cosloy, Boston-based DJ,
Conflict
founder, and then head of Homestead Records, a venerated noise-rock label, to help him run it. Lombardi had the level head required to run the business, but he needed someone with serious scouting abilities and a reputation for tastemaking. Cosloy was perfect.

While in charge of Homestead, Cosloy helped put out some of the
most influential underground records of the nineties, including Big Black's
Atomizer
, Sonic Youth's
Bad Moon Rising
, and Dinosaur Jr.'s very first album,
Dinosaur
. These albums would later be recognized as part of the golden age of indie rock, but at the time they were adored by a relatively small but passionate contingent of the listening public. These difficult-to-please egghead-rock boys and girls were exactly the people Lombardi needed to court as customers. From the very beginning, the key roles performed by Matador's two central figures were established: Lombardi provided the money and business savvy, Cosloy brought the cred.

“I was really obsessed with some bands Matador had,” explains Mary Timony, frontwoman for droning noise rockers Helium, who were signed to Matador. “At that point, the label you were on really defined you more than it does now. You would meet people at the label who were really cool, and we got to tour with other bands. Even if it was just going to the record store to look for seven-inches or going to people's shows and buying their merch because that was the only place you could find it, there was a certain level of excitement.”

Beautiful and enigmatic Timony was as poised as anyone to become the queen of 1990s indie rock, and for a time the New York zeitgeist definers were as giddy about her as they became about Cat Power. “I remember Vicki Wheeler being the same way about Mary Timony when Helium first came along,” Aaron remembers. “Really being, ‘Oh my God, this is an incredibly important woman who is very mysterious and inscrutable and is going to have a big impact.’ In the beginning I was really skeptical about that, but I grew to love that band. She had a lot of charisma and she was beautiful and she was weird. There was a cult of personality around her. I listened to her records. Wrote about some of those records, and to this day, I think she's as talented as Chan.”

Cosloy's reputation as an unimpeachable arbiter of cool established Matador's initial authority, but it was the bands he and Chris signed once the label was up and running that solidified the label's influence. “Their first breakout thing was Teenage Fanclub, followed by Pavement,” Jim Greer, former
Spin
editor and sometime member of Matador band Guided by Voices remembers. “That's pretty good right there. And Liz Phair was pretty close with that, too. It wasn't even just those bands, but some of the lesser-known ones that still had a lot of credibility and critical acclaim. Hardly any sales, but lots of critical acclaim. I'd have to put down a lot of that to Gerard, it's just his ear.”

When Cosloy joined Lombardi to head up Matador Records in 1990, they were looking ahead to years spent scouting new underground talent, shepherding along their albums, and exposing artists they admired to a savvy if relatively small audience. That's what independent record labels were about in the late eighties and early nineties: They couldn't compete in terms of distribution and sales with any of the so-called Big Four corporate labels, but they made up with taste for what they lacked in market share. As it turns out, mere months before Chan moved to New York—and two short years after Lombardi founded Matador Records in his bedroom—indie “cred,” and the people who embodied it, especially Chan Marshall, would become the most powerful forces in mainstream music.

On September 24, 1991, Geffen Records released Nirvana's second album and major label debut Nevermind. By January of the following year, it had replaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous in the number-one spot on the Billboard chart
.
In this one instant, an entire musical, social, and political culture that had been proudly on the fringe for the better part of a decade suddenly became mainstream.
Nevermind
's breakout single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was playing in your neighborhood drugstore, grocery store, convenience store, and minimart. Your grandparents had read articles about its impact in arts sections of their local newspapers, and progressive teachers were letting students write papers about the horror of high school life as revealed in the “Teen Spirit” video. Weird Al released a parody (“Smells Like Nirvana”), and fashion designers started sending flannel-influenced collections down the Paris runways. Nirvana and the alternative culture they represented was everywhere. Bands that never had to consider heretofore impossible issues like fame and wealth were suddenly facing major moral dilemmas.

“Signing to a major label was the most uncool thing you could do,” Timony remembers of the pre-Nirvana era. “But after Nirvana broke, major labels were snapping up a bunch of these bands that were around.” A generation of indie-rock bands who had formed under the pretense that they would be forever ignored by the mainstream instantly became commercially viable.

“It was because of Nirvana and the post-Nirvana feeding frenzy,” Jim Greer, who was working at
Spin
in 1991, remembers. “A lot of bands who normally wouldn't have had any commercial expectations all of a sudden had what turned out to be in most cases unrealistic commercial expectations. It went from the highest you could ever hope for was to be as successful as the Pixies, which was 250,000 records. That was huge. That was enormous. People like Sonic Youth were jealous of the Pixies' level of success. Then after Nirvana happened, and a few other bands came along and sold a million records, in their wake there was an expectation.”

Greer remembers going with Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard to a meeting at Atlantic Records when the band was entertaining offers from various major labels. “It was funny because Danny Goldberg, head of Atlantic then, he was like, ‘You know, Stephen Malkmus wouldn't even come see me and meet me,’” Jim remembers, laughing. “And Bob's like, ‘I want a gold record!’” In a post-Nirvana world it was suddenly conceivable that Guided by Voices, an extremely lo-fi revolving cast of beer-soaked Midwestern garage rockers led by a retired school teacher, not one of them cute or clean, could sell a million records easy.

In a post-Nirvana world, artists like Chicago-based singer-songwriter Liz Phair began their careers believing that wit, irony, and snark were not necessarily impediments to mammoth success. When Phair started out, she had none of Chan's hang-ups about fame, and when she went shopping for record labels she looked explicitly for a company that offered both strong indie credibility and the corporate vision necessary to turn her into a gigantic rock star. “What's the best indie label, just give me top of the line,” Phair remembers asking her friend and future producer Brad Wood when she was searching for a home for the songs that would become her landmark 1993 debut,
Exile in Guyville
. Wood had a one-word answer for her: Matador.

A cassette called
Girly Sound
filled with Phair's spare, confrontational rants was circulating on what she calls the “underground railroad of indie-music exchange,” and eventually landed on Cosloy's desk at Matador. Initially Phair was intimidated by Matador's reputation as supreme-cool hunters, so when Cosloy and Lombardi came to Chicago to visit her, the pressure to impress them was intense. “Chris wanted to know if there was any cocaine to buy in the 'hood,” Phair remembers. “I didn't know how to get any, but I drove them to the bad part of town
and I acted like I knew what I was doing, and we ended up buying baking soda. He was really pissed, I was kind of humiliated. I was like, ‘Wow, there goes my cool facade.’”

Lombardi and Cosloy overlooked Phair's drug-scoring naïveté, and on June 22, 1993, Matador Records released Liz Phair's debut album,
Exile in Guyville
, which was largely based on those early
Girly Sounds
recordings. In early 1994, eight or so months after the album came out,
Guyville
made a brief appearance on the
Billboard
chart, having sold more than 200,000 copies, but its cultural dominance far outweighed its sales. If you were cool, had ever been cool, or aspired to one day become cool, you owned a copy of this record.