Cat Power (19 page)

By late 1994, Cat Power was one of the most-discussed new artists in New York City. This was mostly a good thing for Chan. It meant that she could live the life of a professional musician if she wanted to. But Chan was still wary of that lifestyle, and the increased attention she was suddenly getting made it seem as if the decision had already been made for her. It also triggered her latent self-destructive tendencies. The more expectant the Cat Power audience grew, the more paralyzing Chan's insecurity about her abilities became. “The audience started getting different, like more of a rock audience,” she has said. “They didn't get that we were just making shit up. People started looking cooler and acting cooler, and that made it more uncomfortable.”

After hearing about Cat Power's performance at the Cooler, Moore
vowed to see the band's next show, which took place at Brownie's. “I got up really close so I could check it out. I was bowled over by it,” the Sonic Youth frontman remembers. “I thought she was fantastic, especially in light of the fact that only about a ninth of the audience was paying attention. Everybody else was just, like, socializing. What really got me was that she was singing a solid foot away from the mike and it was creating this atmosphere where it was just all this reverb. She wasn't singing forcibly to compensate for the crowd noise, but it sounded beautiful. Afterward I was like, ‘That's such a radical thing—having all that reverb and then singing a foot away from the microphone just created this really, really weird, eerie kind of vibe. It was great.’ And she said, ‘Well, I didn't tell them to put the reverb on it.’ I found out the sound guy was doing whatever he could to get her voice amplified, so he was just adding all this effect. So it was this system of errors creating this wonderful thing.”

Moore found Chan's performance style odd but not disturbing. “She seemed a little nervous,” Moore remembers. “But it wasn't the leaving-the-stage kind of nervous, it was sort of like throwing the set list away and fooling around.” At this point, Chan used her time onstage to try out provocative performance techniques she'd seen at her favorite avant-garde rock shows. Instead of facing the audience, Chan would play a show with her back to the crowd, willfully disregarding the idea that she was there to entertain or even play actual music. “What was going on was a transaction,” Chan has said of the shows she saw that inspired her early performance style. “There was no judgment. Only for that moment did that experience exist. So when it was our turn to play, I'd play with my back to the audience. We were creating a little world of our own.”

These early Cat Power shows marked the beginning of a careerlong argument Chan has with herself—which has played out onstage in a
very public and sometimes harrowing way—about whether or not she wants to be up there singing in the first place. In his brilliant 2008 memoir,
Black Postcards
, former Galaxie 500 and Luna singer Dean Wareham recalls seeing Cat Power around this time:

Chan's professional music life began as an after-school project, something she convinced herself she wasn't serious about so that she could pursue it without pressure or expectation. In Cabbagetown, this was easy. No one knew how to play. That was the point. In New York it was the same thing at first. Chan saw art-school grads and street kids colliding onstage in debauched celebrations of lack of training, lack of artifice, lack of expectation. But in the back of her head, all along, Chan
heard Eartha Kitt, she heard James Brown, she heard Bob Dylan. She heard music that is all about knowing exactly what you're doing, and doing it extremely well, and it was
this
sound that the singer wanted to emulate. Chan could turn her back to the audience show after show, she could mumble into her mike, she could shroud her face in long brown hair, but none of that would turn her into a freewheeling performance artist. Chan Marshall is a traditional songwriter and a perfectionist. As hard as she tried to free herself from other people's expectations, life in New York City was teaching her that the most imposing ones were those she set for herself.

By the fall of 1994 the second incarnation of Cat Power, featuring Steve Shelley on drums, Tim Foljahn on guitar, and Chan on vocals, was well established as a hot new band to see in New York. The natural next step was to go back
into the studio and record an album that would allow them to capitalize on their hype. In December of 1994, Cat Power went to the Mott Street space where they had been rehearsing and where Moore, Shelley, and Foljahn had worked on
Psychic Hearts
. Fueled by deli coffee and Italian takeout from restaurants down the block in Little Italy, in one day the trio recorded all twenty tracks that would become the first two Cat Power records,
Dear Sir
and
Myra Lee
.

The plan was straightforward: get in there, let Chan emote into the mike, improvise some complementary drums and guitar, and put out the album. “I said, ‘I think your stuff is simple, and Steve and I can just sort of stay out of the way and let you do your thing,’” Foljahn remembers. The Mott Street studio place, with its moist concrete walls, stained coffee mugs, discarded beer cans, and assorted music equipment piled in corners, was as lo-fi as it got. “Literally it was the third subbasement,” Foljahn recalls. “It was so New York.”

Tim remembers the session as mellow and quick. Chan described it as anxiety-ridden. As during the “Headlights” session, Chan's lack of experience in the studio and her uncertainty about how to incorporate other musicians into any of her songs made things extremely hard. “I guess I'm happy with the two albums,” Chan told a reporter in 1996. “Most of the time Steve and Tim ended up looking at each other like, ‘What do we do?’ I wasn't sure what to tell them, since I had never really written songs with a band in mind.”

Dear Sir
came out first, in October 1995 on Runt Records, a small Italian label. It's a raw, sometimes disturbing record that showcases Chan's ability to deliver incredibly personal songs that also feel remote and unknowable. The album is short: The track list has nine songs including two covers, “The Sleepwalker,” written by Chris Matthews, and a harrowing version of the Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan ballad
“Yesterday Is Here.” Chan has always found sanctity in performing other people's songs. Those who attended her early shows would have heard lots of covers, and Chan had recorded a version of Peter Lofton's “Fun” (a live staple at the time) during the recording session for “Headlights,” although it doesn't appear as a B-side to the single.

