Cover Story: Cat’s meow

Cat Power, aka Atlanta native Chan Marshall, has sold somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 records since her 1995 debut, Dear Sir. The new You Are Free, her sixth album, sold a whopping 11,000 copies in its first week of release, landing it at No. 105 on the Billboard album charts.

Impressive stuff for a high-school dropout who, little more than a decade ago, was fully enrolled in the Academy of Glorious Southern Misfits — the one presided over by local folks like Benjamin, the cross-dressing sage who fronted local acts Smoke and Opal Foxx Quartet. The one centered in the tight-knit, pre-gentrified company town/artist colony/white-trash ‘hood of Cabbagetown.

But, then again, rapper 50 Cent’s debut also came out last month and sold 872,000 copies in its first week — and even George Strait’s just-released live record sold 100,000 copies.

So why is it that, given her almost negligible mainstream popularity, Chan Marshall has been the subject of a full-page fashion shoot in The New York Times Magazine and features in establishment rags from Vanity Fair to Newsweek? She’s also enjoyed marquee placement in Rolling Stone, which gave her and 50 Cent equal space in the opening spread of its March 6 record reviews section.

One thing you should know: Chan is friends with a bunch of music critics. I say this not to imply that her career is built on favoritism or conflict-of-interest — only to suggest that writers are drawn to her. The same thing that fascinates critics about her maddening ambivalence toward her “career” as a “pop singer” is what makes us like her personally.

Marshall’s reputation for being a natural star who lacks the ego to perform confidently in front of large groups makes some twisted sense to us. After all, it’s just a willingness to do what she does — get paid to create material for the consumption of others — only without embracing the essentially extroverted nature of it all. That’s something writers know all about. We put stuff out there, and then enjoy the luxury of not having to stand in front of people while they read our stuff.

Roni: Do you read your press?

Chan: Sometimes. Like this one really great girl in Santa Fe, we just had such a great talk — things like that I want to read.

What do you think about music critics who use a lot of first-person and self- referencing? Do you ever feel like it’s self-indulgent — that it’s presumptuous for the writer to think that the reader wants to read about them?

I think that’s the case with a lot of things. Like the grocery store guy could talk to you for five hours about how this salmon is the best salmon, and he’s there to tell you because he knows, because he just knows, and ... “OK, I have to go, I just need my piece of fish.”

What if a writer actually knows the subject? Is it fair game to write about knowing them?

That’s interesting. Uh, yeah, of course. They’re just doing their job. Are you asking me that so I don’t get mad at you about something you’re going to write?

I’m not worried that you’re going to be mad, I was just wondering about your perspective. I have questions about it myself. To take something from a personal life that isn’t designed for the public. Not that there’s anything so personal here ...

I see what you mean — like, exploiting a personal conversation. Well, it’s the choice the writer makes. You just accept that that’s what happens — like this girl in New York who’s interviewed me a couple times, and through that we’ve become friends. It’s weird, because I read something she’d written and it made me feel funny. Because I didn’t know she had these feelings. It just gets you to know the person a little more.

If I’d only known the following information would one day be relevant, I would’ve tried harder to remember the details. There was a major trauma — some guy far away had died — and that was the reason I had to leave. It was only fair. After all, I was just crashing at my friends’ East 4th Street apartment, and Lily was their official new roommate. The deceased was her friend (boyfriend?), and she had every right to mourn without some freeloading stranger sleeping a couple feet away in the living room.

It was the summer of ‘92 in Manhattan. I had just graduated from college and was bouncing between friends’ couches, biding my time until I took off to Europe for six weeks. One friend had moved out of the place on 4th Street, and so the two remaining roommates found Lily, who’d just come up from Atlanta.

When I returned from Europe, I found that one of Lily’s friends had followed her from Atlanta and was living in the apartment as well. She was 20 but had a boyish, wide-eyed quality that made her seem younger. She was funny and cute and quirky, and very easy to like. Her name was Shawn.

A few weeks later, I moved into the building, taking the upstairs apartment. I hung out downstairs once in a while, and sometimes Shawn was around to engage in a conversation. More than anything personal, talking to her tended toward the philosophical or just plain weird. But, generally, it was very entertaining.

