Cat Power (18 page)

In the wake of Thrasher's departure from New York, Chan was facing some of the toughest months of her life. For years, her insecurities about playing music for a living had been tempered by Thrasher, and before that, by her Cabbagetown friends, who made it easy for her to try out the idea of being a rock star without having to truly commit to a career in music. But New York City is not a place for the uncertain. It has a way of demanding a yes-or-no answer out of the aspiring artists who flock to it. After Thrasher left, Chan alone remained to define Cat Power's future. Would she stay and stand alone behind her music for the first time in her life? Or would she retreat back to safer territory? This conflict wore on Chan.

By the following summer, she was still lost. She had her life in New York established, could pay her rent, and had made a few friends, but she hadn't done anything with Cat Power since Thrasher moved away. Her dad invited her to take a road trip along with Miranda and Chan's half sister, Ivy, from Atlanta to Pensacola, Florida. Chan accepted. They all met up in Atlanta, then piled into Charlie's truck for the five-hour drive. Chan was being her usual gregarious self, telling her sisters jokes and bugging her dad to pull over at every secondhand store they passed so she could add to her collection of weird trinkets and beat-up jeans.

At one point the group made a pit stop at a fast-food joint. Hours later, Chan realized that she had left her wallet at the restaurant. “It was
a little Roy Rogers billfold,” Charlie remembers. “She was freaking out. She said, ‘No, it's got my health card in there, it's got this, it's got that!’ She was freaking out!” They were already several hundred miles away, so Charlie calmed Chan down, called the restaurant on his car phone, and arranged to have the wallet mailed to his daughter the following day. But the experience disturbed him. “I could see that she had inherited some of the schizophrenia or paranoia from her mom,” he says. “The craziness in your family makes you crazy.”

If Myra has schizophrenia, Chan has a better chance of developing it than the average person, but that doesn't mean she will. “Schizophrenia is genetically inherited, although it's not simple; the propensity for it is inherited,” Dr. Ewing says. “Your risk of having schizophrenia if nobody in your family had it is about one percent. If one of your parents had it, it's about ten percent. If both your parents had it, it's about thirty percent. The accordance among identical twins is fifty percent.” From a medical standpoint, even if Myra has the disease, Chan's chances of developing it are still pretty slim, but according to Charlie, both of Myra's daughters always seemed right up on the edge of sanity. “I could always tell both of the kids had inherited that from their mom,” Charlie says. “I think my family has it some, too.”

After Glen Thrasher returned to Atlanta, Chan unofficially disbanded Cat Power. She didn't play any shows for almost a year. Instead she focused on working. She got a new job at Todd's Copy, an artists' hangout on Mott
Street, and suspended her pursuit of a professional career in music. Todd Jorgensen, the founder of Todd's Copy, originally worked at Jamie's Canvas in SoHo. Jamie's big draw for the artists living downtown in the late seventies and early eighties was that it was home to Todd's color Xerox machine, the only one in the neighborhood. Now that we have a Kinko's on every corner, it seems absurd that the presence of one such machine could have spawned an entire artists' community, but that's kind of what happened. “That was the go-to place for the SoHo art scene,” Sonic Youth frontman and longtime New Yorker Thurston Moore says of Jamie's Canvas. “It was this intense thing, that you could go there and actually get a color Xerox.”

When Todd decided to establish his own store, he took the copier with him, and all the artists who'd gotten accustomed to using it followed. Todd's Copy quickly became like a bustling Parisian café with color Xeroxes and roller balls for sale instead of coffee and croissants. “I knew it was a great place to be because in the eighties, all the artists would go there and do their work there—so you got to sort of hang with people like Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Moore remembers. “You were always helping these guys out. It was this downtown scene. Glen Brodko would hang out there, Jim Jarmusch.”

One day in the summer of 1994, Chan came home from work to discover that Cat Power was scheduled to play at CBGB's. “The people in God Is My Co-Pilot booked my first solo show in New York without me knowing about it,” Chan has said. “I hadn't done any music at all for a year. Then one day I got home and saw there was a message on my answering machine from my friend saying I had a solo show to play at CBGB's Gallery. I checked the paper and there it was: ‘Cat Power solo.’ So you see, everyone's more responsible for my music than I am.” Sharon and Craig of God Is My Co-Pilot were indeed once again instrumental
in getting Chan's music out of her and into the world, but Chan could have chosen not to play. Instead she showed up and performed by herself for the first time ever. A few days later, Gerard Cosloy booked Cat Power to open for Liz Phair.

“I got home
and
there was a message from Gerard saying, ‘Hey, Chan, would you like to open up for Liz Phair in two nights? You'll get paid two hundred dollars,’” Chan has remembered. “I was thinking, ‘Wow. I've never made more than fifty bucks at most.’ I didn't know who Liz Phair was. I had never heard her music. I had seen her on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. I thought, She's got to be good if she's on Matador and all these people like her. She's got to be talented, right? Wrong! I don't like Liz Phair. But that's the night I met Steve Shelley and Tim Foljahn. And that's the night Steve asked if we could put out a record.”

