Cat Power (36 page)

In addition to receiving good reviews,
You Are Free
also attracted attention because it represented a new and extremely appealing chapter in the singer's saga. Chan Marshall's life was always at least as interesting as Cat Power's music, but for much of the early part of her career there was only the depressing part of the story to tell. Now that the ultimate damaged Southern belle was reaching for freedom armed with a slick new sound and an even slicker haircut, her narrative had a Hollywood-ending sheen to it. Interested but previously unconvinced music fans no longer needed to get sad with Chan;
You Are Free
allowed them to celebrate with her.

Around the release of
You Are Free
, Chan was profiled in
New York
magazine,
Rolling Stone
, and, most famously, in
The New Yorker
, which ran a tasteful but risqué portrait of the singer by celebrated photographer and cultural icon Richard Avedon. The photo features Chan in full hippie-vixen mode, arms full of miscellaneous bracelets, breasts barely covered by a Bob Dylan T-shirt, and a patch of pubic hair peeking out from beneath the fly of her unbuttoned Levi's. The vision of indie rock's cult heroine exposed in such a prestigious magazine hammered home Chan's emerging image as the genre's critically respected pinup girl.

The Avedon shoot took place in New York, and Chan had to fly in
for it. The singer's body was so destroyed from relentless partying that she couldn't walk off the plane by herself: She had to be taken out of the airport in a wheelchair. A few days later, she showed up at Avedon's studio in New York, blitzed, grinning and giggling, but unable to button her jeans. “The reason why my fly's undone is because it hurt so bad, because I was killing my organs,” Chan has said. “I didn't have time to zip up. I guess he didn't realize my pants were undone because he was eighty years old.” Once again Chan's self-abuse directly advanced her career. “The first pubic hairs ever to be published in
The New Yorker,”
Chan has said. “My grandmother shit a brick.

“He took me upstairs to his apartment. It was like a museum,” Chan remembered. “It was modest—eight hundred square feet, maybe, all open-floor with a kitchen. He had a portrait of Marilyn. … He had all these photos from Africa. He had pictures of his wife and his son and books upon books. It was just a mesh of collectible things from all over the world. He opened up a bottle of champagne and we sat in the garden and I smoked. He was so accommodating. He was running around doing everything for me—so handsome, such an open-minded person. We talked about Dylan and a lot about the civil-rights era. He was just a wealth of knowledge.”

The photo is absolutely stunning: A weird combination of rude and refined, it shows a tanned Chan with her hair pulled back, beaming from behind puffy, messily made-up eyes. She looks beautiful. She looks iconic. She looks supremely fucked-up. “Never in a million years did I think I'd open up
The New Yorker
one day and there she'd be, flashing pubic hair with a Bob Dylan T-shirt on,” Steve Dollar says, laughing. “I had dinner with her one night in New York after the Avedon thing. She had a huge dinner with her friends and had a couple beers and was quite jolly. I was impressed by the amount of food she ate. She's totally, like, carnivorous.

“They spent a lot of time talking about Martin Luther King,” Dollar says. “She's obsessed with him. She once said she felt like because of Martin Luther King, Atlanta had this aura over it that would protect it. Avedon was the sixties, and she liked hanging out with him because he knew all those people that were her idols.” Chan recalled. “He was talking to me about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin,” she has remembered. “He said, ‘I was doing fashion just to pay for trips to Cambodia and Vietnam. Something about your music shows me that you understand things, and I just want to talk to you.’ I told him about the show that I was doing for Janis Joplin's birthday in Central Park. He said, ‘I would love to come. I loved Janis so much. She was a great girl. Such a sweetheart.’ He came to the show, this eighty-year-old man rocking out to Big Brother and the Holding Company and me.”

Even as Chan grew more comfortable with her professional accomplishments, with the idea of herself as someone who makes music for a living, she remained stubbornly committed to the desire to abandon it. Soon after
You Are Free
came out, Chan again started talking about how exhausting the transient touring life is and how nice it would be to have a reason to give it up. “I've been traveling for like four years straight, so I'm not living anywhere,” the singer said at the time. “There's a big map in my mind, and I don't know dates and I don't know days, but I know cities and I know the amount of time I'm supposed to be in each place. Home? No, I don't have a home yet. As I get older I don't know what I'm going to do. Thirty wasn't a big deal, but when I'm forty I'm going to be so much more tired of doing this than I am now. It's really wearing me out, traveling and playing shows. I don't have any routine. I'm lucky if I brush my teeth twice a day.”