I stayed in touch with a friend there after I’d moved out. One day she told me Shawn was opening for Liz Phair — which, circa 1993, was a big deal. Shawn’s band — actually either a duo, with fellow Atlanta expat Glen Thrasher (since returned), or just a solo act — was called Cat Power.

Somewhere along the line, I also found out Shawn’s name wasn’t Shawn at all. It was Chan — “Shon,” as in Chantal. The difference between “Shon” and “Shawn” was narrow enough to be missed by me, and everyone else who didn’t know her well enough to have ever seen her name written down. And, of course, anyone who had seen her name written down couldn’t stop calling her Chan, as in Charlie Chan.

I recall being surprised — not only by the fact that she had scored the Liz Phair gig, but that she even played music. I vaguely recall now that she owned a guitar at the time, but so did every third slacker in the East Village. From a distance, it didn’t stand out as a big part of her life.

Come to think of it, I wasn’t really sure what it was she did, or what she wanted to do. She never much talked about ambitions, and she seemed to exist in a world far removed from me and my friends, recent grads faced with figuring out how to jump-start a life during the waning days of the first Bush recession. She worked here and there — some mutual friends got her a waitress job uptown, and I think she was a bartender briefly. But she never gave much indication that she was working toward something.

And then, suddenly, Chan was the hippest thing going in indie music. Downtown avant-rockers God Is My Co-Pilot took her under their wing. Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley was recording her for his Smells Like Records label. Gerard Cosloy, a founder of what was arguably ’90s indie rock’s most important label, Matador (Liz Phair, Pavement), championed her early and eventually signed her (the last four Cat Power records have been on Matador).

Sometime early on, shortly before I left New York in 1994, I saw Cat Power play at the legendary punk club CBGB. I had never heard Chan’s music before — hadn’t even heard much about the music; I was merely interested in seeing the band of someone I sort of knew. The name to me connoted some sexy feline feminism, so I guess I was expecting maybe a riot grrrl version of Josie & the Pussycats. (I later learned the name was actually inspired by a Caterpillar industrial trucks slogan.) When I arrived, Chan and a drummer were already on stage.

Something you’re not used to hearing from a crowd at CBGB: nothing. Partially, it was a practical consideration — Chan played so quietly, so introvertedly, that to talk during the set would’ve made her impossible to hear. But mostly the silence was due to how mesmerizing she was. Standing alone at the front of the stage, facing sideways with her bangs hanging like a drape in front of her face, she exuded discomfort so viscerally it became among the most affecting aspects of her performance — a source of tension, frustration, empathy, drama. And then, of course, there was the music, which came out of Chan’s mic and amp as one formless stream of voice and guitar noodlings, so pure and guileless it was a pleasure to hear, even if the songs didn’t particularly stand out.

Chan hadn’t yet developed a reputation as an erratic stage performer, so seeing her squirm and apologize her way through a set was shocking enough to leave me physically shaken. I certainly can understand the perspective of someone who has no sympathy or patience for a performer who’s afraid to perform. It’s not, for instance, a huge surprise to see the readers of the popular, locally produced ‘zine, Chunklet, voting Cat Power the “shittiest band you’ve ever seen.” But something about her left me feeling like this was one of the greatest bands I’d ever seen.

Maybe it was because it was just so different from the normal audience/ performer dynamic. Maybe because it made me feel something, which is more than I could say for 95 percent of bands I’ve seen live. Maybe it affected me so strongly because it had no basis whatsoever in what I knew about Chan as a person. Talking to her after the show, I felt the impulse both to congratulate her and to console her.

Because our time of regular acquaintance had passed without ever developing into an actual friendship, and because I could recognize that my fascination with this group came from a gut reaction and not a desire to be a booster for a friend, I decided early on that it wasn’t much of a conflict of interest for me to write about Cat Power as a music journalist.

It wasn’t until 1998, when Chan released her first great record, Moon Pix, that I interviewed her for a story. Her previous records had been fine, but with Moon Pix she arrived as a formidable recording artist, and I was anxious to write about her accomplishment.

I hadn’t seen or talked to her in years, probably since seeing her at CBGB in ‘94. I’d spent most of the four years that had passed in the Carolinas. Chan had come South as well. In between the release of 1996’s What Would the Community Think and Moon Pix, she’d taken an extended break, stopped playing music and moved with her then-boyfriend, Bill Callahan of Smog (another one-person indie act), to a farmhouse in South Carolina. When the relationship and the hiatus ended, she found herself back in Atlanta after six years away.

