Cat Power (17 page)

Phair and Matador had a huge indie-rock hit on their hands, but they looked at it as merely the first step of a grand scheme to make tons of money selling really good music to the mainstream. The label started out as a home for great bands, but now that great bands were making great big piles of cash, they wanted in on it. “Gerard and Chris saw themselves as minitycoons,” Phair explains. “You felt like they were gonna do big things, and that's what we had in common. It wasn't like they were just really selfless and they loved these pure acts, and then when they got successful they thought they'd make something of it. They wanted to be moguls from the get-go, and that's what I loved about them—they absolutely carried themselves like tycoons before they were.”

Cat Power wasn't even signed to Matador when
Exile in Guyville
came out, and Chan Marshall did not become a marquee Matador artist until the late 1990s and early 2000s, but she has followed a path Phair forged, both as the first female star of indie rock and as Matador's first flagship female artist. The two women couldn't be more different as musicians—Liz Phair is a distinctly nineties wry social commentator with a preternatural ear for the perfect pop song, and Chan is an eraless,
haunted blues singer—but in many ways Chan has the career Matador Records envisioned for Liz Phair.

One of the many side effects of Nirvana's success was that indie labels, not just bands, were being scouted by the Big Four. Matador was no exception and in 1993, they partnered with Atlantic Records. It was during this general era that Phair first remembers hearing about Cat Power. “She would have been the other girl.” Phair's first impression of Chan was as a rebel who refused to change her style in order to maximize her marketability. “They were still looking at it through those ambitious eyes,” Phair recalls, “like, ‘Let's make another Liz Phair.’ She was not quite playing ball. I vaguely remember there being this inability on their part to wrangle her the way they wanted.”

Phair's deep respect for Chan's independence comes from her very personal understanding of how hard it is to stay grounded when, as a woman in the music business, every day someone new is telling you who you need to become if you want to be successful. Ever since the 1993 release of
Guyville
, Phair has been battling industry pressure to retreat into the prison of any number of women-in-rock archetypes—and in some instances, her willingness to listen to others over herself made for ultimately bad career decisions. Phair doesn't just admire Chan's independent spirit, she thinks it's the essence of Chan's allure. “She kept growing, and her appeal kept growing,” Phair marvels, “despite or maybe because of this kind of wild-horse thing. That's a beautiful thing. It's maddening, but it's beautiful.”

By December of 1992, Chan was making it all work. Cat Power played the occasional show, which was fun, and Chan continued to explore the LES scene, stomping through the first snow of the year in work boots and Levi's to see shows
down on the Lower East Side. Glen got a day job working in an office at Cardozo Law School with his friend local scenester Rick Brown. Through Brown they met Bob Bannister, an accomplished guitarist who played in several local bands and who also worked at Cardozo during the day. “I was putting out a fanzine at the time called
On Site
, so I knew Glen from his fanzine,” Bannister remembers. “Although we had more likely traded barbs than anything else, because that was the fanzine culture.”

During their days at Cardozo, Glen told Rick Brown and Bob Bannister about Chan, and about the music the two of them were working on. After checking out a Cat Power show in person, Bannister joined the band as a guitarist. “I started playing, and we did a show as a trio at ABC No Rio, then we did a show at CBGB,” Bannister remembers. This gig at CB's was a big deal for Chan. When she found out Cat Power had been booked at the legendary venue, she called up all her bandmates from back home and recruited several of them to join her onstage—including Fletcher Liegerot, Damon Moore, and Mark Moore, who had moved back to Atlanta mere weeks after he, Thrasher, and Chan first showed up. “It was December 10, 1992,” Bob remembers. “All of Chan's friends that she'd been playing with in Atlanta were so excited that she was playing at CBGB that they all drove up to the show.”

Before he moved up to New York, Glen Thrasher became friends with the New York-based noise rockers God Is My Co-Pilot, a band founded by husband-and-wife duo Sharon Topper and Craig Flanagin. In addition to playing in God Is My Co-Pilot, Craig ran his own small label, The Making of Americans. After seeing a couple Cat Power shows, he offered to record a single with the band. In early 1993, Chan, Glen, and Bob headed into a small studio in SoHo to record “Headlights,” with Craig as the producer. The studio was owned by Don Fury, a seasoned producer and veteran of the eighties hardcore punk scene, who served as
engineer during the recording sessions. “I only knew or liked six songs. It felt so strange. I was so suspicious,” Chan remembered of her first time in the studio. “Microphones and headphones plugged in, and the guy is in that room turning buttons, and I felt like it was so unnatural and didn't make sense.”

Three years before recording “Headlights,” Chan was making Robert Hayes stand in the garden while she played for an audience of one in her Cabbagetown kitchen. By the time Cat Power was recording “Headlights” Chan's confidence had grown, but the experience of physically being in a studio triggered her ever-present sense of inadequacy. “I was really uptight and scared and embarrassed,” she has said. “Like, Oh, I sound like shit and I can't play and it's really dark and they're all looking at me through that glass thing and I don't like how it feels.” Chan found the studio environment sterile and threatening, and she heard exactly the kind of stiff amateurism in the “Headlights” single that she feared would emerge. “I had no idea what I was doing, and I'm not really happy with how it came out,” Chan has said. “It sounds too trapped.”

