Cat Power (14 page)

Thrasher has said that the band moved to New York in September 1992 because “it seemed like the thing to do at the time.” It was the thing to do. Though there was a staggering amount of great music happening in Atlanta, no one outside of the Cabbagetown scene seemed to know about it. “Everybody had the sense that nothing was gonna happen for them if they remained here in Atlanta,” Kemp remembers, and Clark agrees, “By that point she had the idea that maybe she could do it, and moving to New York would be a step in the right direction.” As obvious as it seems that moving was the only choice Chan had if she wanted to make something of Cat Power, ambition is not the reason she gives when asked why she left Atlanta. According to Chan, she left to get
away from the drugs and the death. Benjamin Smoke was the scene's most notorious addict, but his drug of choice was speed. Everyone else was doing heroin.

Like every other major urban area in America in the 1990s, in Atlanta heroin was cheap, extremely high quality, and easy to get. Dollar, who lived and worked in Atlanta during the late eighties and early nineties, sums up the arrival of heroin on the scene this way: “People started dying.” For all the ink that has been spilled discussing Chan and her myriad addictions, when she first started her career in music she was unequivocally antidrug. Between her dad's acid trips, her mom's heavy drinking, and the collection of strung-out musicians she saw sleeping it off on her family's couch, Chan was the last person who would fall for the idea that drug use was romantic, part of a larger bohemian life that led to the making of good art. And when her friends started dying, Chan's hatred of drug use intensified.

Damon Moore, who played in an early version of Cat Power, died of an overdose in 1996. Allen Page, the drummer from Dirt and Opal Foxx Quartet, was another prominent casualty. A few of Atlanta's most well-known addicts survived heroin and are now in recovery including Coleman Lewis, who played guitar in Smoke, and Glen Thrasher, Chan's mentor. “He was one of the biggest heroin addicts in Atlanta,” Jeff Clark says, and Chan's friend Steve Dollar, then an Atlanta-area journalist, puts it even more succinctly: “I'm surprised he's still alive, he was this ghostlike figure.” Watching her friends overdose and knowing her mentor could easily be next, it's no wonder Chan developed such a violent aversion to hard drug use.

Tim Foljahn, Chan's future band mate, remembers the singer talking about her aversion to drug use. “Even for those days, heroin had rolled through Atlanta and just decimated the whole hipster population,” he
recalls. “It took like fifty percent. It was just really heavy. Even if some of those people were just her acquaintances, she still knew a lot of people that had died. She was sick of it.”

Even without the booze, heroin overdoses, speed, needle swapping, and HIV infection that came with it, Cabbagetown rockers were prone to tragic deaths. Deacon Lunchbox, Chan's roommate Robert Hayes, and Rob Clayton, the drummer in the Jody Grind, were all killed in a car accident in 1992. The trio was driving in a rented van in Montgomery, Alabama, when a drunk driver crossed the I-65 median and hit them head-on. “I think you're safer serving your country in Iraq than playing music,” Taft surmises. “I'm amazed at the number of funerals I've been to over the years.” Grace Braun agrees. “My friend Mary died recently,” she says. “She was eighty, and I was like, ‘This is the best funeral I've ever been to, because she died of old age.’” Clark points out that it's not just the loss of life, it's the fact that so many of the deceased were crucial figures. “There's been a few people over the years that have grown to be a centerpiece of the scene, and all of them end up dying—it's really weird.”

All that death and loss disturbed Chan. She had grown up around similar types of self-destructive behavior and she didn't like it, so she decided to leave Atlanta. “Everyone started doin' heroin and becoming a junkie,” Chan has said when asked why she left home. “I wanted to escape.” As much emotional sense as this rationale makes, it's also a ludicrous argument. The last place you'd want to move to avoid heroin in the early 1990s would have been New York City. Glen himself made this point in a post on his blog. “I don't think the move had anything to do with drugs,” the former drummer wrote. “Although I am sure Chan was not thrilled with all the drugs her friends in Atlanta were using at the time. If Chan wanted to move away from drugs, why would she move
to New York?” Furthermore, why would she bring with her Glen Thrasher, who was one of Atlanta's most notorious heroin addicts? “It's odd that she would say she wanted to get away from drugs, then take Glen up to New York,” Clark muses.

