Cat Power (41 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Goodman
For the first time since she was a teenager, Chan had nowhere she had to be, nobody around to occupy her attention, and no substances to distract her from her thoughts. “I hadn't had time off since I lived in South Carolina in 1996-97, so it was really weird to wake up in the same place,” Chan has said. “I thought, What the fuck am I going to do with myself?” The prospect of all that unstructured time alone—especially in contrast to the regimented life she'd been living as a touring musician— was intimidating, but Chan embraced it.
She started listening closely to her body and mind, relying on intuition and instinct to guide every moment of her day. She ate what she wanted to eat when she wanted to eat it. She slept when she wanted for as long as she wanted. She read all the books she'd been buying for years but never had time to read. She spent hours trying on clothes in her closet, many of them forgotten purchases with the tags still on. She scrubbed her apartment. She wrote in a journal. She woke up early and swam in the ocean before breakfast. She experimented in the kitchen. She bought the Winsor Pilates DVD from television and started exercising
every day with a neighbor. She made tea. She went out dancing with her girlfriends. She hosted dinner parties.
The singer relished relearning how to live. “If I wanted to, I could wake up at six, swim in the ocean till seven thirty, lay around and read on the beach,” Chan recalled. “I could do whatever I wanted. I didn't have to go be on a plane. I didn't have to be at soundcheck. I didn't have to do an interview. I didn't have to rush to see my four best friends in New York in one hour before I have to fly to Paris to do another show. I could come back from the beach, sleep till four. I could get in a taxi, go see two movies, and on the way home go to a bookstore and buy a couple of books. I could write an eight-page letter to a friend on a type-writer, to someone I was only able to hang out with at soundcheck in Portland. I could go see a therapist, talk about something that happened when I was eighteen. The world was open.
“If you drink every day, I highly recommend trying not doing it for a while,” Chan has said since becoming semisober. “Being on the road, touring, the many bars… you meet so many different strangers. I drank to create a bubble so I wouldn't really have to be there all the time. And alcoholism runs in my family. I thought, ‘Oh, it'll never affect me. I've got a control on it.’ But there's a good aspect: It helped me understand alcoholics I've known my whole life. It helped me understand their perspective and the crazy things they do that were often hurtful—traumatizing at times. It helped me understand I can't take it personally, even though it's really hard to accept sometimes.”
Chan didn't participate in an organized recovery program like Alcoholics Anonymous, but during the months that followed her hospitalization she continued to see her doctors and follow a vaguely twelve-stepesque plan. “I received a letter from her,” Moore remembers. “I think she wrote to a lot of people apologizing for her behavior and
saying how she has discovered herself. It really looked like a letter that somebody wanted to write as part of a program.” Stewart Lupton didn't receive a letter from Chan, but he got a similar sense that she was out there in the world, making amends. “I hadn't talked to her in a while when I saw her with the Memphis crew,” he remembers. “But getting the record was like talking to her. I knew some sea change had happened, and I couldn't stop listening to it. Don't tell her that, 'cause she'll apologize.”
At home, away from the spotlight and alone for the first time in years with her guitar and her musical instincts, Chan started reconnecting with the songs she loved as a child. She wore out records by Buddy Holly, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams, playing certain tracks on repeat and tinkering with her own interpretations of her favorite songs. Many of these cuts would later appear on the singer's second covers album,
Jukebox
, which would be released in 2008.
Winter gave way to spring, and soon summer was looming. Cat Power had not played a single show since the previous fall and hadn't been out on a proper tour in more than a year. The band still hadn't performed a single song off
The Greatest
since the album's acclaimed release. But Chan was starting to feel that familiar roving impulse. She called up Matador, announced that she was ready to return to her life as a rock ‘n’ roll star, and that summer, six months after
The Greatest
came out, Cat Power and her Memphis Rhythm Band finally hit the road in support of a reissued, repackaged version of the album.
At Mount Sinai Hospital, Chan didn't find God, sanity, or the strength to combat debilitating addiction: She found that she actually likes herself, and that realization jump-started her will to live. “Having traveled around drinking, drinking, drinking, being in bars and stuff, I now see myself at thirty-four versus twenty-four,
when I was
feeling inferior for many different reasons,” Chan mused. “Being a Southern female
uneducated poor person, they're shackles. I accepted them and thought that I was less 'cause I was a woman. Less 'cause I was uneducated. Less 'cause I come from the South. Who I thought I was then, who I was then—I see myself, all the things I thought I knew then. I feel like I know myself more now than I did then. I can trust myself more, and that makes me feel like I'm not a piece of shit. That makes me feel good.”
