Cat Power (3 page)

The singer hasn't lived in the South full-time since she was twenty, but no matter what's going on in her life—whether she's caught up in one of Cat Power's epic European tours or enjoying a minibreak at Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld's country home—Chan always finds time to come home for hush puppies and barbecue. And even though she'll help bake the sweet-potato pie at Christmas in North Carolina or gallivant around her old Atlanta stomping grounds with friends from high school, compared to the rest of her family, Chan is practically a Yankee. She's the first person in her family to move north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Chan's mother and father still live down South (her mom in Greensboro, North Carolina, her dad in Atlanta), as does every other living blood relative from her sister, Miranda; stepfather, Leamon; half brother, Lenny; niece, Audrey; nephew, Ian; brother-in-law, Mike; grandmother, Lillian; grandfather, Richard; and half sister, Ivy, to innumerable best friends whom this genteel but feisty Southern girl considers family.

Chan Marshall has friends everywhere from Barcelona to Montreal to Melbourne, but in her parents' sixty-some years on earth, neither of
them has spent much time outside of the southern United States. Her father graduated from high school and briefly experimented with the idea of college, but found the pull of a rock ‘n’ roll life to be too strong and soon dropped out. Chan has indicated that Myra never finished high school. And yet these two young people, roots deeply planted in red clay soil, started out with dreams of living a kind of life that is not so different from the one Chan now leads. The identities of both Chan's parents were forged at a time when the rebel spirit of the sixties was alive and thriving. The young couple was musically inclined and naturally drawn to the artists lifestyle, which during the time was directly aligned with social and political revolution.

Charles Marshall was born Charles Fowler in 1947 in Talladega, then a small mill town in central Alabama. Today Talladega is known for being home to the longest and fastest superspeedway in stock-car racing, but the track wasn't built until the 1960s. In the 1950s, when Charlie and his younger brother, Jerry, were growing up, the place was a one-stoplight town in which you had to make your own fun. From a very early age, Charlie learned the three pillars of amusement: girls, liquor, and rock ‘n’ roll.

As a young boy, Charlie lived with his aunt and uncle. Then, when he was about ten years old, his mother, Lena Faye, remarried and Charlie went to live with her and her new husband. William Herman Marshall, who went by the name Benny, adopted Charlie when he was a teenager and Charlie changed his name from Charles Fowler to Charlie Marshall.

“We didn't have a lot of money,” Charlie remembers. “At Christmastime, when I was a tiny boy, my mom would come visit. We'd sit around the fire and we'd sing Christmas songs. ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ was my aunt Ruby's favorite song. We would just sing.”

As a child, Charlie quickly learned that he could use his natural charm to command the attention of whichever adults happened to be around, a skill he would pass on to Chan. Charlie's early knack for performance is something both he and Chan are proud of.

“My first professional gig—I always tell people this,” Charlie begins, excited to relay one of his many favorite personal narratives. “In Talladega, music was everywhere. I remember there was one old couple, and if I'd walk by 'em just right they'd say, ‘Sing for us, Charlie.’ So I would do ‘Hey Good Lookin'.’ They'd give me a quarter.” Chan often proudly tells this story as well.

Just as it would be in Chan's life, music was the one consistent presence in her father's world. Mom and Dad were inconsistent, but the music would always be there. Soon Charlie was playing in the most popular local band, the Turks, and enjoying the spoils of small-town fame. “All of the sudden, to all of the girls who didn't pay any attention to me—I was like top cat!” he remembers, laughing. “I said, ‘I like this!’ I was bit immediately.” Between the electrifying feel of playing before a crowd and the collection of snug-bell-bottom-wearing female admirers who lined up to bat their eyes at him after the show, Charlie quickly realized the rock ‘n’ roll life was for him—and just as quickly concluded that the Turks were not the band to get him out of Talladega. He decided to go to technical college down in Childersburg, Alabama, where he joined a new band and started traveling on the local college-to-college circuit, playing frat parties for gas money and free beer. “All of the sudden I wasn't just small-town Charlie Marshall in Talladega, Alabama,” he remembers. “I realized that you could actually travel and make money doing this.”