The single does have a certain cornered quality to it, as if Chan is singing in an interrogation room, but it also reveals the remote intimacy in Chan's vocals and the obscure but weirdly familiar style of her song-writing, both of which would become Cat Power hallmarks. The song is built around a series of repetitive phrases like “Get up around eight,” “Last thing I remember,” and “It's cold as hell,” which reflects a style of songwriting Tim Foljahn noticed years later when he would help her record Cat Power's first three albums,
Dear Sir, Myra Lee
, and
What Would the Community Think
. “She would write a repetitive, looping line and then improv over it,” Tim remembers. “It would become a stuck improvisation, but it would be this very lyrical thing.” The “Headlights” single displays another of Cat Power's hallmark themes: merging a sense
of dread with joy. The song sounds droning and repetitive, but the cover of the single features a photo of a young Chan Marshall, about six, dressed in a loose sundress and standing arms entwined, eyes closed, face blissfully lifted to the sky. The image was the perfect contrast to the anguished sounds contained inside the sleeve.

Part of Chan's discomfort with the recording process resulted from inexperience, but being in the studio with professionally trained musicians also triggered memories of her father telling her that making music required a sophistication she lacked. Chan's exposure to the loose Cabbagetown rockers and the wild free-jazz artists in downtown New York had made her more comfortable with her lack of professional performance experience, but once she entered the studio, a sense of familiar shame came rushing back. “Glen was like, ‘Let's just try it,’” Chan has said of her friend's attempt to calm her down while recording. “When it was done, I couldn't breathe and just ran away,” Chan remembered. “It was like getting closer to people I didn't know, and that was so intimidating to me, so I just left.”

Guitarist Bob Bannister remembers Chan being unnecessarily hard on herself, but is quick to point out that her frustrations, while extreme, were not totally unfounded. Chan is a perfectionist, and recording live music is an inherently imperfect enterprise. A take that most people might hear as exquisitely vulnerable, Chan would hear as an embarrassing mess. “She was on the edge of that artistic sensitivity,” Bannister acknowledges. “But you can hear what she was reacting to, which is that she didn't hit a note quite right or her voice cracked a bit. In a music that's more about expressiveness than virtuosity, it seems to me that nuances like that are not only not a problem, they're often good.”

In recent years, Chan has attributed her self-sabotaging tendencies to her problems with alcohol, but at these early recording sessions, she
didn't need whiskey to trigger her descent. “She's become legendary for being unstable, but it didn't strike me as that extreme,” Bannister says of Chan's drinking. “I never saw any particular sign of excessive drinking or any drug use whatsoever.” Foljahn concurs: The guitarist would go on to play with Cat Power through the conclusion of the
What Would the Community Thinks
tour and would see her exhibit plenty of alarming behavior, but he also says that he's never seen her drunk. “She was very careful with the booze, and that's when I was drinking a lot, so it was weird 'cause I'd be getting trashed and she wouldn't be,” Foljahn remembers. “I remember being in Atlanta with her and her being like, ‘No, I've got to keep it to a couple of beers because I don't want to get out of control.’ She'd just come out of that scene where everybody was so fucked-up, and she'd just had it with that stuff.”

God Is My Co-Pilot pressed five hundred copies of “Headlights” and distributed it on their Making of Americans label. The single, with its melancholy but melodic sound, boosted interest in Cat Power and attendance at the band's shows. Things were starting to go well for Chan and her fledgling music career: She had survived her first recording session relatively unscathed, people were responding to the tracks she recorded, and Cat Power shows were drawing fans.

“With that Glen guy, she evolved into a normal indie-rock act,” Aaron says. “I don't think anything she'd been doing before was substantial in any way. She created something powerful for a wider audience. Something that could be packaged and sold. It's smart. She's talented. I would never have figured that she would have done anything like that. I just figured she was another one of those you-had-to-be-on-drugs-and-live-in-a-squat people.”

Shortly after “Headlights” was released, Glen abruptly moved back to Atlanta. Glen was the one who inspired Chan to put Cat Power
together in the first place. He helped Chan gain enough confidence to get onstage and perform back in Atlanta. He spearheaded the band's move to New York, and once there, he got Chan onstage and into a recording studio. Glen was Chan's greatest early champion and her most influential early collaborator, and his departure, especially for a woman with deep connections to the older men in her life, felt like abandonment.

The reasons why Glen left actually had very little to do with Chan and very much to do with his heroin addiction. “Glen went back to Atlanta totally independently of Chan,” Bannister asserts. “He certainly didn't have a falling-out with her. It was entirely his own problems that caused him to leave. He was having trouble in New York.” In addition to Thrasher's ongoing battle with addiction, Bannister also remembers the drummer struggling with the strain of trying to live an artist's life in an expensive city. “A lot of the things you can do to be involved in the life of the music scene, like putting out fanzines, putting on shows— these things are fun, but make you no money,” Bannister explains. “They are easier to do in a city where the cost of living is much lower.”

Thrasher's departure left Chan at a complete loss. “My drummer got addicted to heroin and left town,” Chan has said, glossing over the fact that Glen was already an addict when they moved to New York. “So I just stopped playing music altogether, because he was the one who wanted us to play.” With Thrasher back in Atlanta, any plan to turn Cat Power into a true ensemble evaporated, and Chan went through a period of deep confusion about what she was doing in New York. For the first time since she willed herself out of her father's house and into a real life of her own, Chan was forced to look at where she was, who she was, and what she was doing with her life. She no longer had Glen and their band to justify her presence in New York, and the choice to stay in the city had to be hers alone.

“It was real difficult during those first two years,” Chan has said. “I moved to New York to get away from different things about Atlanta. I had my ex-boyfriend
Mark Moore
and a good friend of mine
Thrasher
. My good friend went insane and my ex-boyfriend got fucked up and left two or three weeks after I got there. I didn't know anybody and didn't have any money. But I didn't want to go back to Atlanta, and there was nowhere else I wanted to go.”