In the summer of 2007 I interviewed Nick Cave for Rolling Stone. He and his deranged blues-rocking side project, Grinderman (whose signature song is titled “No Pussy Blues”), were in New York City to open (along with Porter
Wagoner) for the White Stripes at the Detroit duo's first-ever gig at Madison Square Garden. We met at the decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll hour of ten thirty a.m. at a hotel that should have been the Chelsea (New York's most famous home away from home for debauched poets) but was actually the Holiday Inn type hotel just next door. I was extremely nervous. Cave is a whip-smart musical visionary with a reputation for torturing journalists who don't impress him. My only comfort was that a friend and fellow journalist once confused him with Nick Drake during their interview, so I knew the bar had been set very low.
After meeting him in the lobby, I had the thrilling experience of riding in an uncomfortably small hotel elevator with the recently showered Australian rock star (black hair still wet, vintage Hawaiian shirt clinging to his chest). We got off on the sixth floor, arranged ourselves awkwardly on the scratchy floral bedspread in one of the band members' rooms, and talked for twenty minutes. When the interview was over, I rode the elevator back down to the lobby with Cave and the bearded Grinderman violinist Warren Ellis, who also plays with Australian group and occasional Cat Power collaborators the Dirty Three. Cave leaned against the elevator door, arms crossed, managing to glare and smirk at me at the same time. Ellis was friendlier. I mentioned that I was working on a book about Cat Power and asked Ellis, then Cave, if he would consider being interviewed for it. “You're doing a book on Cat Power?” Cave said from behind comically cheap-looking mirrored aviators. “Yes,” I said, quivering. “An entire book?” Cave asked. “I mean, I could see doing a
pamphlet
.”
On September 15, 2008, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds sold out approximately eighteen hundred seats at the Hollywood Bowl. The legendary venue is one of the largest the band has ever played. It's speculated that the secret to their sudden box office success wasn't a
renewed interest in diabolical Australian geniuses, great as Cave and his band's new album
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
was. It wasn't even the promise that Cave would wear that filmy Hawaiian shirt onstage. It was the fact that they shared the bill with Spiritualized, and more crucially, Cat Power. She did the same thing for Interpol at MSG earlier in the year.
Boys could slag her off, underestimate her, or imply that she was not ready for the full-book treatment, but when they had arenas to fill they were more than happy to capitalize on some of that dubious charisma. Soon Cat Power will be filling these venues herself.
In a post
-Greatest
world, anything is possible for Chan Marshall. It was as if she compiled one of those things-to-do-before-you-die lists self-help books advocate, then tackled each and every item on it. Chan hasn't yet made it to painter, baker, or schoolteacher, but she did cover visual performer, professional model, actress, activist, and mother, albeit to a little French bulldog named Mona.
In 2006, Chan told the
New York Times
that she was going to audition to be a cast member on
Saturday Night Live
. This from a woman whose sunniest album includes a song based around the refrain “I hate myself and I want to die” (which she stole from Kurt Cobain, a man equally famous for his optimism). In frenzied moments of passionate motivation, Chan had no doubt made similar grandiose proclamations, but in the past nobody was really listening. This time everybody's ears were perked.
“People were like, Did you hear this? Chan wants to be on
Saturday Night Live,”
Fred Armisen remembers. (Armisen is a real live
SNL
cast member who plays Barack Obama on the show, has directed music videos, and can be seen opening for Jeff Tweedy's solo tour in the Wilco documentary
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.)
“People blew it out of proportion. As I talked to her, I was like, Well, she's just saying that she
can do characters and she can do impressions and stuff. Which she can, really well. It's like me saying, ‘I play such great drums, I could totally be in the Shins!’ Then it's like: Fred Armisen has made an announcement that he's gonna play in the Shins.”
There are lots of opportunities available to Chan now that she is a genuine icon in a world full of TMZ-minted celebrities, and she's taken advantage of many of them. After meeting Chan at the Mercer Hotel in New York City, Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld offered her a job as the face of the label's new jewelry line. In the fall of 2006 Chan and her new players, the Dirty Delta Blues Band, performed in Paris at Chanel's spring show. Chan also lent her voice to the musical excursions of her new fellow model friends, including Jack White's wife, Karen Elson, with whom Chan sang a version of “Je T'aime (Moi Non Plus)” for a 2005 Serge Gainsbourg tribute album.
In the winter of 2007 Chan collaborated with multimedia artist Doug Aitken for an installation at the MOMA, which featured Tilda Swinton and Donald Sutherland among her fellow performers. And supermodel and sometimes girlfriend to Pete Doherty Irina Lazareanu says that Chan will appear on her forthcoming album. In 2007 she appeared as Jude Law's girlfriend in her first feature film, Wong Kar-wai's
My Blueberry Nights
, and in the fall of 2007 Chan had her first solo art show at Max Fish down on the Lower East Side, her old stomping grounds.
