Cat Power (23 page)

More than a decade after she first played
What Would the Community Thinks
in her childhood bedroom, Appel still finds the album consoling. Chan doesn't get the same kind of satisfaction out of her early records. All the singer hears in
Community
is a series of grotesque technical inadequacies and the pain that inspired her to write the songs in the first place. “On those early albums, I was just a kid, dude—I didn't know how to sing. I didn't know what I was doing,” Chan has explained. “I can't listen to them now. I have a friend in France who's a fan of
What Would the Community Think
. She put it on and it was excruciating for me. All I hear is memories of what I was going through then. I can't. It's ridiculous.”

The What Would the Community Think recording process was more fulfilling for Chan than her previous in-the-studio experiences, but the pacing felt rushed and discombobulated. Chan recorded the album in February 1996, a
few months after Miranda gave birth to her second child, Audrey. Chan was in a hurry to finish the record and head back to North Carolina to meet her new niece. She wanted to get there as soon as possible because she knew she'd be off again soon, first to Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest music conference, then to Atlanta, then on to her first real national tour. Chan was always good at living out of a suitcase, but she wasn't ready for the extreme transience she was about to experience.

At first it wasn't obvious that all this travel was taking a toll on Chan's mental health. After all, this was a girl whose dream was to get out of Georgia, and now she was scheduled to travel all over the entire United States before heading to Europe. First Chan headed home, where Cat Power played a resounding hometown gig with the Rock *A* Teens at Dottie's in Atlanta. After touring down South, Cat Power headed north to Chicago, where they played at the famed indie-rock club Lounge Ax. Then they flew to London and began a European tour that included several shows in France, where Cat Power has a particularly fervent fan base. It was during this final leg of the
Community
tour, in the late summer of 1996, that Chan started to unravel emotionally.

“The playing thing was just really horrible for her,” Foljahn remembers. “She really didn't enjoy it. She didn't want to come out of the bathroom, she didn't want to do the show. There were scenes in the hotel room where she was just really tore up. It was inconsolable, suicidal sadness.” At the time, Foljahn, like most of the other people Chan was around, was into the debauched touring life. The party started in the afternoon at the hotel room and continued at soundcheck, then at dinner, during the gig, at the after-party, and started again the next morning in a new city. The fact that she was there, in France, or Germany, or Spain, playing songs about abortion and abuse and neglect to
a series of rooms full of strangers, was starting to dawn on Chan. The more she tried to process what was happening around her, the less able she was to carry on performing and the more entrenched the emotional rift between her and everyone else became.

Chan's reaction to fame was a combination of self-loathing and defiance: Why do all of these people care about me? Why should I care about them? “There's the inferiority and the superiority, and they always go together,” Foljahn explains. “You've got this total insecurity, across-the-board insecurity, and yet this total belief in her talent because she knows how good she is and she kind of always did.”

While Chan was struggling with her sense of worth as an artist, Cat Power's popularity was exploding. With every copy of
Community
sold—each one representative of Chan's triumphant success as a professional musician—the singer became more disturbed by exactly what she was selling and exactly what her fans thought they were buying.

“I did an interview in Paris when I was twenty-four years old,” Chan remembered. “I didn't want to do the interview so I shoved towels in all my clothes and put them under the bed so it looked like I was asleep. I didn't understand this whole process of being interviewed, having my photo taken, just for art, just for a song. I thought, The song is there, I gave you the song. It's on a CD. You can have it. Thank you for giving me the present of being able to have a CD. It's an honor. When the interviewer came in, she thought, She's sleeping. Hearing her wondering what was wrong, I felt like an idiot. I pulled the covers down and said, ‘I'm here.’ I felt so bad. She was seventeen and had a fanzine in France. She started crying: ‘Thank you. Your songs helped me. I was going to kill myself. I didn't know what to do. I played your record to help me.’”

The idea that Chan might have something in common with her fans was a revelation for her. “You realize, ‘Fuck, I'm not alone. There are a lot
of people like us. Displaced. Emotional. Sensitive. Aware. Compassionate. Interested in the world.’” Chan still couldn't process that what she meant to that seventeen-year-old French girl was what Bob Dylan meant to her. But for every one of the times Chan felt a beneficent union with her fans, there was another instance in which things didn't go so well. The fans wanted to tell Chan about their own abortions, child-abusing mothers, absent fathers, violent households, alcoholic relatives, to show her that she had helped them accept the horror of experiences similar to the ones she sings about. They felt better after unburdening themselves to her, but she felt worse, like a priest who's heard too many confessions. “The intensely autobiographical nature of her songs was freaking her out,” Foljahn surmises. “She was thinking, What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I singing such a personal thing to all these people?”

At this point Chan had yet to cultivate the Cat Power fan base specifically drawn to her manic onstage behavior, but even before the tour reached Europe, even before her most famously deranged shows took place a few years later, Chan was already paying close attention to the way an audience would react to her onstage emotional disintegration.

