Cat Power (20 page)

To this day Lenny still has a hard time keeping up a good relationship with his mother. “I can't be around my mom,” he says frankly. “Twenty minutes around her and I'm uneasy.” He talks to her on the phone all the time, though, which he finds easier than seeing Myra face-to-face. “Charlyn is different from me,” he says. “Charlyn can be around her, but she can't talk to her on the phone. It's completely flipped. Sometimes we get together for the holidays. Charlyn would go, but I wouldn't because it's uncomfortable. I love travel, but I wouldn't want to be around her. I was like, ‘Hey, Merry Christmas, I'll see you when I see you.’”

Though
Myra Lee
was recorded at the same time as
Dear Sir
, the album feels more confident and less muddled than Cat Power's debut.
Myra Lee
sounds as if it was written and recorded by moonlight on a rickety old porch in the Deep South during a dark night of the soul. For those who missed it on
Dear Sir
, “Rockets” is included in the track list, but this time it has much more competition for the listener's attention. For the duration of her career, Chan has insisted that where others hear deep hopelessness and sorrow in her songs, she hears redemption. On
Myra Lee
's second track, “We All Die,” Chan showcases her ability to find promise in despair. The song's title is almost comically depressing, but the propulsive nature of the simple guitar/drums and Chan's repeating (unironic) lyrical refrain “All the lies aside/I believe I am the/Luckiest person alive” give the song a sense of defiant resiliency that, beginning with
Myra Lee
, is a recurring theme in much of Cat Power's music. On her second album Chan again chose to include a cover amid her original songs: Hank Williams's “Still in Love,” which the singer transforms into a forlorn but romantic ballad. “Ice Water,” with
lyrics like “I feel just like/Some great big disease,” is a good example of the awkward, personal confessional that would make legions of self-loathing adolescent girls latch onto Chan as their messiah.

In spite of Chan's insistence that her songs are not supposed to be debilitatingly sad, she admits that her early material was born out of incredible pain. “I know what I was thinking about then,” she has said of the time she spent writing her first two albums. “I don't need those songs to remind me.” Chan's early songs are confessionals in a genuinely religious sense, as if every lyric she wrote is a prayer for salvation from the memory that inspired it. Chan would suffer in the years to come from sharing so much personal pain with strangers, who often feel a sense of ownership over the songs.

All artists face concern about revealing too much of themselves in their art. You want your work to be personal, but not so intimate that in sharing the inspiration behind the art, you cease to own it. For Chan this has been a huge problem. Songwriting saved her from the emotional hell she was living in as a child; it made her feel as if she had a secret, an ace in the hole against the world. When she decided to share her music with strangers, she had to share her secret, and she's spent most of her career grappling with that reality. Through most of the 1990s, Cat Power continued to record songs that were often mysterious but never willfully masked.

Eventually, Chan adjusted her songwriting style in order to protect herself from excruciating emotional exposure. On the early albums, though, you're tapped directly into Chan's soul without filters or obfuscation. “Confused, wondering what the hell you're doing. Everything seems so desperate and empty and just lost,” the singer has said, describing what she hears when she plays her early records. “I'm so glad I'm not there anymore.”

Myra Lee
was first released until March 1996, a year and two months after it was recorded alongside
Dear Sir
in that dank studio on Mott Street. Between the December 1994 recording of the first two Cat Power albums and the release of
Myra Lee
in early '96, the band played in New York as much as possible; they also went on tour for the first time. Chan may have moved to New York City in the summer of 1992, but she's never really left Atlanta. Even during her early years in New York, the singer would borrow a friend's car or scrape together enough Todd's Copy paychecks or waitressing tips to buy a bus ticket home. After recording with Shelley and Foljahn, Chan finally had a real band together, and the practical entrepreneur in her began pairing trips home with minitours.

