Cat Power (29 page)

Just as Chan seemed to be careening out of control mentally, she started pulling herself together professionally. The singer has always had the financial wits of a girl who grew up worrying about the electricity getting shut off. Now that Chan makes a good living, she'll spend a few thousand dollars at a time on Louis Vuitton luggage or Chanel gloves, but she's still a relatively frugal person. Even during the
Moon Pix
tour, when she was never in one city for more than a few days, Chan always paid her bills on time. “She would send a check with a letter or a postcard, so it was always fun to get her rent,” Ibbotson remembers. “She'd always write a note, and she told me if I needed it beforehand there was her best friend I could call.”

While she was torturing herself over the idea that she might be crazy, Chan was designing a pale-pink-and-off-white color scheme for the walls of her Atlanta apartment, diligently paying her bills at both her Atlanta and New York residences, and pestering Matt Shipp for advice about how to make real money as a musician. “She was always stopping me and
asking me questions about the business of jazz,” Shipp remembers. “A jazz musician who has much less of a name than an indie-rock star can make a better living. She was struck by that, and was always asking me questions about the structure of touring. It seemed so cool to her that a jazz musician could go to Europe, do festivals because they're subsidized by governments. Not long after that, she got a really good manager. She was making the switch to Triple A.”

Chan likes to think of signing with Matador and the events that followed as a series of coincidences that could have happened to anybody. “When you don't know that many people, and the few people you know and like tell you they want to put your record out, you start to think, ‘Hmmmm.…’ I was naïve,” Chan has said. “If you don't know any better and people tell you to jump off a bridge….” But even in the relatively early years of her career, friends like Shipp found this doe-eyed-ingenue act difficult to reconcile with the obvious careerist in Chan.

“She knows what she's doing,” Shipp says with a sly smile. “On some levels, I think she's an extremely calculating person.” Looking back, Shipp, who clearly adores Chan and respects her as a songwriter and singer, is also extremely skeptical about the idea that she happened upon success. “Anybody who can keep that type of profile that long—you have to be making some right moves,” he says. “You can't make that many mistakes. I've never told her this, but she really knows what she's doing. I never used to know why she was asking me things or what she was processing, but she was taking in all the right information.”

Chan not only disagrees with this impression of her as an ambitious, driven tycoon, she is actively offended by it. “My friend Terry says, ‘Oh, I just think it's great. You know, you always knew that you wanted to be a singer, and wanted to be famous,’” Chan said at the time. “I'm just
like, ‘What?’ I felt so insulted because that's not true. That's not the way that I am. She had it all wrong, and she's my friend, and things like that drive me insane.” And yet in the post
-Moon Pix
era, when the Gap called, Chan didn't find their offer to model for them insulting. Later, when Cingular wanted her to record a special cover of the Nerves' “Hanging on the Telephone” for one of their ads, Chan wasn't offended enough to say no. And in 2008, when Lincoln asked her to record a version of David Bowie's “Space Oddity” especially for them, Chan had no problem doing it.

For all of Chan's evident business acumen, she also has a flighty, fiscally carefree side that concerns some of her friends. Chan routinely walks around with thousands of dollars in cash loose in the bottom of her purse and has a hard time keeping track of her credit cards, ID, and keys. Matt Shipp remembers walking on lower Broadway with Chan in the post
-Moon Pix
era and watching as she casually dropped fifty bucks on makeup in under ten minutes. A mere drop in the bucket for a rock star, but the mindlessness of Chan's spending alarmed Shipp.

As Cat Power's renown has grown, she's traded up from Sephora to even more upscale brands—and though she still walks around barefoot in rolled-up five-dollar used 501s, her family members have taken note. “I think everybody's a little concerned about her finances. Everybody wants her to be able to function financially after this is over,” Lenny says. “She can't tour forever. I think she's made some unwise choices. She's just trying to live her life trying to find balance. But stayin' at the Ritz? There are cheaper alternatives. Then again, she's the one putting in the work. I'm hoping that her catalog and other things will help her sustain her life.”

As Chan became more and more savvy about the music business, her relationship with Matador transformed from the traditional arrangement,
in which the artist makes the art and the label does everything else, to something more complex. “
It's only
very recently that there's been any sort of weirdness, like serious weirdness about the working relationship,” Cosloy says. “Chan pays a lot more attention to the day-to-day business of being Cat Power than she might have ten or twelve years ago.” Consequently, Cosloy explains, the label is under more scrutiny from her than in the past. “Back in those days it was very much, Let the record label do its own thing. Now there's much more checks and balances. We have to go back to her much more often and say, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of this? What do you think of this?’ There are occasional disagreements regarding money or contracts or what's the next thing to do, but at the end of the day she's the boss. At the end of the day, we work for her.”

Cosloy also points out that Matador has benefited from Chan's acute understanding of how best to run the business of Cat Power. “Chan knows a lot more about the music business than a lot of other artists,” Cosloy says. “She's seen a lot of funny stuff go down. And she honestly is trying to think of what would be fun or interesting or would look cool—she just presumes that her fans will get it, and so will everybody else, and nine times out of ten she's right.”

