Cat Power (37 page)

“Drugs and alcohol were part of my growing up,” the singer has said. “The people I was around were of the sixties. There was that sense of rebellion. Then the seventies hit and it was all about cocaine. The reefer was always around, and so was alcohol. It just got darker and darker,
but I thought I'd never have a problem with alcohol. And then I stopped and asked myself: Why am I drinking two bottles of wine at dinner or half a bottle of scotch? I never really thought, When something bad happens, you go to the bar and turn off your emotions. I never realized that I'd gotten to the point of such depression.”

As vocal as Chan has been about her drinking problem and her family's history of substance abuse, a remarkable number of the singer's close friends don't buy her as an alcoholic. “I know musicians who had severe substance or alcohol problems,” Steve Dollar says. “A certain amount of drinking is just maintenance, then there's people doing destructive drinking. I don't really see her like that, though. She doesn't seem like an out-of-control person. But then again, it's not like there weren't a lot of people that were pretty blacked-out down in Atlanta, so you could, in fact, seem to be pretty okay by comparison.”

Jeff Clark and Loring Kemp are similarly perplexed by the notion of their friend as an out-of-control addict. “To me or Jeff, it wasn't obvious,” Kemp says. “I don't remember seeing her falling-down drunk or doing anything outrageous. I remember her having a good time, but never anything that would ring alarm bells. As eccentric as she can be, she's a very, very smart and together person. She really loves life and all the experiences she can have doing this. I can't ever imagine her allowing herself to go down that road.”

The fact that many of Chan's close friends didn't pick up on her drinking problem is, in a way, a sign of exactly how bad it was. Chan is the first to admit that she's a master of disguising what's really going on with her for the benefit of other people in her life; she had to be in order to survive her childhood. “Chan Marshall, me, has always taken care of herself,” the singer has said, speaking about herself in the third person. “Chan has never been an addict. Chan's had friends who are dead
because of their promiscuity with drug use. Chan would never be a junkie. Chan's mom was an alcoholic; she would never do that. Chan was always in control.”

The singer also points out that though she was an excessive drinker, she could hold her liquor. “I wasn't a sloppy drunk. I could have a fifth of scotch and still be carrying on a rational conversation, doing dishes or whatever, and never slurring,” she has explained. “The amount that you drink enables you to drink more. If you have one drink on Monday, you can have two on Tuesday, and then three on Wednesday. By the time you hit Saturday, you're up to ten drinks. You feel like shit on Sunday, so you have a drink, and then two on Monday. When that happens, depression stays in your blood.”

Chan may have a preternaturally developed sense of her own appeal, but by accident or by design, she was still not as famous as she could have been. The singer's bluesy vocal style, her high profile in areas outside of music, and the fact
that Cat Power's songs became more mainstream as her career progressed suggested that every minivan in America should have had
The Covers Record
or
You Are Free
in its CD changer. The fact that they didn't frustrated the label guys who'd put a decade-plus into coaching Chan from a howling androgynous banshee to a polished star. “Obviously there is still a slight nagging feeling on our part that compared to her level of celebrity, we wish more records were being sold,” Cosloy allows. “We wouldn't be human if we didn't sit around every now and then and say, ‘Well, gee, how come she doesn't sell as many records as Norah Jones?’”

In February 2002, Jones, a little-known jazz vocalist, released her debut album,
Come Away with Me
. By June, Jones's second single, “Don't Know Why,” was as ubiquitous as Avril Lavigne's bratty summer hit “Complicated.” Jones was neither a pop star nor a merely palatable Lilith girl: She has a moody voice that's not dissimilar to Chan's and a sober, pensive style. Yet
Come Away with Me
eventually reached the top of the
Billboard
chart, cleaned up at the 2003 Grammies with five wins, and to date has sold more than twenty million copies, making it the best-selling studio album of the decade thus far. The singer's next album, 2004's
Feels Like Home
, sold a million copies in its first week of release, firmly establishing the Norah Jones business model as one to emulate. No singer in contemporary music was as well positioned to capitalize on Jones's success as Chan, and Cat Power's next album, 2006's
The Greatest
, was designed to do exactly that.