Dear Sir
is an inconsistent record. “Itchyhead” is an initially compelling track because of Chan's anodyne but sirenesque vocals and the spare style of the recording, but the song never takes the listener much past despair. This is a pattern demonstrated by many of the songs on the album: They start off as oppressively dark, with Chan's voice hiding timidly in its lower registers before careening (with Shelley and Foljahn in tow) into a realm of sonic anguish so intense it's uncomfortable.

Yet there are several exquisite moments. A new recording of Cat Power's first single, “Headlights,” concludes the album with a punch of appealingly skuzzy mid-nineties guitar-rock charm (even if the misery it conveys is abrasive in its intensity), and “Rockets,” the second track on
Dear Sir
, is one of the best Cat Power songs of the 1990s. Chan has undersold this song as “just a hymn,” but it's really the first Cat Power recording to display the delicate weirdness that would become Chan's hallmark as an artist for much of the next decade. “Where is the night so warm and so strange/That no one is afraid/Of themselves?” Chan asks wistfully, while Tim's guitar churns urgently behind her. “Here, pick up, dig, dig out those weeds/Out of your happy-go-lucky fields/Of such polluted thinking,” she then sings with renewed vigor, as if this command, while not a real answer to the question she's just posed, is one appropriate response.

Dear Sir
includes one of Cat Power's most notorious songs, “Mr. Gallo,” which was supposedly inspired by filmmaker, former Todd's Copy employee, and Chan's alleged onetime lover, Vincent Gallo. The
song has a depressive sort of girl-sings-about-boy-who-loves-girl-who-might-love-boy appeal that suits the subject. “She had men's shoes on, a nonmatching set, and both of them on the wrong foot,” Gallo has said of the first time he saw Chan, when she was still working at Todd's. “She wasn't kidding. It was no joke. I thought, Oh, that girl is the greatest.”

Chan has laughed off Gallo's account of their first meeting. “He was articulating his sense of humor,” Chan has said. “My shit was fucking dorky. I was eccentric when I was twenty years old, let's face it.” Gallo has gone on to say that he's flattered by the attention Chan gave him on her first album. “I like Cat Power, especially the song ‘Mr. Gallo,’” the filmmaker told a reporter in 1997. “I would like any band that did a song about me.” Gallo went on to boast about how madly in love with him Chan must have been to write such a song. “That good-looking Cat Power chick, Chan Marshall, wrote some nasty words,” he's said. “What could she do? She loved me. I would've done the same thing if I loved me. Anyway, that chick's a superstar. I should've stayed with her.”

While neither Chan nor Gallo has been explicit about what exactly went on between them, it's at least as likely that she ended things with him as it is that he ended things with her. “That was fascinating,” Foljahn says of the Chan-Vincent romance. “At that time he seemed like this older guy that was all hooked up and was kind of stalking her. He'd show up at Todd's and be like, ‘We gotta go out! We gotta go out! We gotta make it happen, you and me!’ That's how he operates. I've been with other girls when he's hitting on them, and that's his thing.”

Dear Sir
didn't have much of a commercial impact, but it's an intriguing album that kept music-industry insiders interested.
Dear Sir
ensured that already-committed Cat Power fans would stay loyal through the release of the next album,
Myra Lee
, which Steve Shelley put out on his Smells Like Records label in March 1996. Shelley's
involvement with Cat Power went a long way toward getting Chan noticed not just in New York, but all over the country. When Chan recorded the “Headlights” single, people back home in Atlanta knew about it and passed copies around—it was their friend's band. But when Shelley joined the band and then put out
Myra Lee
on his label, it was seen as his public endorsement of Chan, which bolstered the band's reputation and helped insulate Chan against increasingly vocal detractors.

“Over time she was developing a following,” Gerard Cosloy remembers. “But there were people in town who were like, ‘Forget it, get lost.’ Chan is a love-her-or-hate-her songwriter. For those that are moved by her music, her genius seems obvious, but for those who aren't, she comes across as elevator music for self-indulgent, whiny hipsters.” But even those who adore Cat Power's music were amazed by how quickly Chan's obscure lyrics and restrictively simple sound connected with a devoted, passionate audience. “I was surprised everyone else picked up on it,”
Stomp and Stammer
editor Jeff Clark says. “I never thought that it was something that was going to be welcomed by a very wide audience. Some of those early albums I don't really understand.”

Chan has not explicitly explained why she named the second Cat Power album after her mother, but she did begin speaking to Myra again for the first time in several years around the time
Myra Lee
came out. Back home in Greensboro, Chan's mom wasn't doing very well. Leamon and Myra had been married for thirteen years, but nearly every one of them was turbulent. The drama finally got to be too much, and in 1993 they got divorced. “They had a passionate love affair, or a psycho love affair, you could say,” Lenny recalls. “They divorced when I was thirteen. I left when I was fourteen. I got out of there as soon as I could.” Lenny went to live with his father in Columbia, South Carolina, and
Myra stayed in Greensboro. “She wasn't working a lot,” Lenny recalls. “It was basically alimony and Mom's social-security check. I know that sounds bad. I'm just being honest.”