With the spoils of her new projects, Chan bought a new, splashier two-story condo in Miami. With a coat of fresh paint and lots of light, Chan's spare, airy, peaceful home is filled with framed photos of the Rolling Stones and Dylan and toys for Mona, to whom she openly coos in a throaty baby voice.
In 2007, almost ten years after Chan made that disturbing and inspiring first trip to Africa, the singer tried to go back, though civil war
in Kenya forced her to cancel part of her journey. Chan also started working with various relief organizations and reached out to her fans, encouraging them to give to people affected by the cyclone that hit India in November 2007.
In April of 2007 Chan finally met Bob Dylan. “At last we meet,” Chan's hero supposedly said to her backstage at his show in Paris. “I love you,” Chan responded. Dylan's alleged response? “I like the sound of that. At least somebody does.” She wrote “Song to Bobby,” the one new original composition on
Jukebox
, about this encounter—one she'd been waiting for her entire life.
Even with all these new distractions, Cat Power's musical prominence was only increasing. Chan's version of “Sea of Love,” off the original covers record, was featured prominently in 2008's Oscar-winning sleeper blockbuster and pop-cultural phenomenon
Juno
. And the elder statesmen of rock, many of whom, like Cave, had remained skeptical of this fragile Southern singer, started to invite Chan to their lunch tables.
The singer was among the list of collaborators Yoko Ono invited to record versions of Ono's songs for 2007's
Yes, I'm a Witch
. “I cannot believe what she did,” the venerated Ono enthuses. “To pick ‘Revelations,’ it's a very difficult one. This song was the kind of song that was buried because the nature of it is not pop. She brought it out. For her to do this was really an honor for me. I'm thankful to her. She gave a big, beautiful moment for this song.” After working with Chan, Ono perceived the singer as a potent artistic force. “She's big now, and also a very powerful person and singer-songwriter.”
Still, when Chan's take on David Bowie's “Space Oddity” began blaring out of TV sets across America as part of a Lincoln car commercial, it felt like it was high time Cat Power got back to real work. The singer's next album of original songs has yet to be released, but
Jukebox
,
another collection of covers that came out on January 22, 2008, suggests that Chan is poised to mutate once again.
Like the original covers record, two years separate
Jukebox
from its predecessor in the Cat Power canon. Like
Covers
, Chan decided to make
Jukebox
after she had already written most of a new album of original material that she was not yet emotionally ready to release. Like
Covers, Jukebox
features mostly cover songs except for one of Chan's old tunes (“American Flag,” originally off
Moon Pix
) revamped to reflect the changes in the composer and one new original (“Song to Bobby”). And like
Covers
, a new level of Chan's celebrity cachet preceded the recording of
Jukebox
.
Like training wheels on a child's bike,
The Covers Record
helped Chan navigate the transition from confessional tomboy to mysterious glamour girl.
Jukebox
works in exactly the same way. It marks a shift in Chan from successful, record-selling celebrity to someone else; someone we will get to know in the coming years.
“I have to say, I'm more excited to hear her next album than any album she's ever made,” concedes Charles Aaron, who has spent fifteen years waiting to love a Cat Power record. “The fact that she can get up there and not embarrass herself with those Memphis guys impressed me enough to want to take her seriously. And the Memphis-horns thing is cool, but just make a Cat Power indie-rock album with all the best people who are your peers, and write some really good songs, and maybe we can finally see her for who she really is. I'm tired of having an attitude about Cat Power. It felt like a weight. Now I know with one hundred percent certainty that she's got great music in her. Maybe I'd missed something before because of all the nonsense.”
In the time since Chan was released from the hospital and announced she was sober, the singer has definitely started drinking again. At first
it was a thimble of vodka in her OJ in honor of a friend's birthday. Then it was a beer with food. Then the ritualized postshow glass of wine. Then the occasional beer or two (or four) while relaxing in her hotel room. Chan Marshall's demons will never die. Within her there will always be a struggle between the two opposing sides of her conflicting personality. She will always want to stay home
and
go out, to dress like a dude
and
wear couture. She will always want to be Cat Power and Chan Marshall, Gatsby and Jay Gatz. Yet even as she's added a drink or two to her postbreakdown regimen, she hasn't foregone the fruit salad and mint tea.
Most important, when Chan invariably loses her way again, she knows how to get back to where she is now. All she has to do is sing. “Who doesn't love singing songs, making music?” she asked. “It's the one chain they can't break. My dad was a singer, my mom was a singer, my stepdad was in bands, my grandma was a singer in church. We were always singing. I have that cassette of me singing ‘The Gambler’ when I was six, and it's the way I'm singing now. It's the same shit. I spent all these years learning to play guitar, learning to express myself musically. Listening to that tape, my Southern little voice, it broke my heart because I didn't have to spend all this fucking time trying to find … I'm Southern, you know what I mean? Six years old. It was there, but I didn't know it. It was repressed.”