Cat Power (27 page)

As emotive as Chan and Callahan were in their respective sonic sendoffs to each other, the most intense feelings were yet to come. Chan exposed
herself on
Moon Pix
, and in revealing her pain there was the implicit hope that it would lessen. But the success of
Moon Pix
propelled the singer into what would become a seemingly endless tour that kept her rootless, off-kilter, and emotionally stunted. The wounds we hear Chan describing in harrowing detail on
Moon Pix
would not heal for a long while.

Between the recording of Moon Pix in the winter of 1998 and the album's September release, Chan went back to New York City and tried to establish a new life. As spring turned to summer, she still wasn't settled. Word had gotten back to
her that Bill Callahan might be seeing someone else. The idea that he might have moved on so quickly underscored just how badly their
experimental
domesticity had failed. Now there Chan was, back in her one-room apartment on East Third, with months and months of touring commitments and the loneliness of road life stretching before her. “I had to go on tour,” she has said. “That's when the drinking started. I had a bottle of scotch backstage at that point. A year later, my rider had a bottle of scotch and a case of beer for every show.”

After hearing
Moon Pix
, Matador knew they had an important record on their hands, and they got behind the album with an extensive (for an indie label) promotional campaign that included shooting a music video for the single. Chan has described “Cross Bones Style” as “the real dance song” on
Moon Pix
, which made it the ideal candidate. Ever obsessed with Madonna, Chan got excited about filming a Material Girl-inspired clip. “I'm thinking of doing a full-on ‘Lucky Star’-style video,” the singer said at the time. “Like Madonna, dancing in a white room. I'm sure I'll chicken out, though.” “Cross Bones Style” was never released as a single, but she did make the video with her close friend Brett Vapnek directing. It features Chan and a bunch of friends doing funny approximations of angular dance moves while Chan, wearing a red dress and neckerchief that looks like it's choking her, pretends to play guitar. In other shots, Chan wears her late-nineties uniform of baggy jeans and conservative black button-down, against which her aggressively rosy lip gloss and eye makeup seems awkward.

The stress of touring behind a successful record took a significant psychological toll. By day she traveled from city to city in a sparse tour bus, looking forward to the next night she'd spend in a real bed. At night she drank, played her show, then drank some more. Through years spent in New York or on the road, Chan had collected a set of friends
scattered around the world. At almost every tour stop, there was someone she needed to catch up with, so she'd rally with whiskey and nicotine and stay out until last call, then do it all again the next night. The alcohol kept her going into the wee hours of each morning, it allowed her to nod off to sleep at dawn, and it helped her contend with the residual awkwardness she felt onstage, which deepened as she became more successful and began to play to larger and more demanding audiences.

As the child of a wannabe rockstar and an alcoholic, Chan has never bought into the false romance of a Dionysian lifestyle. She wasn't the sort of drinker who had a few too many at the after-party; Chan drank to survive. “I've always been accountable,” the singer has said. “I've always been very professional, believe it or not. Even though people think my shows have been…but as a friend, a person, a lover, a girlfriend, I've always been right there. Drinking was more of a way to continue traveling. To keep going to the next show, keep meeting people in different cities. It was a way for me to be calm.”

By the time Chan was touring behind
Moon Pix
, her bouts of onstage lunacy were well-known, and most of Chan's hard-core fans believed they'd already witnessed the worst of their hero's psychological unraveling. They had not. In the months after
Moon Pix
was released, Chan's live shows transformed from merely weird and sometimes boring to harrowing displays of self-destruction and almost nightly antiperformances.

These raw shows became so notorious that they drew in a whole new group of Cat Power fan and critic: those who actually wanted to see the grotesque spectacle of public evisceration. Many who didn't buy the authenticity of Chan's breakdowns accused her of delivering performances that were nothing more than despicable manipulations of the artist-audience relationship.