“She'd need to get to Atlanta,” Foljahn remembers. “So we'd tour our way down there in some weird vehicle.” Packed into a friend's woodpaneled station wagon or VW bus, the band would head south, stopping to play shows at dive bars and small clubs between New York and Atlanta. Most every time Chan visited Atlanta, whether she was with or without her band, she would play a few local shows. Kristi Cameron remembers seeing Chan perform solo at Dottie's, a storied old Atlanta bar and sometime venue where the singer briefly worked back in her Cabbagetown days. “Dottie's was this totally trashy Southern country bar,” Cameron remembers. “One of our friends started working as a bar-tender there and she started booking her friend's bands. She totally walks that line between redneck and whatever that Southern music-scene thing is.”

After an entire childhood spent on the move, Chan easily adapted to touring life. She had her favorite clothes—beat-up Levi's, beaded bracelets, and work shirts—but besides something to wear, books, and a few records, Chan didn't need much stuff. She was perfectly at home
in the passenger seat of a rented van on the way to her next gig. One of Chan's only on-the-road rules was that someone else had to drive: that way, she could focus on changing the radio station every few minutes, or read out loud to whoever was listening. “She would sit in the back and tell jokes and sing and read,” Foljahn remembers. “She used to joke about wanting to go to McDonald's. She was always very interested in food.” During these road trips, Foljahn also discovered Chan's capacity to perfectly mimic any song on the radio, which is ironic considering that she would later become famous for her virtually unrecognizable covers. “Riding in the car with her, she could do a whole Michael Jackson song any time she wanted to,” the guitarist recalls. “She can do those songs for fun, but she would hit it every time. It was a little weird.”

Chan isn't shy about expressing her opinion, and while she was cooped up in the car for hours on end with a bunch of boys, she was even more forceful. Decisions about where to eat, what radio station to listen to, and what time to pull over and sleep were often made by her. And yet every time she'd choose KFC over Burger King, or country over classic rock, she couldn't resist asking her favorite question: “Are you mad at me?” Foljahn got so bored with this refrain that he started answering yes each time she asked. “Her catchphrase was, ‘I'm sorry, are you mad at me?’” Tim recalls. “She would start the conversation with that, and then you'd go from there. So when we were driving around, I'd be like, ‘Yes, Chan, I'm really mad at you. Please don't talk to me.’ That would sort of slow it down. She'd laugh.”

Chan's trademark question is more than the old habit of a trained-to-be-submissive Southern girl: It's a manipulation technique. “That's the whole trick with people who ask, ‘Are you mad at me?’ It gets them instantly off the hook,” the guitarist explains. “It's funny that she would always go, ‘Are you mad at me?’ because
she
was always mad at
me,”
Chan's friend and former landlord Judy Ibbotson recalls. “She left a washer and dryer at her apartment when she moved out. Well, my insurance guy every now and then comes around and he said, ‘You have to move that washer and dryer because it's a fire hazard.’ I thought she'd abandoned it, 'cause it'd been a year and a half. So I gave it away. And then she's mad at me. She should have told me! I had to get it off the porch!”

By the time Shelley and Foljahn returned from a handful of trips on the road with Chan, they had new insight into the problems that came along with her compelling eccentricities. “Steve came back from that tour and he was like, ‘I don't know how much longer I can do this,’” Moore remembers. “It became problematic because Steve has a classic Midwestern work ethic. He goes out and he wants to do the job the best he can, and he does it and it's great, and you can always depend on him. Chan was having a lot of issues about what her own value was as a performer.”

This uncertainty about her worth manifested itself in a series of obnoxious onstage behaviors. Chan would begin songs and then abruptly end them, leaving the band unsure of what to play. She would perform with her back to the audience and compulsively apologize to the crowd for mistakes only she could hear. “It was very frustrating for the band,” Foljahn recalls. “She would just stop playing a song. It annoyed the shit out of Steve, so I would kind of get annoyed along with him. You'd think, Why? Why? It was going so well! Why are we doing this? It's a whole different kind of frustration than I've had in any other band because you know she can do it if she wants to. That's the thing.”