In the three-plus years that passed between
You Are Free
and the summer of 2005, when Chan entered the studio to record
The Greatest
, she was as cagey with Matador as she was with the press about where she was and with whom she was recording. In spring of 2005, Chris Lombardi began the long process of locating Chan and locking her into
a specific time and place where she would record the next Cat Power album. In the ten years Chan had been making music professionally, everyone from the most die-hard Cat Power fans to skeptical critics to the executives at her label had wondered aloud why Chan hadn't yet made the traditional soul record her honey-toned voice always seemed best suited for.

Lombardi was at the top of the list of people who wanted to see Cat Power make an old-school, Muscle Shoals-style album that would finally take advantage, commercially, of Chan's voice. Lombardi and a small Matador team tracked Chan down in Barcelona, took her out for a giant Spanish meal, and, legend has it, by the time they were enjoying their postmeal kava, Cat Power was scheduled to record in June with Al Green's band at Ardent Studios in Memphis. “Everyone wanted a band,” Chan has recalled. “It was: ‘Where's the rock 'n’ roll? Where's the band?’” It has been suggested that Chan refused to record unless Lombardi got her Al Green's players, assuming this would be impossible, but Cosloy says negotiations weren't quite that theatrical. “As far as Chan saying, ‘Get me Al Green's band or I won't make the record,’ I don't think that's true. That might be a slight exaggeration.”

Robert Gordon, a renowned Memphis-based journalist who knows all the old-time blues players in the area, put Chan in touch with the performers who would record
The Greatest
with her. “Gordon was the one who got Teenie and the other players together,” Cosloy says, referring to legendary songwriter and guitarist Teenie Hodges. “Musically, the record, it's all Chan, and the band are obviously awesome and great players, but Robert and Chris especially did a lot of heavy lifting as far as just getting a record together.”

“When planning the recording of her latest album… Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) phoned me for assistance,” Gordon wrote as part of an
introduction to an interview he did with Chan for
Stop Smiling
. “She wanted to record in Memphis with a Memphis group and a Memphis sound, and wondered if I could help put together a band. Her call renewed an acquaintanceship we'd struck up during her previous Memphis sessions, for
What Would the Community Think
, a decade earlier.”

Hodges, Al Green's guitarist and cowriter of some of the legend's most famous hits, including “Take Me to the River” and “Love and Happiness,” got the call from Gordon before he'd ever heard of Cat Power. “Robert called me one day to see if I would be interested in recording Cat Power,” Hodges remembers. “He said, ‘Have you ever heard of her? Heard her play or sing?’ I said, ‘No, I've never heard of her before tonight.’” Gordon set up a meeting between Stuart Sikes, who would produce the album, Chan, and Hodges at a restaurant in Memphis. At first the meal felt like a bad first date. “Rob and I are sitting next to each other,” Hodges remembers. “Chan went back to the other side of the table, and Rob said, ‘Chan, you come over and sit by Teenie.’” But soon Chan warmed up, and twenty minutes later the whole group decided to go straight from the restaurant to the studio to try out a few ideas.

In addition to working with Al Green, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges also recorded and toured with his brothers, bassist Leroy “Flick” Hodges and keyboardist Charles Hodges, as the Hi Rhythm Section. They worked as the in-house band on many songs released by legendary Memphis soul and rockabilly label Hi Records. The group's ability to conjure both sorrow and warmth with simple, deeply emotive playing provided the backdrop for some of the greatest soul records ever, including Al Green classics “Let's Stay Together” and “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)” as well as the Ann Peebles song “I Can't Stand the Rain” (later made even more famous by Missy Elliott) and O. V. Wright's “A Nickel and a Nail.”

