Cat Power (24 page)

When Chan talks about this show, she explains that she couldn't get off the stage because she couldn't admit that the performance was beyond salvation. “When things go wrong, I usually play for a long time,” the singer has said. This paradox—that the worse things went, the longer Chan would play—became the dominant pattern in Cat Power shows for the next ten years. And its emergence reflected the larger conflict Chan was feeling about being onstage in the first place. Foljahn noticed it, Moore noticed it: Anyone who was around could see that Chan wasn't yet ready to succeed. She wasn't ready to deal with what success would mean about her worth as a person, what that would say about her talent as an artist, and the ways in which it would force her to admit that as much as she loathed rock stardom, she had become a rock star. Instead of contending with all of this, Chan decided to disappear for a while.

“I went to have fun,” Chan has said of the trip to South Africa she took in early 1997. “But the first two weeks in Cape Town were such a nightmare that I ended up leaving and going to Johannesburg and then going to Durban and then farther out into the bush. That's where I saw the stuff that made me not want to make music anymore. I didn't think music was important. You can't feel like, when you're playing your songs and people are asking you questions and you're getting a photo shoot— you can't feel special or talented. It makes me think of what someone else doesn't have.”

In addition to being struck by the contrast between her life and the lives of the locals, Chan also claims to have had a mystical experience while in Africa that really disturbed her. Apparently, she had a strange conversation with a Zulu shaman just as she was getting off the plane in Cape Town. “Twelve days later, I had to track him down because I was seeing people who weren't really there. I could no longer tell the
difference between reality and what I thought was hell,” Chan has said. She spoke to this shaman one more time and he explained a dream she had four years prior, which brought her a sense of relief and resolution. Chan has referred to this experience as a “spiritual episode,” but is upset by the suggestion that it was something more menacing. “A friend of mine called it a psychotic episode, which hurt me more than I can say,” the singer has said. “My problem is that other people's idea of reality is not mine.”

Chan returned to New York, but didn't stay very long. She soon took off for the Pacific Northwest. “It's really pretty and clean and it's gonna be spring,” the singer told a reporter before she left for Portland, Oregon, where her sometimes boyfriend, Truman's Water bassist Kirk Branstetter, was living. “I want a nice, quiet time.” As with most of Chan's lurches toward the quiet life, her move to Oregon worked for a few months. She babysat, hung out with the guys from the band, and focused on inhaling clean air, smelling spring flowers, and purifying herself of all the evil dirty rock sins she had committed over the last year. Ultimately the city took to Chan more than she took to it: “I would go out there later and people would be talking to me about her,” Foljahn remembers. “I think Chan had a good time out there, but it didn't last very long.”

In the mid-nineties, Chan's dating life was as unwieldy as her professional life. She was always on the road or traveling on her own, and she wasn't sure whether she was going to continue making music or give it all up for a simpler life. In Bill Callahan, a poet Chan met in 1996, she found a reason to focus. By the late spring of 1997, Callahan, a handsome but somber-looking guy with a slight build and a knowing stare, was the only man left in Chan's life.

Callahan, who recorded music under the name Smog, was born in
June 1966 in Silver Spring, Maryland, a large suburb of Washington, D.C. He was a quiet child with an elaborate inner life he rarely shared. His brief forays into traditional teenage society included archery lessons, a stint on the middle school cross-country team, and hours spent skate-boarding on the yellow slalom board he got at Sears. Callahan's musical heroes include John Lee Hooker and James Brown, but he was into the romance of discovering any kind of new music. “I made my way through just about everything as a kid,” the singer has said. And when asked which artists first grabbed his attention, he said, “The transistor radio held to the ear late into the night.”

In 1988, Bill used a four-track to record a series of homemade cassettes under the name Smog. From the very beginning, Bill was into brutally spare music: Smog's debut album
Sewn to the Sky
(released in 1990) showcases serrated, almost violent instrumentals played with a willful lack of artistry on junk-shop instruments. Callahan also was interested in music made without any of the usual frivolous adornments like an in-tune guitar or a hook. Callahan also had a predilection for wandering. In 1988 he moved to Georgia, then back to Maryland. Around the time
Sewn to the Sky
came out, Bill was off to New Hampshire, and in 1992, just after
Forgotten Foundation
, his debut album for indie label Drag City, came out, Bill moved to California, where he lived in San Francisco and Sacramento. All told, Callahan has lived in more than twenty cities in his life. He currently resides in Austin, Texas, though only he knows for how long.

