Cat Power (2 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Goodman
Chan has gone into elaborate detail about the steady stream of rock boys, drugs, and instability that defined her early childhood, the sanctuary she found in music, the mental illness that runs in her family, the psychosis she has personally battled over the years, the story behind how her pubic hair landed in the pages of
The New Yorker
, the play-by-play of what she saw and heard when she spent a week in a Miami hospital psych ward. Why would Chan tell these detailed, provocative stories, then act appalled and revolted when people listen intently?
For all of the singer's seemingly unfettered disclosures to journalists, she is actually very controlled in her interviews. She lobs confessions like deceptively well-guided grenades aimed to distract. No matter how cunning a reporter might be, if an interviewee tells you about her abortion, you don't ask if it was a boy or a girl. You ask if you can refresh her drink or light her cigarette.
This started to bother me. I now wanted to be the one, the only one, to ask the follow-up question. I wanted to ask her if it was a boy or a girl.
And I wanted her to know that even if she lit my cigarette and poured me a cup of green tea and let me pet her puppy, I would still ask and I would still wait for an answer. I wanted to call Chan on her bullshit.
The more intensely Chan protested the book, the deeper I was compelled to dig. And the more I learned about this woman's childhood, about the roots of her mental instability, about the cunning concealed beneath those shaggy bangs, the more I realized how naïve I'd been to imagine that she wouldn't object to someone writing a biography about her. No longer my idealized confidante, Chan became my subject. And as such I started to look at her without the filter of adoration.
I saw her addiction to fame, the natural flip side of an equally genuine repulsion to it that she often discusses. I saw the absurd hypocrisy in her deliberate self-mythologizing—her willingness to play up her tragic childhood and emotional instability in order to make us look closer, then her scandalized disgust when we do. I saw her as someone who will direct an assistant to secure impossible dinner reservations one minute, then pick her nose in front of strangers the next. I saw
her
.
In resisting the publication of this book so virulently, Chan showed me exactly why it was worth writing. I could have given the advance money back and gone on my way, and if Chan were one of her merely pleasant contemporaries—Feist, or Norah Jones—I probably would have. But like her idols Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, and Madonna, Chan is a Gatsby, and while that means very little to the fangirl who started this book, it means everything to the journalist who finished it.
Chan Marshall didn't want me to write
A Good Woman
and she doesn't want you to read it. But given her protestations, I can only assume that for reasons that are still becoming clear to me, she needs us too.
June 9, Town Hall in New York City. Cat Power's sold-out engagement at the prestigious, eighty-six-year-old venue where Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis once performed featured the Memphis Rhythm Band, a full Southern soul
orchestra. They were all onstage. Chan Marshall was not, and people were starting to worry. This show was originally scheduled for February, but had been canceled for what were then referred to as “health reasons.” By now everybody in the venue knew what that really meant. Chan had suffered one of the most highly publicized mental and physical flameouts in the modern rock era, with the
New York Times
reporting on the details of her institutionalization and one million fans all over the world wondering if her return to the stage would bring the same vulnerable beguiling presence they'd come to cherish and rely on. Chan Marshall had been long gone all winter, and almost for good. Would she be back with the spring? And if so, how damaged would she be?
After nearly an hour, the singer finally took the stage barefoot, wearing a strapless beaded Chanel couture dress carrying a hot-pink commuter mug filled with what she kept triumphantly insisting was chamomile tea, not single malt scotch, or wine, or beer, the preferred on-stage beverages for most of her career. So invested in Chan's well-being were many of the fans in the audience that this revelation itself drew applause. The gown's pale, creamy tone showed off her deep tan and lithe frame, achieved during winter months spent trading booze and dark hotel rooms for the Miami sunshine, novels read by the pool, and Pilates. She looked happy, which, for anyone who knew her personally or had followed the evolution of her career, was stunning to witness: the mental-hygiene equivalent of onstage pyro.
She was tentative as she led the band, who were clearly pulling for her as well, through the first few songs, relying on weirdly equine galloping dance steps to neutralize the tension.
During the minimalist ballad “Where Is My Love” she left the stage for a while, prompting the background singer to add a wry tone to the lyric. It seemed like Chan was gone too long and a sense of here-she-goes-again
nervous energy permeated the crowd. Her eventual return drew another wave of relieved whoops and applause. She flashed a huge grin, cantered over to her piano, and proceeded to sing with such smoky, lived-in authority that it was as if she finally knew her lines after fifteen years of tense rehearsal. It was the best Cat Power show I've ever seen.
Delayed gratification has always been Chan's signature stage move. During her earliest shows she would often stand feet away from the mike so that the audience could hear exactly enough to know what they were missing in not being able to hear more. This sort of vocal titillation was defiant, as if she resented being onstage and wanted to taunt her listeners. When Chan reappeared at Town Hall that night, beckoned by the increasingly insistent “Where is my love?” refrain sung by her backup vocalist, that sense of performance as being punitive was gone. In its place was unadulterated joy.
