Cat Power (10 page)

In 1881, construction began on the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, a factory located near the railroad tracks in east Atlanta. Heading into the turn of the century, textile production in the South emerged as a major industry and the
mill expanded several times, bringing in workers, including Chan's great-great-grandparents, from South Georgia and the Appalachian mountains to live and work there. The insular neighborhood that was built to house them became known as Cabbagetown. “It got the name because you could smell the cabbage cooking,” Leamon says. “That was all they could afford.”

After World War II, changes in the business rendered the mill's products increasingly obsolete, but the majority of its workers stayed in Cabbagetown until the mill finally closed for good in 1977. Afterward, most of the workers scattered in search of new work, while those who stayed watched Cabbagetown fall into disrepair. In the 1980s and 1990s, a loose-knit community of backwater punks, painters, sculptors, drug dealers, drug doers, and musicians like Chan took refuge in this curious little neighborhood of modest two-story shotgun homes sitting side by side on narrow, uneven streets. These artists sought the same stability and willful isolation that mill families enjoyed one hundred years prior.

Cabbagetown's geography reinforces the sense of remoteness prized by those who live there. Railroad tracks separate the neighborhood from the leafy neighborhood of Inman Park to the north. South of Cabbage-town is East Atlanta, a formerly rough neighborhood where much of the city's recent music renaissance is taking place; to the west is Oakland Cemetery, and to the south is Grant Park. Even now there is a discernible sensory shift that takes place when you cross underneath the graffiti-decorated Krog Street Bridge and move south from the grand Victorians and established suburban splendor of Inman Park, under the railroad tracks, and into Cabbagetown. The air becomes thicker and more stagnant. The delicate camellia roses smell sweeter. The cicadas are louder on a summer night. The elms seem taller, their roots deeper, the expanse of their branches wider and more stately. Local women sip coffee and stop to gossip with each other on the way to get the mail. A
young man takes off his T-shirt to hose off his balcony revealing intricate, almost refined full-body tattoos. Children languidly ride their bikes around the narrow, shady streets, their calls to one another drowned out by that thick, still air as they race each other up the small hilly alley that connects Cameron Street to Berean Avenue, the very street where Chan's great-grandparents made their home, and where Chan would live, decades later, in the late nineties.

Olivier Alary, the French musician who performs under the name Ensemble and who recorded the song “Disown, Delete” with Chan at Zero Return Studio in Atlanta, remembers Chan giving him a tour through Cabbagetown. “This old lady that had no teeth had this really angry dog that was swinging on the rocking chair,” Alary remembers. “She kept saying, ‘He's a bad dog!’ It really felt like we were stuck in two centuries ago. Really flowery and really dirty. We saw a dog attached with a rope, not a leash, and he had two really trashy white kids playing in mud. It reeked of poverty.”

There's a deep, cultural richness to Cabbagetown that makes outsiders feel distinctly foreign. You don't know this place. It's not that people are unfriendly. They will politely rise up out of their rocking chairs to give you thoughtful directions if you ask, they will talk to you about their personal histories, they will tell you how they first found themselves in this little pocket of bohemia, but they aren't going to think about you again once you're on your way: The residents of Cabbagetown are emotionally, creatively, and spiritually self-sufficient. In many ways, the Cabbagetown art scene that embraced Chan when she moved out of her dad's place was a real-world incarnation of the elusive countercultural nirvana the singer's parents idealized and longed for but failed to achieve. For Chan, coming to Cabbagetown was like finally coming home.

In 1991, by the time Chan moved out of her father's house and started
her life in Atlanta, Cabbagetown had a real rock scene going. Bands like the Jody Grind, DQE (Dairy Queen Empire), and Magic Bone were rehearsing in backyards and playing shows in abandoned storefronts. These groups had little in common in terms of their sound, but they shared a sense of disenfranchisement from the mainstream music scene and the desire to live and work somewhere cheap and weird. Like Berlin in the 1970s, Brooklyn in the 1990s, or Montreal in the 2000s, the combination of affordable housing, good, cheap drugs, and a sense of brotherhood in debauchery brought the squat artists to Cabbagetown where they happily subsisted on ramen and Camels in exchange for inspiration and a place to shoot up, get laid, or sleep it off.

The Cabbagetown scene's unofficial vanguard was Benjamin Smoke, a flamboyantly gay poet and musician from rural Georgia who fronted two of the era's most significant bands, the Opal Foxx Quartet and Smoke. As potent as Benjamin's musical contribution to the scene was, his influence as a personality was almost more significant. He was a totally mesmerizing diva with a bawdy, deranged sense of humor, a sweet disposition, and a gift for inspiring others to act on their baser instincts. He was the undisputed queen of Cabbagetown, and he significantly influenced the other musicians and artists living and working in Atlanta in the late eighties and early nineties, including Chan.

Bill Taft, a veteran of the Atlanta rock scene since 1982, when he first moved to the city from Ohio, remembers the first time he saw Benjamin perform, right before he joined the lineup that was to become Benjamin's first brilliant band, the Opal Foxx Quartet. “Benjamin was playing at the Little Five Points Pub, and I got to hear him one night,” Taft remembers. “It was the greatest, most wonderful thing I'd ever heard. It was hilarious, it was tragic, it was old-timey post-post-modern, just the strangest contradictions and juxtapositions. It was this punk-rock-showtune-cabaret-mindfuck.
So I said, ‘You need a guitar player, I'll play guitar with you.’”