Drug use and death weren't all Chan was running from. In 1992, at the age of twenty, Chan got pregnant and had an abortion. She would have had a son. Though she had good reason for making this decision (no real place to live, no steady job, an uncertain relationship with the child's would-be father), the experience has haunted Chan ever since. “It's the biggest mistake I ever made,” she has said more than a decade later. Then, around the same time Chan was dealing with the aftermath of the abortion and her friends' deaths, the singer's sister, Miranda, was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“Oh, Lord, Mandy,” Leamon exclaims. “All of a sudden she was dating this North Carolina boy named Dean. She went to California. Something happened. Three days later they found her wandering around the airport. Brought her back to North Carolina. She was hallucinating. Out of it. Seeing things. Pregnant. Went to the hospital and had the baby. Had a real tough time. Couldn't figure out—decided some guy she was hanging around with drugged her. She's had a tough time ever since.”

Ironically, considering Chan's mom's lifelong resistance to treating her own disease, Myra was instrumental in getting Miranda the help she needed. Much as Granny Lil did for Myra when she needed help with her young children, Myra committed herself to taking care of Miranda and her newborn son, Ian. “My mom actually helped her get into treatment,” Lenny remembers. “Mandy stayed with my mom. She had Ian and my mom helped raise him. I think my mom understood.” “My oldest daughter, she actually takes the medication,” Charlie says. “It tends to make you put on weight, is the problem. She would get off the
medication because she'd say, ‘Dad, I'm getting fat.’ But if you have to take your mental health with twenty pounds extra, then you do.”

Chan had many good reasons to leave Atlanta (friends' deaths, heightened drug use, the future of her career), but the best one was that she already knew what life awaited her if she stayed. Chan was not speaking to her mother. She had a residual blind devotion to her dad, but he had betrayed her when he threw her out of his house. She had just aborted a child and discovered that her maternal, reliable older sister had the same disease that plagued her mother. Her new family, the assortment of pizza slingers, record-store geeks, local writers, and fellow musicians she had befriended, already seemed tainted by the shadow of drugs and death. If she'd stayed in Atlanta, Chan would likely have ended up living an indie-rock version of the barefoot-and-pregnant cliché she desperately wanted to avoid. In what would become a pattern for Chan throughout her life, she looked at her circumstances, gathered strength she didn't even know she had, severed ties with almost everyone she knew as if she were amputating a gangrened limb, and moved away.

When Chan arrived in New York City in the early fall of 1992, she added herself to the long and illustrious list of people drawn to New York in search of a new self. She settled into life on the Lower East Side, which was then a forgotten
urban wasteland. The scene was dirtier than it is now. For example, those few locals whose buildings haven't yet been outfitted with sleek washers and driers use the Laundromat on Third Street between Avenues B and C. Back in 1992, when Chan moved to New York, the place was like a take-out joint for drugs, where you could openly buy ten-dollar packets of heroin and cocaine. In the early 1990s, Manhattan's Lower East Side was still a genuinely dangerous place where homeless people, drug dealers, and addicts mingled with an influx of artists willing to brave the crack-vial-and-syringe-littered streets and constant threat of muggings for the sake of cheap rent and space to create.

Downtown Manhattan's drug scene was so in sync with the art and indie-music world that the heroin sold at the Laundromat came in glassine bags stamped with pop-culturally literate, darkly witty brand names like Tango and Cash, Eyewitness News, and Bad Lieutenant. This irreverent smack was so much a part of the local culture that indie-rock godheads Pavement wrote a song about waiting in line to buy it. On “Mercy Snack: The Laundromat,” the B-side to the signature Matador band's 1992 single “Summer Babe,” frontman Stephen Malkmus sings: “I'm jonesin' for a mercy snack … I've been down to the Laundromat.”