Several bands later, Charlie and his friend Mike Lewis headed to Tuscaloosa, where Chan's father enrolled as a part-time student and the
pair formed a new band called the Brick Wall. Mike Lewis went on to have an impressive career in the music business. He played with the Standells (of “Dirty Water” fame), was on two Quicksilver Messenger Service albums, and later became a disco producer. The Brick Wall was a long way from that kind of success, but they were aiming high. Relentless ambition brought tough times. Charlie remembers living on a single peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich a day during most of that fall before the band started to get some attention. They made it through the winter, and in early 1968 they recorded their first real single, the bluesy “Poor Mary Has Drowned,” which Capitol Records released. Nearly thirty years before Matador Records signed Cat Power, a member of the Marshall family already had a record deal.

Traditional blues and R&B music is the foundation of contemporary rock ‘n’ roll, yet during the genre's first golden era, Southern rock didn't really exist. During the 1950s, artists like Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and, of course
,
Elvis left a sonic trail of bread crumbs from the spare, unadorned sound of the Delta blues to the explosive bravado that would define rock music in the 1960s. But as rock ‘n’ roll rose in prominence with artists like Roy Orbison and Chubby Checker in the early sixties, Southern music veered from the potent rock sound it had given birth to and toward a country-music twang. During the early 1960s, the South's contribution to contemporary music came mainly out of Nashville, where producers like Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins put a pop sheen on singles by distinctly country artists like Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves.

By the late 1960s, the two poles of Southern music—country and blues—began to merge. Bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Byrds, and the Band popularized a rock sound that included a heavy country influence and revitalized interest in the South as a breeding ground for great rock ‘n’ roll. It was during this era that the Brick Wall was trying to break into the music business. By November 1969, when the Allman Brothers, from Macon, Georgia, released their first album— an eponymous debut that channeled both the riotous and forlorn sides of the South—Southern rock was considered highly commercial. During the 1970s, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, and eventually Lynyrd Skynyrd would make some of the most outrageous, raucous, and distinctly American music in history. The Brick Wall was poised to be a part of this movement, but first they had to find a home base, record some music, and hit the road on tour. In 1968 Capitol Records encouraged them to relocate to one of a handful of so-called major markets in America, where they would be best positioned to capitalize on any attention that came their way.

Arriving in Atlanta in the beatific summer of 1968 felt like coming home. “We pulled around Fourteenth Street, and there was about one hundred longhairs there,” Charlie remembers. “In Tuscaloosa we had
maybe one hundred longhairs in the whole county going to school, so when I saw all these people all congregated in one area I said, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

It was also exactly where Chan's mom and Charlie's future bride, eighteen-year-old Myra Lee Russell, wanted to be. Though she was still living with her parents in Forest Park, a quiet and leafy middle-class suburb of the big city, Myra was already a revolutionary, activist, and artist in spirit, and spent as much time as she could down on Fourteenth Street and Peachtree Street, the main arteries of Atlanta's counterculture.

Myra grew up in a traditional Southern household. Along with her two brothers, Wayne and Dickie, and one sister, Kathy, Myra attended church on Sundays with her parents Lillian (Granny Lil to Chan and the other grandkids) and Richard Russell (who went by Pop). They lived in a modest but well-appointed brick house south of Atlanta.

Myra's family has deep roots in southern Georgia. Around the turn of the century, her grandparents migrated from the rural southern part of the state to Atlanta, where they worked in a cotton mill. Granny Lil, Myra's mom, would also occasionally pick cotton, though Myra says her daughter's description of her grandmother as a cotton picker is one of the many family mischaracterizations Chan made in print: “She would go out and pick cotton for fun, not because she had to,” Myra explains.