Even at this early stage in the evolution of Cat Power, Chan was already displaying some of the tics that would later aggravate her critics, alienate some of her most devoted followers, and compel a new group of
voyeuristic fans to start attending her shows. “I'm not quite sure what happened, but Steve and Tim were in this rolling-of-the-eyes kind of thing when they came back,” Moore remembers. “But they also had a sense of humor about it. They didn't really know what to think of it, but they did know that it was a little bit of a mess sometimes—more so than they were accustomed to, and it got a little weirder and weirder each time.” In spite of their growing concern about Chan's mental state and frustration with the impact it had on her performance style, Shelley and Foljahn continued to play with Chan, and in February 1996 they recorded
What Would the Community Think
with her, then toured behind the album through the end of 1996.

Between the October 1995 release of Dear Sir and the March 1996 release of Myra Lee, Cat Power finally signed a deal with Matador Records. Though Gerard Cosloy was interested in Chan and her music from the very beginning
,
not everyone at the label felt the same way. Some of the New York City-based tastemakers who saw Chan perform solo in the period between Glen Thrasher's spring 1993 departure and the following year, when she started playing with Steve Shelley and Tim Foljahn, had already decided she was overrated at best and a manipulative, crazy sympathy seeker at worst. “For people who are kind of into the whole ‘set lists, thank you, good night, discernable beginning, middle, end,’ it was a little hard to get a handle on,” Cosloy explains.

“I saw a lot of bad shows where she never looked up,” Charles Aaron recalls. “Why did I keep seeing her? Because I kept hearing about
Chan:
‘She's beautiful. She's enigmatic. She's poetic. She's mysterious. Nobody really knows where she's from. Her father's an itinerant blues-man!’ I was from the South, so I had this interest in figuring out whether she was a fraud or not. And I more or less thought she was kind of a fraud for a long time. I thought everybody else was looking for this beautiful creature of the blues who was from the swamps.”

Chan's onstage presence has always been divisive; for some it breeds intimacy, for others it smacks of artifice. But it wasn't just her polarizing nature as an artist that kept Matador from signing her until nearly four years after Cosloy first saw her perform. It was also the fact that both Matador and Chan are particular to the point of snobbery about the company they keep. “I didn't really know her well enough at that point to understand where she was coming from, how serious she was or wasn't,” Cosloy remembers. “She was the least talkative person in that band. I met her a couple of times, but it was months and months before we ever had anything approaching a conversation.”

In addition to Chan's evident shyness, Matador's own unspoken rules about courting artists delayed the consummation. “I was interested almost immediately, but at the time Matador was in a weird state of flux.
Still is, really,” Cosloy ruminates. “We're weird in a passive-aggressive way in that on one hand, if an artist doesn't approach us, we don't know if they wanna be on the label. But on the other hand, we don't like it when we get approached. Sometimes it is just better not to be in this whole snipping, scouting thing and just let stuff happen naturally. In those days we were much bigger on letting stuff happen naturally. Those days it really was more about, like, we're gonna put out records by our friends, by people that we get to know, people we socialize with. It had less to do with Chan needing to convince us over however many years that she was ready for a record deal—it was more a matter of us getting to know her and vice versa.”

It was also a matter of Chris Lombardi being convinced that Cat Power's austere music and elemental performances would one day translate to record and ticket sales. As a general rule, Gerard explains, Matador doesn't sign an artist unless he and Chris are in agreement, but sometimes that takes a while. “There are occasions where one of us might initiate a relationship with a band or be the one that's suggested it or whatever, but there's never a project where I'm the one who did—we just don't do that,” Cosloy explains. “At that point in time I had the earlier relationship with Chan, and Chris hadn't seen some of those early shows. By the time he did see her, he liked what he heard, but there were a lot of questions about the nature of the performances, and how far could this go.”