By the late 2000s the Lower East Side has become a well-scrubbed theme park for hipster culture. Rivington Street, the artery that runs from the Bowery all the way to the East River in New York's Lower East Side, now features Schiller's, a high-end (masquerading as elegantly low-end) French bistro often mentioned on Page Six, a handful of bars where you can buy a fifteen-dollar martini, and multiple vintage-clothing stores frequented by the Olsen twins. But Tim Foljahn, Chan's friend and former Cat Power guitarist, remembers the neighborhood differently. “There were guys selling drugs on every corner,” Foljahn says, shaking his head at how long ago it seems. “You'd see people not just by
the methadone clinics, but all over the Lower East Side at the cop spots. I remember being down the Lower East Side and seeing people getting chased by somebody with a knife. That stuff was just happening.” Foljahn is particularly amused/horrified by the real estate terminology used to describe areas that in the early nineties were all considered universally desolate. “Where Café Gitane is: ‘Nolita,’” the guitarist scoffs, making air quotes and referencing one of eastern Soho's sceneiest cafés (frequented by the likes of David Bowie and Iman). “That was like no-man's-land—there was stuff blowing down the street.”

People like Chan who were drawn to New York by instinct, looking for other damaged but hopeful creative souls, mourn the loss of the feeling of promise and possibility that came with the neighborhood's wantonness. “I don't wanna say there's a lot of white people running around with Fendi bands and stuff,” Chan has said of the changes she sees in her neighborhood. “It's like a college town. I'm not trying to put it down. But a lot of people came to New York not to go to school. A lot of people came here as survivalists. Misfits. Outsiders. Characters. Because they felt displaced in whatever small town they were living in. If you're a poet, you had like a congregation of hope.”

Life was difficult for the aspiring artists that moved to Manhattan's Lower East Side and East Village neighborhoods in the early nineties. Rent was cheap. (A walk-up on Thirteenth and Avenue A used to cost $700 a month. Now the same awkwardly arranged series of almost-rooms rents for about $2,500.) Any jobs available were of the low-income, retail variety. Before Craigslist and the myriad online job sites we have now, the jobless used to line up in front of the newsstand on Astor Place waiting for the
Village Voice
to come out every Tuesday night, hoping to get first look at the classifieds. This scene—hipsters scouring actual,
physical newsprint for information about housing or work—looked like a breadline in Russia, with rent-controlled hovels and bartending gigs being doled out instead of stale onion rolls.

Most scenesters worked several tedious gigs to pay for guitar strings, canvases, loft space, rice and beans, cigarettes, or drugs—whatever it was that they needed in order to get by. In exchange for engaging in this relentless, debilitating struggle, the LES masses received inspiration. Those who survived in the Lower East Side were rewarded with a powerful and useful sense of romance about their derelict lives. In the 1990s, struggle defined these kids, some of whom hid their privileged backgrounds and posh art-school educations in order to feel romantically used by the world and (ideally) make work reflecting that sensation. Everything from what to eat for dinner to how to get your clothes clean to how to pay the rent to how to create felt like a struggle, and struggle felt good.

Stewart Lupton, lead singer and songwriter in Jonathan Fire *Eater, the most inspired garage-rock band in New York during the mid-nineties, remembers meeting Chan during this time. When originally contacted via My Space regarding a potential interview about Chan for this book, Stewart responded with a Byronesque poem in which he suggested that any interview be conducted over oysters and champagne, because that was “the common fare of the period.” Stewart and Chan first met at one of the clubs, bars, and playhouses that dotted Ludlow Street before the investment bankers moved in. “All of the sudden, this girl was constantly apologizing to me and I didn't know why,” the singer remembers. “I really wanted to forgive her for whatever she was apologizing for, so I did, and we became friends.” Lupton, who is now performing with a new group, the Child Ballads, says that this era in downtown
New York City history still haunts him. “I have an abiding, puzzling love for that woman and those years,” he mused. “A microcosm of its own. I feel like a part of me is still suspended in that petri dish.”