According to Callahan, Chan decided to cover the Smog song “Bathysphere” on
What Would the Community Think
after she saw Callahan perform it live. “I liked her version,” the reclusive singer-songwriter has said of the cover. “I think she's got a good voice, something that should be emanating from a minaret.” Chan's choice to put a Smog cover
on her album was the indie-rocker equivalent of passing Callahan a note in study hall, and it worked. For all Chan's insecurity and evident shyness, she's also boy-crazy, and tends to aggressively go after the men that she wants. “She's kind of a dude about the boys,” Foljahn explains, laughing. “She's got a flame gun for the cute ones. She's on it.”

Both Chan and Callahan have been careful not to openly discuss the details of their relationship (that's what postbreakup albums are for), and it's hard to pinpoint exactly when things between them went from like to love, but by the time Cat Power was on the European leg of the
Community
tour, the two were hanging out in Spain as a couple. The relationship continued through Cat Power's return to the States, and though it took her a few months to conclude she'd had enough of the music business, it was Callahan to whom Chan turned when she decided it was time to try out her real dream of becoming a wife and mother. In the spring of 1997 Chan left Portland and met Callahan in Prosperity, South Carolina, where the couple rented a modest two-story white clapboard house off Highway 51. Both vowed to end their nomadic ways.

Prosperity is a remote town of about a thousand people located in northwestern South Carolina. There is a slow, sticky feel to the place that makes porch swinging and iced-tea drinking seem like biological imperatives. In the parking lot of the Piggy Wiggly just outside town, a buxom teenage blonde in a hot-pink John Deere T-shirt makes out with a boy through the open window of his pickup truck. A few cars down, a mother in her twenties wrestles watermelons and twin toddlers into the backseat of a station wagon, the dashboard of which is cluttered with religious figurines. On a Sunday afternoon, Town Square Antiques, which sells everything from costume jewelry to beat-up old dressers to vintage housecoats, is just about the only place open. Down Main Street you'll find the BP station advertising
HOT DOGS, PROPANE, BOILED P-NUTS
, while
teenagers congregate to drink soda pop, crush aluminum cans, and watch the cars go by.

Prosperity feels remote but not rural. The state highway that leads you to Main Street and the town's center features one Baptist or Lutheran church for every tractor-repair shop and fireworks depot. Life here is not bucolic. There's no livestock in sight, no produce stands or wide expanses of well-groomed farmland, and the houses in the area are modest suburban homes set close to the road, featuring mailboxes decorated with tacky floral contact paper. On the town's Web site, the mayor boasts that employment in the Prosperity area is steady, with the Georgia-Pacific sawmill and plywood plant, an auto-parts plant, and a frozen-bread-product producer nearby.

The small house that Chan and Bill lived in sits about five minutes outside of town. It's close enough to Highway 51 that the sound of cars whizzing by is constant. On the other side of the street is a vast expanse of deep-green land, overgrown with weeds. Next door is Ackerman's, a used-car depot that advertises with the slogan “We buy wrecks.” Behind the house is more overgrown land dotted with discarded tractor parts, rusty from exposure to the elements. Prosperity isn't charming, it's oppressive.

The young couple moved to Prosperity in the late spring of 1997, when Chan was twenty-five and Bill was thirty. The plan was simple: Chan was going to quit making music and domesticate, and Bill was going to be the head of the couple's fledgling household. As the man, Bill would continue making Smog albums and touring so he could pull in decent money from royalties and live shows, while Chan would stay home and be a good wife and eventually a good mother as well. “My travels are over/My travels are through/Let's move to the country/Just me and you,” he sings on “Let's Move to the Country,” the opening track on
Knock Knock
, a 1999 Smog album that is widely believed to chronicle the trajectory of his relationship with Chan.