Chan arrived in Atlanta with her spirit broken. After a childhood spent shape-shifting to suit a new town, a new school, a new incarnation of her mother's disease, Chan finally pulled her life together and made good grades at the same school for an entire year, all to be tossed out of her father's house on a whim. She thought very little of her prospects and even less of herself. If Chan had moved to New York City at nine-teen, she would have been lost for good. She didn't have enough faith in herself at that point to survive in a place that measures success based on quantifiable accomplishment. The singer needed to live somewhere low key, where people were being creative out of a sense of inspiration rather than duty. She needed to be somewhere where making music was an option, not an obligation. Chan needed Cabbagetown.

Just as she would later with the East Village and the Lower East Side of New York, both gloriously derelict and inspired places back in the nineties, Chan managed to catch Cabbagetown in its cultural sweet spot, after most of the scary drug dealers moved out but before the espresso drinkers moved in.

In the new millennium, Cabbagetown has exploded into a relatively expensive, gentrified enclave of well-to-do artists and professional people. Judy Ibbotson, a petite, gentle woman with a messy ponytail and the tough, tanned skin of a sun-worshipper, was Chan's landlord in the late 1990s. Today the old mill where Chan's great-grandparents worked has been turned into posh condos with enviably high ceilings, but in 1989, when Ibbotson moved to Cabbagetown, the neighborhood was still scary in a poetic way. It was the “home of go-carts and kids who go to jail early and whose parents use inhalants,” Benjamin Smoke once said.

When the hillbillies moved out of Cabbagetown, they left their
instruments for the young artists moving in. The most important bands to come out of the Cabbagetown music scene embodied a modern punk-rock ethos but conveyed a resounding sense of kinship with those who inhabited the neighborhood before them. “Everyone was in love with Burroughs and this sense of art and making something greater than four dumb drunk guys playing rock ‘n’ roll,” local writer and promoter Henry Owings remembers. “Bringing in things like cellos and violins. And stripping things down, building things up, bringing in a horn, bringing in a harp. Making things that were more of a throwback to what this community was like in the twenties and thirties.”

The apartment Ibbotson rented to Chan for $200 now goes for upwards of $700. The house is a run-down, pale-yellow, glorified shack set close to the road, with porches both upstairs and downstairs. Out back there's a hilly backyard overgrown with bindweed, the delicate white flowers of balloon vine, and a giant oak tree that supports an unstable-looking tree house. Chan lived on the ground floor and used to appear barefoot on the porch on summer afternoons with a big box of Popsicles under her arm. Like the den mother of the neighborhood, she would pass out the frozen treats to the collection of scruffy kids who rode their bikes in an endless loop around the narrow streets.

“When we were living next door to each other, I kept seeing her outside giving little riff-raff kids in Cabbagetown candy,” Loring Kemp remembers. “The Cabbagetown kids were little badasses that were just mean, and she's like the pied piper! I would look out the window at eight o'clock in the morning and she'd be standing there with a line of kids. I always thought that part of the struggle she was having onstage and performing is that there's a big part of her that wants to be settled and wants to have a family, wants to be a housewife. She has goals in her personal life that don't agree with what she does professionally.”

“Cabbagetown is now a shadow of what it was,” laments Henry Owings, who has been living in Atlanta since 1997 and publishes the eviscerating music and culture magazine
Chunklet
. “Real estate prices rising and uptight gay couples coming in, and some would say improving, but I would say they ruin the character of Cabbagetown. It's really depressing because at one time it was everything to me. You just always knew that
in Cabbagetown
you're around your brethren, you're around your constituency. And they were weirdoes, too. When gentrification happened, all the weirdoes just kind of scattered. That sense of community, that specialness, is gone.”

With Granny Lil's devotion to gospel, Leamon's taste in classic rock, Myra's worship of British-invasion music, and Charlie's love for the blues, Chan's musical roots were already deep by the time she started living on her own—but the singer's move to Cabbagetown solidified her connection with the sounds of the old South. In Cabbagetown Chan was surrounded by other people who were drawn to Americana and whose art reflected a modern interpretation of it. Chan fit in right away. Bill Taft remembers meeting Chan through her then-roommate Robert Hayes, who was Taft's bandmate at the time. “I was playing in a band called the Jody Grind—Robert Hayes was the bass player, Kelly Hogan was the singer,” Taft remembers. “Kelly and I are practicing with Robert, Robert needs a place to stay, he gets a row house next to Kelly. Then Chan needs a place to stay, so Chan is living with Robert, and from there it just kind of went on.” Chan became close with the Jody Grind, began going to shows at the Unicorn, the Little Five Points Pub, and Dottie's, and absorbed the scene's relaxed but dedicated music-making ethic.

When she first arrived in Atlanta Chan gravitated immediately toward artists, but it would take her years before she'd actually admit that she too wanted to make a living through art. “She obviously comes
from a musical family,” recalls Loring Kemp. “But I don't recall that she had any ambitions to become a songwriter or a singer.” Instead Chan concentrated on getting her bearings. Paying rent, paying bills, having enough money to eat, getting creative about how to survive without a vocation, a high school diploma, or any family support: Those were her priorities. “She's very independent,” Lenny says with pride. “She was always very independent. Working, thinking, having her own ideas.”

By the time she was nearing twenty years old, Chan had come into her own. She was still a consummate tomboy, but she had traded in her Doc Martens for quirky, androgynously sexy men's shoes, and her short hair showed off her freckles and increasingly defined, postadolescent features. Chan still shopped at the Salvation Army for used Levi's, but she developed a more tactile relationship with her physical appearance, experimenting with makeup and cutting up clothes to suit a vision she had in her head.