“I was with Man or Astroman? and we went to Knoxville, Tennessee,” Atlanta-based promoter Henry Owings remembers. “The lineup was a package tour of Guv'ner and Cat Power and Man or Astroman?, who were at the peak of their crazy spazoid sci-fi powers. They were headlining, Guv'ner was first, and Chan was in the middle.” The order of this lineup was ill-advised. Guv'ner's loud, angular sound amps the crowd up for a rowdy rock show, not a girl with an acoustic guitar and a fear of getting too close to the mike. “These kids from Knoxville want to see the rock band,” Owings remembers. “Chan goes up there and gets through fragments of two songs, three songs, four songs, five songs, whatever it is. She came offstage, took her guitar off, went upstairs to
this big wide empty room, and went over to the farthest corner, and from the other side of the room you could hear her whimpering and sobbing. Man or Astroman? are like, ‘What the fuck just happened? Was she
raped?’”

Performing live brought out raw anguish in Chan, and she noticed, subconsciously, that this was fascinating to other people. Whether she knew it at the time or not, even in these catastrophic moments onstage— which began in these early years as a real, genuine, emotional reaction to unresolved issues with fame, performance, and the notion of audience— Chan was training herself to play up the chaos in her own head for performance's sake. “If you have a really low opinion of yourself that's really deep-seated, and then people say, ‘Oh my God! You're so fragile, I love you! You're so complicated! When you broke down like that, I was really moved,’ imagine what that does to you,”
New York Times
music critic Ben Ratliff, who has written about Cat Power, asks. “It's like, ‘Whoa! Well, I'm still worthless, but that thing that I did.…’” Chan's onstage breakdowns have never been contrived, but that doesn't mean that she isn't aware of how compelling they are.

She was and would continue to be justifiably criticized for flagrantly disregarding any sense of showmanship, but for a woman who refused to think of herself as a professional performer, the idea that she was responsible for delivering something polished onstage completely mystified her. And since her audience drew closer to her with every erratic sob, there was no reason for Chan to dry her tears. “When I write songs, it's for personal reasons,” she has said. “Like the reason you might get a haircut or move out of town, it's because you don't want to look at negative images anymore, so you do something in your own life to change the situation. I wrote songs. I'm not trying to say anything to anyone. Whatever's there is a subconscious buildup.”

Sometimes Chan's accounts of how she was sold into rock-star slavery are merely self-abdicating: “I gave my music to other people because they asked for it,” she has said. “Steve Shelley wanted it for his label, Gerard Cosloy wanted it for Matador, and Mark Moore, who first put a microphone in front of my face, wanted to have a band.” Other times, her explanations are so plainly false they're obnoxious. “What I do anyone could do,” she has said.

Chan's modesty is a cover for her fear that she is actually the sole architect of her own fame. If Cat Power's success is somebody else's fault, then Chan gets to come along for the ride all the while complaining that she never wanted to be there in the first place. During the
Community
tour, this shell game imploded. “Her dream was happening,” Foljahn says, “and she just didn't think she deserved it. There was that tension between whatever had gone on in her childhood and this reality that she could become this thing that she wanted to become, and I think it was painful for her.”

Like most teenagers, Chan aspired to be the exact opposite of her parents, but to be a rebel in the Marshall family meant living a quiet, suburban life. If either of Charlie and Myra's kids defied their parents it was Miranda, who got married, had kids, and became a nurse. For Chan, Cat Power's success represented her failure as a human being. “I don't like to think of it as a career,” the singer has said of making music. “There's so many other things I'd like to do, go work on a boat in Alaska, or teach kids their A to Z's. Music keeps me away from other things I'd like to do.”

After she wrapped up the
Community
tour, Chan went back for a few months to New York, where she tried to reenter her prefame life. She went to other people's shows, enjoyed not having to work a day job, and played hostess to friends from out of town.

Before
What Would the Community Think's
release in September 1996, Chan was dealing with her first major what-am-I-doing-with-my-life breakdown. The singer would face many of these in the future, and all of them
would center around the same central conflict: How can you be a rock star
and
a homemaker? A public figure and a private citizen? A sophisticated, well-traveled independent woman and a good Southern housewife? How can you be Cat Power and Chan Marshall all at once?

In the late fall of 1996, Chan arrived home in New York, back from her first major international tour. She tried to reconnect with her pre
-Community
life. That didn't work. “I like the fact that when I first moved here, I didn't know anybody,” she has said of New York. “I like the fact that there were so many people and I was just one of the people. But now I can't concentrate. I'm always a nervous wreck and I'm always freaking out. It seems like everyone I talk to I'm always saying ‘I'm sorry’ to, because inside my head I'm thinking I'm going insane and I can't really express that, so I just say, ‘I'm sorry.’ What I really want to say is, ‘I have to go, 'cause I can't concentrate.’”

Still unsure of what to do, Chan decided to play a few shows in New York. With Foljahn and Shelley behind her, Cat Power took the stage at the Knitting Factory for what would turn out to be her last performance for more than a year. This show should have been a homecoming celebration: Chan was playing in support of a successful record, had just returned from a whirlwind European tour, and was standing onstage with people she trusted. Yet midsong, midset, the singer looked out onto the range of expectant faces in the crowd and started screaming. At first the moment was interesting, another one of crazy Chan's crazy tics. Then it became mildly alarming, then disturbing, then totally harrowing. An alarmed murmur rose from the crowd, and Shelley and Foljahn stopped trying to keep the song going and looked at each other, unsure of what to do. When Chan finally stopped howling, she mumbled something inaudible into her mike and attempted to play again before the soundman finally cut her off.