Opening for Liz Phair in New York City was about as big a gig as Cat Power could have landed, and it exposed her to exactly the audience that would form her base: namely, girl rock geeks looking for a new personal hero, and dude rock geeks looking for a new crush. Phair doesn't remember this performance; she was still adjusting to the extreme transformation from sheltered suburbanite with a dirty mind to Gen-X poster girl, and was often paralyzed by extreme preshow jitters, not unlike Chan. “I was such an inexperienced performer,” Phair recalls. “I would have been completely consumed with, ‘Oh my God, I'm gonna get stoned,’ and I'm sure that's what happened. Some friend was shoving me out, and so I probably missed what the hell else was going on.”

While Phair was managing her own performance demons, Chan was dealing with the fact that most of the crowd mistook one beautiful brunette singer-songwriter for the other. “I heard the one guy say, ‘My professor plays your CD all the time,’” Chan remembers. “I was like, ‘I'm not Liz Phair!’ It was so uncomfortable. That's one of my favorite
stories. They liked me because they thought I was her.” Chan was nervous, but in retrospect she was pleased with herself for pulling it together and delivering a solid show. “I was totally shaky and sweating,” the singer has said. “But I did a really good job and I was professional and I finished every song. I was done, I walked off, and I looked out the curtain and the room was spiraling and people are standing up, and Gerard is like, ‘That was great! Do you want to go back on?’ And I was like, ‘Nooo!’”

Though Chan remembers meeting Tim Foljahn and Steve Shelley for the first time at the Liz Phair show, Foljahn says they met in the spring of 1994 at a show by all-girl postpunk rockers the Raincoats. “Steve was playing with the Raincoats,” Foljahn remembers. “This kid was warming up before the show. I looked over and honestly, beautiful kid, but I wasn't sure if it was a boy or a girl. Really short hair and the mackinaw coat and the little black shoes with the white socks. Really cool looking.” Chan looked cool; she also looked nervous, and Foljahn decided to try to ease her pain by striking up a conversation with her.

Foljahn, Shelley, and the girls in the Raincoats were all planning to go out to dinner before the show, so they invited Chan to come along. “It was nice because the Raincoats, the lady rockers, were really nice to her,” Foljahn remembers. “We went to this place where they would come and make guacamole right at your table.” After enjoying a rowdy dinner fueled by margaritas and tableside guac, everybody went back to the club and played. This was the first and last time Tim ever remembers seeing Chan play solo, and he was totally mesmerized by her. “It was just like, Wow,” he remembers. “Really, really beautiful and interesting. It was just her in this big place, wherever it was, and there was something really compelling about her songs.” By the end of dinner, Foljahn had a raging crush on Chan; by the end of her set he was in
love with her music. The two exchanged phone numbers and started hanging out.

At the time, Thurston Moore was playing solo material with Shelley and Foljahn: Together they recorded Moore's first solo album, 1995's
Psychic Hearts
. Moore's bandmates started talking about this cute new singer-songwriter they'd met, but what he didn't realize was that he and Chan already knew each other. “While we were hanging out doing
Psychic Hearts
stuff, we were rehearsing at this underground rehearsal joint on Mott Street between Houston and Prince,” Moore recalls. “I remember Tim and Steve going over to Todd's and I was like, ‘Why are you going over to Todd's Xerox shop?’ and he's like, ‘Well, there's this girl who works over there that Tim is really into, this kind of Southern girl.’”

That's when it occurred to Moore he'd already met Foljahn's crush. “I realized who he was talking about because I had gone in there and she was working, and Todd embarrassed her in front of me. He said, ‘Oh, this girl is a big fan of yours.’ I could see that she was mortified that he said that, you know? So I felt kind of sorry for her. But I didn't think anything of it. I thought she was just some kid working there. Then when Tim said he was going to see this girl there, I was like, ‘You know, there is this kind of cute girl who was working there.’”

Chan did have a thing for Thurston. Ever since the rock boys at Fellini's introduced her to Sonic Youth back in the early nineties, Chan associated the band with the kind of integrity in musicmaking that she wanted to embody. “Rock ‘n’ roll was never a moneymaker to emotional, educated people,” Chan has said. “Sonic Youth was coming from an underground place which is not purchasable. Thurston and Lee being poets foremost and Kim being an actual artist, they weren't a band, they were really individual people that did everything.” In these new
friends — Shelley, Moore, and Foljahn—Chan found a replacement for the community of fellow misfits she lost when her Cabbagetown friends left New York. Before long the singer was rehearsing with a new lineup of Cat Power featuring Foljahn on guitar and Shelley on drums.

When Steve Shelley, a bona fide member of a famous rock band, joined Cat Power, the group's profile got a big boost. His presence in the band also strengthened the quality of Cat Power's live performances. With Shelley and Foljahn onstage behind Chan, she relaxed and started to develop a distinctive stage presence. She showcased this new coquettish confidence at a show at the Cooler in the fall of 1994, an event that everyone in town wanted to say they had seen. “The most significant thing I heard was about the Cooler show,” Moore remembers. “Supposedly different people played, and then she came out and did this thing and the whole room just froze. Her voice and how she was singing and all of a sudden you knew there was something going on here. There was a buzz just from that show, and I immediately felt like, ‘Oh, wow, I wish I'd seen that.’”