The couple began their project with the same sense of optimism conveyed in this song. This was Bill's chance to stop moving long enough to actually invest in a real life with someone other than himself. It was Chan's chance to break out of the family business and pursue the life she'd always idealized: as a mother and a wife. “I said, ‘I'm gonna be a housewife,’” Chan remembered. “I'm gonna play with deers. I'm gonna learn to cook. I'm gonna wear dresses and try to be normal.” She's great at living out of a suitcase, but Chan actually has quite a few skills that recommend her to housewifery. From hot summer afternoons in Cabbagetown spent passing out Popsicles to neighborhood kids to the years Chan spent working in New York City restaurants, she has always found satisfaction in serving others, and she's always been a pretty decent cook. “She worked at all these fabulous restaurants,” Foljahn says. “I remember once she made this thing with corn and sun-dried tomatoes… and she'd use good olive oil, and it was all very fancy and really good.”

The plan worked for a while. When Bill wasn't on tour, Chan busied herself tending to him and to their home. When he was away she took walks, listened to records, and read.

“Chan moved into a little house in South Carolina with Bill,” her stepdad, Leamon, remembers. “I met Bill. He was neat. He was quiet. … Didn't get to know him that well. I went out there to visit. Me and Lenny, or me and someone. They had a little farmhouse. We walked around the property, strummed the guitar a little while, she showed us the house, we had a light lunch, sandwiches and stuff.” For a while the pair was really happy. They even bickered like a blissfully devoted married couple. “It was funny the things she had to complain about when she got back from South Carolina,” Foljahn remembers. “They were all
funny-old-married-people things like that he just wanted to cook the same thing all the time. She would cook all these fabulous things and he would just want to make vegetable stir-fry.”

When they were both home at the same time, they would do silly couple stuff like take up odd projects or try out new recipes on each other. “One day, when I lived in the country, I just got bored,” Chan has remembered. “My boyfriend and I went to Wal-Mart and bought some paints 'cause we found all this paper in the recycling bin at the dump. So we bought yellow, blue, red, and white. For eight hours—I made dinner in between paintings—I just made a bunch of paintings and never did it again. It's kinda how it is with songwriting. ‘Oh, I feel like playin' the guitar. Oh, look. I have four new songs. I'm tired. I wanna go out to eat or something.’”

On the surface, Bill Callahan and Chan Marshall seem to be polar opposites. In person, Chan is a hipster Southern belle. Warm and pathologically social, Chan is the sort of person who can make ten friends in ten minutes in a roomful of complete strangers. She's also a huge flirt and a bit of a scenester. Foljahn remembers being at clubs and bars in New York with Chan in the early nineties and listening to her go on and on about whatever semifamous indie-rock sex object was in the room at the time. “We'd go someplace because she had a crush on Jon Spencer,” the guitarist remembers. “She'd go, ‘Oh, there he is!’ Or Malkmus or whatever. She knew all these people, she knew everybody on the scene.” Bill, on the other hand, is a total recluse, known for his unapologetically ornery personality in interviews, coal-black sense of humor, and his hermetic tendencies. It's not unreasonable to wonder: Besides lo-fi rock music, what did these two have in common?

For starters, Bill is as girl-crazy as Chan is boy-crazy. Besides Chan, his past girlfriends include zany journalist and zine-culture icon Lisa
“Suckdog” Carver and freak-folk harpist Joanna Newsom. Though Bill doesn't share Chan's almost predatory flirting style, his lyrics are sexually explicit, bawdy, aggressive, and sometimes violent. The sexualized vitriol certain Smog lyrics reveal has even led some people to call him a misogynist, but it's more that Bill's way of relaying truths about people and relationships often involves sex. In Smog songs, everybody is who they are in bed.

On “Dress Sexy at My Funeral,” off
Dongs of Sevotion
, Callahan sings: “Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife/ … Wear your blouse undone to here/And your skirt split up to there/ … /Tell them about the time we did it/ … /On the railroad tracks with the gravel in your back/ … And in the graveyard where my body now rests.” This is one of the Smog lyrics that scandalizes some listeners, but it's important to note that however seething his anger at women may be in this and other songs, he applies the same lewd examination style to himself. On “To Be of Use,” a heartbreaking track off 1997's
Red Apple Falls
, Callahan uses sex as a metaphor to describe his desire to be of some use in life. “Most of my fantasies are of/Making someone else come/Most of my fantasies are of/To be of use/To be of some hard, simple, undeniable use.”