Onstage at Town Hall that night, the contrasting sides of Chan Marshall, which had been struggling vigorously against each other for most of her then thirty-four years, united for a brief two hours of fragile perfection. She was both shy and confident, glamorous in her gown and tomboyish in her ponytail and bare feet, nervous but happy when she played the piano alone, and forceful like a blues diva when she led her band through songs off her recently released album,
The Greatest
. Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who was in attendance, wrote on his blog that the show was one of the best he'd ever seen. “This combination of Memphis rhythm section and her hesitant … phrasing was … a very strange idea,” Byrne wrote. “The result is somewhere in the middle of two worlds. Some new thing came into being that had elements of both worlds but that was neither.”
Those who are familiar with Chan know two main things about her:
She has the voice of a damaged angel, and she's probably crazy. Beginning very early in her career but reaching an apex during 1998 and 1999 when Chan toured in support of her fourth album,
Moon Pix
, Cat Power played a series of shows during which Chan would regularly self-destruct onstage. These displays were so gory—a combination of genuinely alarming psychosis and weirdly compelling performance art—that the singer soon became as famous for her eccentricity and mental instability as she was for her music. In the following years Cat Power released three more albums (2000's
The Covers Record
, 2003's
You Are Free
, and 2006's
The Greatest
), each of which earned her increasing amounts of mainstream media coverage. She used her access to the press to speak with disturbing candor about the history of mental illness in her family, the scary household she grew up in, and the paralyzing sense of worthlessness she felt every time she stepped onstage, walked outside, or took a breath.
When Chan opened her mouth to sing, fans and critics heard generations of poor Southerners crippled by a sense of inescapable illegitimacy. We longed to hear that voice really open up, to surpass the limitations imposed on it by Chan's evident self-loathing and insecurity. Every implosive Cat Power performance carried a sense of rooting for the underdog. We the fans knew what she had, what she was, what she was worth, and we longed to make her know, to make her see. If she saw and heard what we saw and heard perhaps she could get onstage and sing with strength, confidence, and freedom the way she did when she was just a little girl, singing hymns in church.
Chan has been struggling since birth. She was raised in a wild and unstable home, exposed to drugs and alcohol as a kid, endured her parents' divorce, attended countless different schools before dropping out of high school at seventeen to work in a pizza parlor, and by the age of twenty she was pregnant. If Chan Marshall had amounted to nothing,
it would have surprised no one, especially not herself. And yet just as consistently as she has been underestimated, she has also defied expectations. Chan learned from her parents' mistakes and stayed clean while many of her friends became casualties of the nineties heroin scene. When she got pregnant at a young age by the wrong guy, she had an abortion, collected the money she'd wisely saved, and moved to New York City, becoming the first person in her family to leave the South for good.
When Chan first started playing her unusual breed of dour blues rock, she was marginalized by many as a cute girl with a dark past and an indie record deal. But Chan propelled Cat Power to international fame and her artistic potency went well past the sell-by date of most of her contemporaries. When success didn't exorcize the demons she'd been running from since childhood, Chan experienced a psychological breakdown and public tour cancellation that could have signaled the end of Cat Power. Instead, her return marked the most triumphant moment in her career and heralded the most spectacular critical and commercial success Cat Power has ever had.
“God shined on her,”
Spin
editor Charles Aaron says of the
Greatest
shows with the Memphis Rhythm Band, a collection of extremely venerable bluesmen with decades of experience. “It made her realize she's not existing in this whole indie-rock world where whether you can or cannot sing is viewed as an interpretive thing. It's like, ‘Okay, either perform to the very best of my ability, or I will be humiliated onstage.’ They'll be nice. They're perfect gentlemen, but in their hearts of hearts they'll be like, ‘Who is this child? Who is this white girl that we have to do this with? Whatever. Pay me.’ But she stepped it up.”
Before Chan was hospitalized in the winter of 2006, her shows were fearful. In the fall of 2006, after the
Greatest
tour ended and Chan stopped playing with the Memphis Rhythm Band she performed with
sterile professionalism. But for a short, precious time between the spring of 2006 and the fall of that same year, Chan reached her potential. She got there. Onstage she was wounded and healed and sane and insane and young and old and feminine and masculine all at once, and it was magic. Then, like her best songs, the moment passed, disintegrated into the ether, and we were left, as was she, to wait for its return.
Even though Atlanta is now an urban center, congested with labyrinthine freeways and tract housing, much of the city still embodies the feeling of traditional Southern life. Downtown, locals leisurely stroll the streets and chat
naturally with each other at the grocery store or gas station, and at dusk it's not uncommon to see Atlantans gathering for a predinner cocktail out on the porch or stoop or backyard. Even where signs of a more sterile suburban life exist, the old ways persist. In the middle of a Thursday in July, at the Starbucks in Peachtree Center, you can find an Emory prelaw student passionately arguing politics for hours with a dread-locked African American Vietnam veteran he met that day. Two hours and several cups of coffee later, they exchange e-mails, then part ways, the student off to his campus apartment, the veteran off to the shelter where he sleeps. This Atlanta—the one defined by a happy contradiction between traditional values and progressive liberal thought—is Chan's Atlanta.