From Jim Morrison in Miami in 1969 to the Sex Pistols at Winterland
to Guns N' Roses in Toronto in 1992 to Amy Winehouse at the MTV Europe Awards in 2008, most notoriously unstable artists have a show that represents their darkest period, when all their demons emerge onstage for every last audience member to see. Cat Power's took place on January 4, 1999, at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City. Lucky for her, it was pre-YouTube, or the clip would still be passed around for the sheer shock value alone. The gig was part of a series of sold-out dates Chan played during that leg of the relentless
Moon Pix
tour. In addition to the core fans who were there for the music, Cat Power's audience now also included those who were there for the voyeuristic thrill of watching a performer's psyche dismantle onstage.

A severe winter chill has descended on the city, but the faithful bundle up and brave the stinging air outside for the promise of emotional warmth inside. It's after eleven before Chan appears onstage, not that you can see beneath the sheets of matted hair hanging over her face and the deliberately underlit stage. Fans are politely quiet when she first steps in front of the mike, but there's a sense of giddy anticipation in the crowd. Four months after the release of
Moon Pix
, Chan's adopted hometown is finally going to hear her perform material from an album that's being heralded as Cat Power's first masterpiece.

If there's a set list, no one's following it. Instead, Chan halfheartedly starts songs, then stops a quarter of the way through before calling off the band, which includes two of Chan's ex-boyfriends, Mark Moore on guitar and Chris Lopez on drums. “They hate me,” she tells the audience in a loud whisper, her first comprehensible words of the evening. If she does manage to string together multiple seconds of coherent singing and playing, she'll stop anyway so that she can chastise herself
for mistakes only she can hear. Chan mutters vicious descriptions of her own failures into the floor, then manically apologizes to the crowd, and finally, during a brutally aborted performance of “Cross Bones Style,” the show disintegrates completely. Chan climbs off the stage and shuffles, hair over her eyes, baggy clothes barely shifting, her movements are so ponderous, out into the audience, where she crumples into a fetal position and rocks, head between her knees.

Her band is totally appalled. They storm off the stage, amps screeching and cymbals awkwardly banging against snare. Chan continues to press her face into the moist wood of the beer-soaked floor and wonders aloud what it would be like to be slashed by a machete. The crowd splits into two sets: Half is as revolted as the band by Chan's display of unabashedly sensationalized melodrama, the other half empathizes with the fragile singer and starts to come up, one by one, to reassuringly pet her head as if she is a wounded jungle creature in need of consolation.

New York Times
critic Ben Ratliff was in the audience that night. Even though ten years have passed since the show, Ratliff's memory of Chan's performance of “Cross Bones Style” incites a combination of bafflement and rage. “She did this thing that on one level was part of what I found nauseating, but was also something that I had never seen before,” he remembers. “She went into the audience and kept singing the song. She got down on the floor and put her nose and her forehead on the floor and people were patting her on the back, trying to make her feel better. I just thought, Ughh, you know? Like, No! You know? This is terrible! Doing this thing and ultimately
seeking
comfort like that from her fans, I found nauseating.”

“I really didn't mind that they did that,” Chan has said of her fans'
physical intimacy. “Because I felt like I was already dead—that I wasn't even there anymore, or something.… When the fans were patting my back, I already felt like I'd been murdered, so it didn't bother me. As for the band, I've never talked to them about it and to this day I'm sure they still think that I'm crazy and out of control, and which is, you know, fine because it's not how I see myself, or how I feel. In fact the greatest misconception about me is that people think I'm crazy. I surely am not.”

The following day, Ratliff's piece ran in the
New York Times
. He described the set as “staggering for its inversion of standard rock-performance ethics,” before going on to indict Chan for not holding up her end of the bargain between audience and artist. “Gone was the idea of exultation, or of showing what one can do,” Ratliff wrote. “In its place was outrageously passive-aggressive behavior and nonmusicianship.”