Myra grew up wild. She spent hours outside in the verdant, sticky Georgia summers, wreaking havoc with her three siblings. “I was shooting a twenty-two when I was twelve,” Myra recalls with a raspy laugh earned through decades of heavy smoking. “We'd collect bottles in Poulan, Georgia, and go down to the store and get an RC Cola and a Moon Pie for a nickel. We'd put 'em up on the fence posts and shoot 'em down.”

For all the rowdy backwoods fun in the Russell household, there was also a lot of sorrow. When he was just sixteen, Myra's younger brother,
Wayne, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Wayne was the golden child of the family, a handsome and charismatic boy whose vastly contrasting light and dark sides remind Charlie a lot of Chan. When Wayne was just a teenager and Charlie and Myra were still married, the Russells sent their youngest son down to Atlanta to visit his sister, her husband, and their new baby, Miranda. “This is when we were living down with the hippies,” Charlie remembers. “Everyone wanted to come see the hippies! Wayne couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen, and one of my friends had been giving him beer behind my back. He threw up all over.”

Wayne's death rocked the Russell family, in particular Myra and Lillian. “That's a sore subject for both of them,” Lenny Land, Chan's half brother, says. “I think they feel like they could have prevented it somehow. Like they could have talked him off the motorcycle that night. Guilt is the overwhelming theme with us.”

Chan often talks about how deeply mental illness and alcoholism run in her family, and on Myra's side both are extremely prominent. According to Charlie, Myra's older brother, who served in the military, was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. Leamon puts it more succinctly: “Myra's brother is the crazy one. He went to spend some time in the service, said he had Agent Orange. He goes in and out.” Myra's older sister, Kathy, now Kathy Brady, is another wild child. “Myra's sister, that's a whole other story,” Leamon says with a soft laugh. “Kathy is like seventy now, the oldest bartender in Atlanta. There's been a lot of bars gone out of business over that girl. When Myra and her get together, they just roar.”

As Myra got older, she became a beautiful young woman with the refined features of a big-city fashion model, but the wildness of spirit forged shooting guns and running barefoot through the Georgia woods stayed with her. In spite of her unusually light green eyes, fine, straight
brown hair, and curtain-making mother back at home, Myra was no docile society girl. Even at eighteen, while still living in her father's house, Myra had a self-assuredness that was as compelling as her good looks.

For both Myra and Charlie, the political and social revolution of the late 1960s provided the perfect backdrop for postadolescent rebellion. “I used to sell
The Great Speckled Bird
on the streets,” Myra says, referring to Atlanta's radical underground paper. “Oh, man, we were some rude hippies. We were antiestablishment, we were anti all war. Still am.” The couple also shared a deep adoration of music. Myra spent a lot of her time as a teenager record shopping downtown and devising ways to get out of her parents' house at night so she could see rock shows.

“On Fourteenth Street, everybody hung out at a restaurant called the Pennant,” Leamon Land, Myra's second husband and Chan's eventual stepfather, remembers. “And there was a hippie movement on Peachtree—it was kind of the Haight Ashbury of Atlanta. We used to hang out in the park. We'd see bands, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead. I knew Charlie. We were all part of the same group. Everybody met down in that area.”

In the fall of 1969, the Brick Wall played a gig at a local rock club in downtown Atlanta called the Spot. Myra Russell and a group of girlfriends were in the audience and stuck around after the show, eager to prolong the precious minutes spent out in the city and away from the oppressive peace of their parents' suburban homes. “She was very beautiful,” Charlie says quietly. “I still say Myra had the most beautiful face I've ever seen on anyone.” A few minutes into his first conversation with Myra, Charlie knew he'd met someone who would become more than just another pretty face. Armed with an understated wit, Myra was able to cut Charlie's expansive ego down to size. And the more she teased him about his outrageous stage moves, his hair, and his bombastic
singing style, the harder he fell for her. (For her part, Chan has told the story of her parents' meeting slightly differently. “The story goes that he took this girl Nancy home that night, and that he asked Nancy for Mom's number,” she has said.)