Today Hodges is a physically fragile man with a flirtatious wit that belies
his poor health. He suffers from emphysema, which seriously impairs his breathing and has affected his ability to tour, record, and even spend time outside during the warmer months. As a kid, however, the legendary bluesman was a promising baseball player and had dreams of becoming a professional catcher before an early growth spurt proved to be the only one he'd ever experience—and he was forced to admit he was too short and too thin for the professional leagues.

The Greatest
was a full-blown studio record with sophisticated production and senior players backing Chan up, and this scared her to death. The rest of the world was impressed by the fame quotient of her
You Are Free
collaborators, but to Chan, Vedder and Grohl and Kasper were just grown-up kids like her, with their roots firmly planted in indie rock. The idea of working with the Memphis players was much more daunting because these people were Chan's heroes. They made the music that kept her company as a girl when things were bad. Faced with the reality of directing her musical idols in the studio, all of Chan's old hang-ups reappeared.

June in Memphis is best spent sipping iced tea and waiting for fall, but Chan and her players (who would later tour with her as the Memphis Rhythm Band) assembled at Ardent Studios every morning and got right to work, recording each track on
The Greatest
in a one-take session. This meant that the band had to be extremely well rehearsed, yet comfortable enough with each other to keep the sound from feeling uptight. Chan's approach to accomplishing this was to stay drunk all day.

“I was bad,” the singer has said. “I always had my fifth of scotch, but I didn't realize that I always had that. I thought it was normal. I didn't realize I was a mess.” Chan needed to communicate with her musicians, but she wasn't sure how to do it. “The recording process was intense,” the singer has said. “You know, white girl from Georgia asking these
legendary musicians if they'd be interested in recording. Teenie would be like, ‘Now, what key is this song in?’ and I'd be like, ‘I don't know anything about keys.’”

Hodges quickly became Chan's friend and supporter in the studio, serving as a conduit between Chan's vision for the songs and the rest of the musicians. “All I need is a music sheet, not numbered chords with a number chart,” Hodges explains. “That's the way we do it in Memphis and Nashville. The person to start that process was Reggie Young with the Memphis Boys. Reggie was my mentor for playing guitar, so we adopted that style. Once we got her in the studio, I'd just tell her, ‘Just play it on the guitar or the piano, and as you play it, I'll write it out.’”

“He'd be like, ‘Okay, just play it,’” Chan has said. “‘I'd play and he'd mark down the Nashville number system.’” Each number represents a chord, making it easier to write out the basic structure of a song. “That's the way poor people learned to play because,” she says, adopting a Deep South accent, “they don't have no
con-serrr-va-tory
.” Hodges was crucial to making Chan feel comfortable enough in the studio that she was able to communicate her ideas to the rest of the players. “Teenie would be like, ‘See that note you played? That's the key. It's always gonna come back to that note,’” Chan has said. Teaching Chan the Nashville number system was one way Hodges kept the singer relaxed in the studio. He also helped her stay drunk. “The first day when we went to the studio, she said, ‘I'd sure like to have a drink, but I can't because if my boyfriend knew it, he'd kill me,’” Hodges remembers. “I said something like, ‘I won't tell. I've got some corn liquor.’ So she took a drink of it, and from that day and for the next three days, she drank and drank.”

“We would get into the studio and I would play a song. They'd listen to it, and then Teenie would say, ‘Now, Chan, was that 5-5-1-5 or 5-1-1-5?’” the singer has remembered. “I would just sit there silent and
kinda start tearing up and sort of try and hide under the piano. And they would look at each other like, ‘Oh yeah—right,’ and then go into the corner and work it out.”

“Chan would say, ‘Oh, my songs are so simple!’” producer Stuart Sikes has said. “But no one there was like, ‘Well, this is too easy!’ Every body really got into it. They were there for three days and would come back to see what was going on, everyone who recorded on it—even the horn guys would sneak back in. And after we did it, they all individually told me how much they liked it.”