Cat Power (30 page)

Chan never introduced Bill Callahan to her father (though her stepfather met him), but Charlie Marshall met Currie several times. “He and
Chan just looked like two little kids together,” Charlie remembers. “In a lot of ways, that's what love is: You just peel back all the layers, and this is me, that's you, and we're in love.” The couple even talked about marriage. “Saying ‘We're getting married’ is kind of an explanation for your idea of the future,” Chan has said. “But did we want to marry each other? Yes, we did.”

When they weren't running around Paris or London or giggling while trying on crappy sunglasses at some dusty truck stop while touring America, Currie and Chan were in New York, palling around with the city's coolest young artists. With her stylish haircut, new rock-star status, and model boyfriend by her side, Chan finally had a way into the fashion world that had always compelled her. “Back when I started hanging out with her at her place, you know, trying to kiss her, the most shocking thing was that there were all these fashion magazines around,” Foljahn remembers. “She knew every model's name! I didn't know anything about any of this stuff, and I didn't even know any-body who knew anything about this stuff.”

Chan's new friends included designers and fashion personalities like photographer Terry Richardson; Marc Jacobs, who was then perfectly in touch with the indie aesthetic and modernized vintage style; and French fashion house Balenciaga's new savant designer, Nicolas Ghesquiere. Like Chan, these artists made careers out of their ability to channel unique perspectives on underground pop culture into collections with mass appeal. In Chan these fashion leaders saw inspiring authenticity, which, for all the fantasy associated with couture, is the central element of style. In them, Chan saw her Lower East Side brethren with swankier apartments and better champagne in their fridges.

“She became really connected with these high-profile French fashion guys,” Thurston Moore remembers. “She is certainly a beautiful and
interesting-looking person, but they were sort of fascinated with her aesthetic. She does have a sense of style that is really personal, and it is very intriguing to these guys. Marc's
Jacobs
long-standing boyfriend, Pierre Bailey, is a photographer. I know he shot her live. She was making that scene.”

Charles Aaron remembers that Chan was popular with the distinctly Lower East Side (and distinctly hard-to-impress) fashion kids, including designers Built by Wendy and those who hung out at the small, exclusive Ludlow Street boutique TG170. “The hippest people, all the most tastemaking music people, all the most tastemaking fashion people in the mid-nineties, those people who were the indie-fashion people then became more mainstream, were into her,” he remembers. “They were all obsessed with Chan: She was the One.

“I remember going to a Knitting Factory show and sitting in the balcony with all those people and just thinking. This is fucking horrible,” Aaron continues. “She can't sing. She's either scared or untalented, I can't tell which. She's phoning it in with her fake twang, and all these people who design cool jeans and belts are like gaga over her. She was very charismatic, though. In general. Even offstage, she might have had more than onstage. She would make albums that I didn't really listen to that much. I didn't get it. But she had a cult of personality.”

Fashion designer Benjamin Cho remembers the first time he met Chan, in 1998. “I was at a photo shoot doing hair and makeup for
English fashion magazine
Dazed and Confused,”
Cho recalls. “Their shoot was running late, so I was just waiting there. She came off set and we were talking and having a really great time being silly. I thought she was a model. At the time so many models looked like her, because she's really beautiful but kind of masculine. She had short hair then.”

Chan's appeal as a fashion muse comes from the same juxtaposition
between transparency and mystery that makes her music so compelling. Chan is beautiful, but in a regular way. She can pull off false eyelashes, liquid eyeliner, and couture gowns like she's been playing dress-up in socialites' closets since childhood, but you can always see the shorn, Carhartt-wearing country girl beneath the makeup. “She's this indie girl, but when I go visit her in Miami, we're at the pool at the Delano ordering drinks, and she's in a Chanel bikini,” Cho laughs. “You can do that if you don't give a shit. It's very punk. There's nothing punk about faking it. It's not like she's doing this to be on the best-dressed list. It's very natural. There's no desperation. Desperation makes people boring. All those starlets in
Us Weekly are
so boring.”