Chan always had style. In the early nineties, when she was living in Cabbagetown, she dressed like an elegant trucker in cut-off T-shirts and eyeliner. When she moved to New York City, Chan adopted her own interpretation of
the era's popular androgynous look, shaving her head and wearing work shirts, baggy Levi's, and the intentionally drab men's dress shoes worn by all the cool indie-rock chicks. After
Moon Pix
was released, Chan started dressing less like a stylish construction worker and more like a glamorous hipster. The first symbol of this shift was a simple haircut. The cover of
Moon Pix
features a dreamy, freckle-faced, shaggy-haired young girl peering out tentatively from behind a flowering tree. By the following year, Chan had grown out her hair and was wearing a shorter version of the dramatic eye-skimming bangs and long, straight mane she's now identified with—a style similar to Nico during her iconic tenure in the Velvet Underground; urban retro-chic.

Her transformation from tomboy to glamazon was also reflected in her new boyfriend, Daniel Currie, a twenty-two-year-old model and bartender Chan met on a street corner downtown in the spring of 1999, shortly after returning to New York. “I'm so much older, and I was thinking, ‘You're so fucking cute and interesting,’” the singer has said of this first encounter. “When we kissed, he didn't think that I liked him.”

With his shaggy dark hair, wiry frame, refined bone structure, and pink, cupid's-bow lips, Currie looked the part of the elegantly disheveled heroin-chic New York hipster—but he is actually a Southern boy from the Atlanta suburbs. In fact, he was born in the same hospital as Chan, Crawford Long. Chan relentlessly sought balance between her traditional self and the rock-star New Yorker within; in Daniel, she found a partner who shared this juxtaposition. Soon the new couple was inseparable. “I'm so engulfed with my relationship,” Chan had said shortly after meeting Daniel. “I just want to be with him every day.”

Though Currie had plenty of creative aspirations, they were at best casually directed. The forms of art he routinely practiced included skateboarding, putting up drywall, and bartending. Currie was young, his
professional life yet to be established. Chan, on the other hand, was in the middle of a career upswing, so the young couple both committed to Cat Power and took their affair on the road. As the nineties came to an end, Cat Power was still touring, though not ostensibly in support of one particular album.
Moon Pix
had vaulted Chan's career to a new level that guaranteed her an audience whenever she decided to play. Matador was starting to make noise about a new record, but Chan was too in love to care.

Chan and Currie traveled the world together, enjoying the dizzying romance of endless travel made all the more intense by brand-new love. By day they would explore the exotic cities on Cat Power's itinerary, and at night Chan would play shows and Currie would hang out backstage, sometimes selling merch for his girlfriend or helping to load and unload gear. Chan was technically working, with money from Matador coming in to pay for the tour expenses as ticket sales increased both the company's and Chan's bank balances. Despite all her attempts to become a dutiful homemaker, Chan was once again the guy in her relationship and her partner, Currie, was along for the ride.

By the time the couple returned to New York, they were so used to a life that revolved around Cat Power, it was easy to continue along that path. Currie would work when he could, but mostly he followed his girlfriend around, waiting for her while she attended business meetings and coming along every time she had to go to the West Coast for press, or out on tour for a few weeks. Currie and Chan would also go home to Atlanta together, where they'd stay in Chan's house in Cabbagetown and visit with old friends and family. For the young couple this plan worked, but Chan's judgmental city friends were skeptical of the directionless pretty boy who'd infiltrated her life.

Compared to Bill Callahan, who had an intense personality, was older
than Chan, and was more professionally accomplished than she was while they were dating, Currie was like a puppy, a giggling, silly partner in crime for Chan. Thurston Moore remembers meeting Currie outside the New York office of Chan's booking agent, Jim Romeo. “She was seeing this guy for quite a while, this sort of young male-model-looking guy,” Moore remembers. “I remember going to her booking agent's place, and she was up there Xeroxing some stuff. I met him out in the street, like he was waiting for something. He had his little leather cap on. She goes, ‘Did you meet my boyfriend?’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’ She goes, ‘Isn't he cute? He's cute, isn't he?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, cute is a good word for it.’”

Like the Mafia, Lower East Side hipsters had a code in the 1990s. It was fine to bartend and wait tables in order to support your burgeoning career as a guitarist, but Currie's apparent lack of ambition to do anything other than follow his girlfriend around seemed utterly pathetic.

“I met him in California,” Tim Foljahn says of Currie. “He was very sweet. It was just funny because he was such a model, which was mind-blowing because in that crowd, the dudes don't even have the balls to go out with a model. The remnants of the nineties, the whole thing has its own form of stuck-up weirdness. So everybody was being kind of weird about him, you know, because he's different. He wasn't a misanthropic hipster. He was totally tan and hip and wearing this nice bathrobe. Everything looked fancier on him—he looked like a model!” Currie's Southern warmth and lack of neuroses turned off many of Chan's proudly cynical city friends, but it's exactly what drew the singer to him in the first place. “It wasn't complex,” Chan has said of the four years she spent with Currie. “It's like when someone is with you in it, and it's a reciprocated love. I'd never felt that before.”