Chan's previous fantasies about abandoning musicmaking to domesticate involved visions of her and a boyfriend blissfully baking pies and
frolicking barefoot in country streams somewhere, but as she got older, she started thinking in more concrete terms about motherhood and marriage. “If I could change what I'm doing, I would probably want to be a mom,” Chan has said. “I don't want to be like this. I don't want to be alone. I'd love to have someone, you know. I'd love to, I mean, I'm just like the next guy, but I'm not because I can't stop being this way.” Chan sees touring and making albums as a perverse affliction, something she can't find the will to quit, but starting a family might force her to change. “If I ever get pregnant, I'll probably stop,” Chan explained. “If it happened, I would be excited. I think that would ground me and force me to stop playing music and wandering around. I would still make songs, but I would have a focus.”

Chan has always lived a nomadic lifestyle, but in the months leading up to and following the release of
You Are Free
she made a renewed effort to plant roots, this time in Miami, where an old friend had recently moved. “One of her best friends is this girl Jenny Lee, who now lives in Miami,” Loring Kemp recalls. “They've been friends since middle school and they're still very close.” Chan first started visiting Miami regularly in 1999, and by the time she decided she liked it enough to stay, Jenny had moved up to New York. But the singer's love affair with the laid-back eclecticism of the place had already sunk in.

In 2003 Chan bought a small condo on Ocean Drive in South Beach and officially made Miami her home. “I can work on things that I couldn't do while I was touring. Things like physical health, sleep, not drinking, stuff like that,” Chan has said of her attraction to Florida. She's also an avid sun worshipper and loves the ocean, so her condo, which is right by the water, gave Chan easy access to a mellow, beachcomber sort of life that she found very restorative. Just as Chan was reaching for a saner lifestyle in Florida, one that might eventually support
the marriage and family life she craved, her relationship with Currie began to unravel.

Chan wrote “He War” in the late 1990s, around the same time she met Daniel; by the winter of 2003, a few months before
You Are Free
came out, Chan found herself in a speedboat, chasing Currie through placid Miami waters while her friend Brett Vapnek filmed the entire chase for the “He War” video. The clip isn't meant to be metaphorical: Chan and Currie play themselves, and the desperate sense of irreversible disconnection conveyed by the video reflects exactly what was going on between them at the time.

After countless trips back to Atlanta together, Chan had gotten to know Currie's family well. When the pair separated, the singer mourned the loss of her adopted family. Well after the breakup, Charlie Marshall remembers his daughter fretting about how to get Christmas presents to the Curries. “We were flying back to Atlanta on the plane together,” Charlie recalls. “She wanted me to go bring Daniel and his sister and mother their Christmas presents. I said, ‘Well, sweetheart, when I get into Atlanta I pick up my car and I drive to Alabama, and I see my folks in Alabama for their Christmas—that's a lot of driving and flying.’ I think she was upset that she had to do it herself. I think she didn't want to see them right then.”

Chan has not been very forthcoming about what caused the couple's breakup, but both she and Currie were totally wrecked in the aftermath. For years following their split Chan would refer to Currie as the love of her life, and she has suggested that the stress of losing him sparked a drinking and drugging tailspin that nearly killed her. Because she's the one in the public eye, Chan has had more opportunity to describe the effect the split had on her, but according to Currie's mother, Winnie, her son has never really recovered from his relationship with Chan. “I will
say this, he is very screwed-up because of her,” Mrs. Currie reveals. “She was a lot older and he was a pretty young guy in New York. He's still screwed-up. I don't know what will happen to Daniel. It probably would have been better for him had he never met her. It's not that we don't like her, we do, but for him it was bad.” Daniel's mother hesitates to say more about the details of her son's relationship with Chan, but tells me that he called me at least once, ready to tell his own story. “He got your machine,” Winnie explains, “but he didn't leave a message.” Repeated attempts to contact Daniel went otherwise unanswered.