Our phone interview in the summer of 1998 found Chan as friendly and charming as I’d remembered, but also perhaps more unwound and manic — sometimes disturbingly so. We spoke about the near-breakdown she’d had in South Carolina that resulted in many of the songs on Moon Pix.

“I went fucking insane,” she said. “I really didn’t go crazy — to other people I’m crazy, you see — but to myself I realized some things about my spirituality, that I can’t talk about to my friends because they all think I need help. I believe in God now, and that’s the truth.”

When it came to discussing more concrete topics, the sort of free-association, stream-of-consciousness that Chan channels into conversation worked brilliantly. She described Cabbagetown, the neighborhood she left in ‘92 and where she had recently returned. I’d never heard of the place at that point, but the imagery she drew seems almost like poetry now, enhanced but essentially accurate:

“If you drive in Cabbagetown, a lot of what you see is, like, 6-year-old girls with underwear on, riding dirty old dogs with linens in their toenails and wild-ass teeth and stuff. Beautiful kids, as kids are beautiful, but just wild and dangerous jungle kids. That’s how I think of my mom in the ’50s, coming down here.”

Three months later, as my wife and I were making preparations to move back to New York, a chance phone call to Atlanta at just the right time resulted in me taking the music editor’s job at Creative Loafing.

Sometime about two months into the job, I got an e-mail from Steve Dollar, who was at that point the AJC’s veteran music critic, a guy who knew something about the city’s grassroots music culture.

He wrote something to the effect of, “Hey, are you guys going to do anything about Benjamin?”

Benjamin, one of the central — and certainly the most colorful — figures of Cabbagetown’s early-’90s artistic renaissance, had died. The problem was, aside from reading his name in the Music Menu once or twice, I had no idea who he or the bands he fronted — Smoke and Opal Foxx Quartet — were.

Chan knew. At the time, she told local music ‘zine Stomp and Stammer that Benjamin was one of the reasons she came back to Atlanta. That he was the most inspirational artist to come from where she’d come from — Cabbagetown. (On her current tour to support You Are Free, two former members of Smoke — Coleman Lewis and Will Fratesi — serve as her backing band.)

But for Creative Loafing not to know is a dangerous thing for business, so I found out. I heard stories, I read the articles. I got the CDs, I saw the Benjamin Smoke documentary. (By chance, the film’s DVD release got reviewed in the same recent issue of Rolling Stone as You Are Free. Benjamin in Rolling Stone? Probably even weirder than Cat Power in Vanity Fair).

The longer you stick around, the more you learn. Lots of great things had come out of Cabbagetown in the decade before I arrived, each one its own chapter in the history of Atlanta music and art. Sadly, most of the greatest characters from the neighborhood were gone by the time I arrived. Some had moved — singer Kelly Hogan to Chicago, photographer/ drummer Chris Verene to New York. But more, it seemed, were dead. There was Greg Smalley, a galvanizing force behind the Redneck Underground movement. There was “Panorama Ray” Herbert, a celebrated photographer and “mayor of Cabbagetown.”

And there was the car crash in April 1992 that killed chainsaw-wielding poet Deacon Lunchbox, along with bassist Robert Hayes and drummer Rob Clayton of the Jody Grind, an ahead-of-its-time, up-and-coming quartet of old-time music-loving indie-rockers.

Hayes lived on Cabbagetown’s main drag, Carroll Street, in a house he shared with his best friend, Chan Marshall, who was at that time known mainly as the nice young lady who served pizza at Fellini’s on Ponce. Two months after Hayes died, Chan escaped to New York.

“Robert had actually moved out, literally five days before the accident,” Chan says now. “When my friend walked up my stairs and told me that he had been killed, my instinct was to run in his room and ask him if this was true. I ran into the room and he wasn’t there, and it was like proof, you know? So then I ran in my room and was like, ‘I have to tell Lily,’ because they kind of had a romance thing at this point. And she had just moved back to New York. So I called Lily, and then I was just comatose for a couple weeks. Lily kept calling every now and again, saying, ‘There’s a room opening up in my apartment.’”