When Chan describes her personal style, it's clear she enjoys mixing clothes that reflect both her down-home roots and her appreciation of glamour. “I'll buy army-navy, or go to the thrift store for old Levi's, and then I'll get an Eres Bra and Cosabella underwear,” the singer has said of her approach to shopping. “Salvation Army jeans, a friend's band's T-shirt, and a Chanel fanny pack.”

When they first met, Cho didn't realize Chan was there to shoot promo photos, but after they talked for a while she mentioned that she was in a band called Cat Power. Cho remembers that the name was vaguely familiar, but was more impressed by the gregarious personality he'd just met than by her notoriety. The pair stayed in touch. “I was really into letter writing back then,” he remembers. “So I wrote her this letter and sent it to her in Georgia. And then I was at another photo shoot and she walks in. It was so random, I just kept seeing her at photo shoots. Then
Moon Pix
came out and I was like, ‘Oh my motherfucking God, what a fantastic album.’ So I used ‘American Flag’ in my first show, and we've remained really close. I consider her like family even though I never really see her.”

For the most part, Chan's biological family is not a stabilizing force in her life. The family she counts on to be there for her when she's in trouble is her vast network of friends. “Chan puts a lot of importance on her friends,” says Loring Kemp. “The way that she grew up, living with her dad and going back and forth with her mom, she has always created family. That's what I see in Atlanta with her friends, and that's where it comes from. Anybody from a single-parent home, especially a female that's being raised during her teenage years by a male, she creates a family around her.”

Fan response to Moon Pix was extremely positive, and Chan's zany, headline-grabbing tour for the record brought her new attention, as did endorsements like the Gap ads and Chan's new friendships within the fashion world. The
result of all this was that there were a lot of expectations riding on the next Cat Power album, and a lot of pressure to put it out sooner rather than later.

Theoretically, this shouldn't have been a problem. Chan never really stops writing, and she generally records a new song every couple of months. She travels so much that it's easy for her to pop into a studio in Dublin, or Sevilla, or Buenos Aires, and record a song she wrote last week. She does this so often that not even her label is sure how many Cat Power tracks are actually out there on tape. “Usually what happens is, I'll play it four times early on and be like, Is this something I don't want to remember?” Chan has said of her approach to writing. “If it's something I want to remember, I have to play it four more times because I have to remember it. Because in the time it takes for me to look under my bed to find the tape recorder, I lose all the lyrics and the music. Then a couple months later I'll be like, what is this? And then I'll remember. The trick is remembering it and testing yourself, without the cassette, if the song still resonates with you. The ones that come out are the ones I remember, so there's a lot of them that are like, No, no, no, no, no.”

During the tail end of 1999, Chan was following her usual recording pattern—except that every time she got behind a studio mike, she found herself working on covers instead of new songs. “Even when I was younger, nervous, uncomfortably and emotionally disabled, I always felt more freedom singing covers because it's not really my material,” Chan has said. “Before I put out
The Covers Record
, I had all these songs. I thought that was going to be the record, but I put out
The Covers Record
because I felt like I had a bad thing in my stomach. It wasn't time for that. I felt something telling me to do
The Covers Record
. I had this love for a lot of those songs, and they made me feel joyous. I didn't want to do the other songs.”

Around this time, Chan embarked on an unusual tour, one that allowed her to stay as out of sight as possible and solidified her commitment to releasing an all-covers album. She scheduled a series of dates in which she performed solo, on a spooky black stage, while the silent film
The Passion of Joan of Arc
played on the wall behind her. She routinely sat to the side of the stage, lit only by the delicate rays of light reflecting off the screen, and played mostly covers as Joan of Arc, played by French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti, martyred herself. “I want to be personless,” Chan explained of the impulse to hide in plain sight onstage. Like many of the performances Chan would give during the
Covers Record
era, without the deranged craziness to occupy the audience, there was nothing left to hold their attention. “The
Joan of Arc
shows were just a way for her to get people distracted from looking at her,” Chan's old friend from Atlanta, Steve Dollar, surmises. “So she could sort of evaporate. I went. I saw it. I don't know if it was really, like, great, you know? It was just her sort of doing her songs with
Joan of Arc
playing in the background.”