Out of pain and frustration resulting from the breakup, Chan trashed the elegant Silvertone guitar that once decorated her glorified squat in Cabbagetown. “It was either that or jump out the window,” she has said. The couple's breakup took the better part of a year, but in those first torturous, emotionally unstable months, Chan had even less reason to stay in one place—so she embarked on a lengthy tour that continued off and on for two full years.

Cat Power's output during this period was as all over the place as Chan's mind. In 2004 Matador put out Cat Power's one and only critical flop,
Speaking for Trees
, a CD/DVD combo that featured Chan at her hiding-from-fame-while-simultaneously-courting-it worst. The crux of the release is a two-hour Cat Power solo concert performed in the woods and shot by Chan's friend Mark Borthwick, whose ample skills as a still photographer don't translate to film. The reviews on the
Amazon.com
page for this release have titles like “not all experiments work,” “the most boring film ever,” and “apparently Chan likes 'shrooms.” The songs Chan plays, which include her own material as well as covers, are compelling, but the audio is poor, the bursts of blinding sunlight and deafening sound of crickets are supremely distracting, the singer's face is
almost completely obscured throughout, and ultimately the Chan-gets-lost-in-nature sensibility feels self-indulgent and contrived.

Speaking for Trees
does contain an excellent original Cat Power tune, “From Fur City,” which Chan wrote in tribute to her friend Benjamin Smoke. The poet laureate of Cabbagetown eventually contracted HIV from using dirty needles. On January 29, 1999, he died from an AIDS-related infection. Chan attended his memorial.

Though she resented it mightily, working on
You Are Free
with other established musicians opened Chan up to future collaborations. The audio CD portion of
SFT
contains an eighteen-minute song, “Willie Deadwilder,” recorded with then up-and-coming guitarist M. Ward. And that same year, Chan lent her vocals to the track “I've Been Thinking” on the Handsome Boy Modeling School's album
White People
. In addition to working with other artists Chan was on the road, writing songs and popping into the studio on her off days to record them. In 2005 Cat Power did an Australian tour supporting Nick Cave and appeared at the Meltdown festival, directed that year by Patti Smith. During these gigs Chan started to play some of these new songs, many of which would appear on her next album.

At this point in her career, Chan was living the relatively good life on the road. She stayed in hotels with actual lobbies and was routinely invited to glitzy parties and events in nearly every major city she played. But she was extremely lonely. Chan muted the isolation of a life set at highway rest stops and after-parties with as much alcohol as she could swallow. “In the morning I would go to the minibar and get Jack Daniel's and do that all day long,” Chan has said of her post
-You Are Free
life. “Obviously I was really unhappy, but I wasn't goin' to let myself know that, so I made sure I was drunk for every minute of every
fuckin' day. I was a mess. But again, it was the best time of my life. I don't remember anything.”

When Chan was later asked what part of sobriety she finds most difficult, she said it's remembering things she did when she was drunk. “Like taking my shirt off at the Chateau Marmont,” she has said. “Or hanging out all night with these homeless Muslim guys in Spain. Realizing that I put myself at risk.” Chan's under-the-influence antics got her banned, like some imploding starlet, from the Chateau. “All these photographs in the
New York Times
were really disturbing me,” the singer has remembered. “The election was coming up. There were all these mosques and synagogues being bombed—just really depressing images, and I kept cutting them out and sticking them all over. I had heavy traffic coming in and out of my hotel room. At the pool I was just clearly shit-faced, getting people in the pool to sing along and running around topless. I pulled Kirsten Dunst's top down at one point. You know, just drunk—someone who doesn't realize their actions until they get reminded.”

Chan embraced perpetual drunkenness like a warm fog that brought cozy familiarity to every chilly, bleak hotel room. It also ensured the singer wouldn't have to focus on any ugly memories. “Shane MacGowan is probably the happiest person on the planet because he can keep himself in a bubble,” Chan has said of the famously dissolute, toothless frontman for the Pogues. “But imagine what he could do if someone could get him sober. Live longer. Survive. Write fucking books. In the bubble you're never gonna fall in love, never gonna settle down.