It was a big deal for a paper as influential as the
New York Times
to be covering a show by this long-toiling local artist. The paper's presence reflected the reaches of Chan's new fame, but by melting down in front of Ratliff, Chan ensured she would now be at least as well-known for her self-destruction as for her music. No matter what their reaction, everyone who saw this show came away from it with the same question on their minds: Is she really crazy? After the Bowery show, this question would be alluded to in every Cat Power review, in every feature written about Chan. After this show, talking about Chan's mental state would become the primary way of talking about Cat Power.

“I really, really had a hard time with it,” Ratliff recalls, still visibly disturbed by it all these years later. “In fact, when it was over, instead of just getting on the subway and going home, I walked about forty blocks thinking about it, because I didn't want to be complicit in any way with the fundamental bullshittiness of it, you know? I had such
trouble with it. And yet it wasn't something that I felt like just canceling the review and saying, ‘It was a waste of time. Let's not deal with it.’ Clearly there was something there that she had and nobody else had that was unique and special.”

Ratliff was most troubled by the juxtaposition between Chan's evident ability and her unwillingness to display it. “She was dealing with her own gifts in such a funny way,” he recalls. “She was being really hide-and-seek with them. She'd make it clear that she could sing, and then it was like she forgot how. She would make it clear that she knew how to play chords, and then she would forget how. I felt like on one level it was sad, and on one level it was very manipulative. I felt like the audience was being manipulated, and I couldn't stand it.

“I listened to
Moon Pix
again and I just kept being drawn back to the moments on that record where she proves that she can sing,” he explains almost ten years after writing the review. “Those are like, ‘All right, she's got my trust.’ Then it kind of drifts for a while, and then she sings a beautiful note. She has a kind of froggy, nasal voice that she can put on, and, man, it's good.” For Ratliff, the frustrating thing about Chan is that she has the goods and won't give them up, which makes her failures obnoxious rather than endearing. “Have you ever had a schoolmate who goes around the class eliciting sympathy by saying, ‘Oh my God. I'm going to fail this test so bad. I'm so stupid’? Then the person gets an A plus, and you knew all along that they would?” Ratliff asks. “That's the reaction that I had: ‘I don't know what, clinically, is happening with you, but I think that you deserve to be ignored right now.’”

Chan is not one of those artists who avoids her own press. And even if she tried not to pay attention to what's being written about her, her family would keep her up to date. Myra buys lots of music magazines, and Granny Lil keeps track of what family secrets Chan is revealing in print.
She has even chastised her granddaughter for speaking so bluntly about Myra's alcoholism. As harsh as the
Times
review was, it actually remains one of Chan's favorite pieces of writing about Cat Power. “My booking agent faxed it to me while I was on tour,” the singer remembered. “He was like, ‘Be prepared, it's really bad.’ He thought it was a huge deal.” For Chan, a bad review is one that mislabels her as dumb or worthless or entitled. A critic that expects more of Chan than she's giving is one she appreciates, one who respects Chan more than she respects herself. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, is he saying that I'm a stupid bitch with no sense of humor and I'm poor white trash and I don't have a vocabulary and I stand funny and I'm dumb?’” Chan has said. “It was a completely objective opinion about what he thought. I e-mailed my booking agent and was like, ‘This isn't bad. It's realistic. It's good!’ A personal attack from someone you don't know—negative, mean, maliciousness is bad. If you want to have an opinion, that's good.”

Chan has been asked about what exactly happened that cold, still winter night at the Bowery Ballroom and she's offered an explanation that only deepens the mystery surrounding the show. “This guy was there who I had known for a long time,” the singer has said. “He was on drugs and telling me crazy stuff. He had a gun and was trying to tease me that he had power. I thought he was going to shoot me.” Chan has had several stalkers over the years, including one in France and an American girl who has been following her more recently. This guy could very well have been another stalker with a particularly dangerous profile. Chan has said that several months later, he shot both of his parents and himself.