The dead boyfriend that got me kicked out of my friends’ apartment. The arrival of Shawn. Even the most seemingly inconsequential events in a life contain back-stories of enormous gravity to others. Sometimes those moments even come back to have an unforeseen relevance to you.

I’ve probably seen Chan once or twice since 1998, but I haven’t interviewed her again until now. On the phone from Los Angeles, she sounded different. It might’ve just been the particular circumstances of the day I happened to talk to her. But I don’t think so. People get older, they grow, they change.

Still charming and sweet, her voice sounded surer, more confident. And why not? She’s managed to maintain a positive relationship for five years (with a fellow Atlantan/New Yorker). She seems to have come to some terms with her family dysfunction. She gets extraordinary reviews for her records. She bought a house, and spends most of her year traveling the world. On tour, she’s the boss-lady of an eight-member crew. And though she hates the idea of attaching her name to celebrities, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl happen to both play on You Are Free.

The record’s music is itself a measure of Chan’s newfound confidence. Her words are no longer oblique. Instead, she’s singing about her world of performers and fans (“I Don’t Blame You”); she’s offering her earnest advice to the listener (“Free”); she’s identifying the ghosts that haunt her (“Names”).

Mind you, she’s not confident to the extent that she’s going to start strutting and preening around on stage. But she’s grown comfortable with what she does; she understands why she acts the way she does, and why people react the way they do.

Roni: You don’t come across as someone who is calculating in a careerist way, but on the other hand, it seems that to reach a level of doing what you do — which so many people want to do — takes someone who is really directed. Someone to say, “I want to be a musician for my living, so I need to do this and this and this.”

Chan: No, I never wanted to be a musician for my living. It’s strange. I’ve gotten over it because of so much practice being judged by strangers, but if they would turn off all the lights, I would be so happy. And if I was faceless and if I was unknown, it would be so much more beautiful. But it’s impossible.

Well, I think one of the things people are attracted to with you is that whole thing at shows where you don’t know what’s going to happen, where you seem so uncomfortable.

Of course. There are all these people you don’t know standing there and you feel shy. It’s normal. It’s a human feeling.

So why do you do it?

There’s a moment, usually around the third song, when there’s just this flat line that cuts straight through the room, and our brains are kind of on the same level. It’s this energy going both ways. It feels good, you know. The best thing is being able to be accepted and have people say, “Wow, I know exactly how you feel.” And that makes me feel less of an outsider, less of an outcast; it makes me stronger. That kid backstage telling me something, and me telling him that I felt the same fucking way and it’s completely normal. That makes them stronger. Seeing these beautiful people come to the front of the stage, who are really wanting something nice — it’s a great feeling to look at their faces smiling at me.

The whole live thing, when you’ll stop songs or you’ll be kind of withdrawn ...

Well, I’m insecure. I’m not Wonder Woman, I’m a human being. Some shows I’m gonna think, “Well, I’m stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a dumb-ass.” I mean, I am who I am. But I’m gonna be playing these songs right now, and they make me a little insecure because they’re songs I wrote.

Are you conscious of the fact that people expect that from you?

No, absolutely not. My friend told me a long time ago that this guy in The New York Times just narrowed it down to “people come to my shows to see a train wreck.” And that made me feel sad for all these young kids who come because they’re hoping there’s not a train wreck. You know what I mean?

You could argue that there are people who really believe in you, but are still kind of interested to see the train wreck because it would kind of validate ...

They’re feeling like a train wreck? Well, then I hope I persevere to help them see that they can persevere. Because, you know, life is kinda difficult for everybody. And I think that’s why people love music, and it’s totally normal to play it, you know?

One thing that hasn’t changed about Chan is her natural inclination to make people feel good. At the start of our interview, she apologizes for not calling me when she’s been in town recently. It’s a nice thing to say, even though in 11 years, we’ve never had a phone conversation that wasn’t set up through a publicist.

I’m sure she means it in the moment, but no such explanation is required, of course. Not that I wouldn’t value having her as a friend. But even if she had room, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Friends don’t tape conversations and print the transcripts in the paper.

She’s a former neighbor, and I like to see her when I do. She’s also an important Atlanta musician, and I’m an Atlanta music writer. Both relationships exist, sometimes in conflict. As it is, I know her just well enough to think she’d be a nice friend — and enough to recognize she’s a great subject.


roni.sarig@creativeloafing.com