Cat Power (7 page)

Leamon's job kept him away from home for long stretches of time, but when he was around he brought stability to the household and paid attention to the kids. Leamon remembers several family vacations, including one to Topsail Island on the North Carolina coast. “It was a little place, real small, just a strip of land with water between it. We'd go there, get a hotel room, and play on the beach. It had one little restaurant. We'd also drive up in the mountains, to Banner Elk
a resort town in western North Carolina
, and get a cabin where the ski resorts were. The kids would have their music in the back, listening to that, and Myra and I would be up front talking.”

These moments of familial unity were few. “What kind of parents do they make? Shitty parents,” Dr. Ewing says of schizophrenics. “Sometimes
they can get up and make lunch for their kids and send them off to school, but what they can't really do is make emotional connection and understand what the kid really needs. And they also might be painting satanic symbols on the wall and chanting about the devil instead of changing diapers, who knows. One man put his two toddlers in the melting bucket at the steel plant because he believed that was the only way to save them from the devil. The range is huge. But mostly it would be sort of like they were absent.”

Sometimes Myra's behavior would be limited to carelessness or basic neglect. “She'd just cut up some vegetables and say, ‘Here's dinner,’” Lenny remembers. But when Myra was drinking, her temperament would shift from passive to aggressive. Chan has been uniformly vague about Myra's mental health problems. When she talks about her mom, she'll describe her as bipolar or simply crazy, then go into harrowing detail about growing up in fear of her mother's volatile mood swings. “When you're raised by a bipolar person, you have to be afraid,” Chan has recalled. “If you turn the knob on the door when you come home from school too loudly, you're fucking in trouble, you know? I got shit kicked out of me. I was always afraid.”

“One minute she can be as nice as can be towards you and you think everything is cool, and the next minute she flies off the handle,” Lenny remembers. “She'd yell. You'd be stunned. Okay, what did I do? After a while, you're walking on eggshells—Okay, I have to do everything exactly the way Mom wants it done, 'cause I don't want her to yell at me.” Leamon describes Myra's mood swings as directly connected to her drinking. “I don't know if Myra knows she needs help,” Leamon muses. “Don't know if she knows she has a problem. Maybe she does and doesn't want to accept it. There's something there that's obviously bothering her, and she's not a drunk or anything, but when she does
have a few drinks, a couple of beers, her personality changes—she'd get kind of manic. That brought along a lot of the problems, why they didn't get along. She would holler at them.”

Chan learned to be submissive in order to survive. By the time she was in middle school, Chan had internalized the idea that she was always wrong, and this notion has haunted her into adulthood. Anyone who has seen Cat Power live, or has had even a five-minute conversation with Chan, has heard her say, “I'm sorry,” or ask, “Are you mad at me?” at least once. She repeats these phrases like mantras, a dubious habit that her critics point to when they argue she's the cynical architect of her own mad image. But Chan's compulsive apologizing is as much a well-honed survival mechanism as it is cunning self-deprecation. Chan needed to be an emotional chameleon in order to get through life in new school after new school, and in order to manage her mother. If joy and effervescence were in order, that's what she would deliver. If absolute quiet and withdrawn submission was required, she would embody it. And when prostrate apology was necessary, that's what she would give.

Even though Chan was ill equipped as a kid to understand her mother's mental illness, she intuited enough that she began to fear not only her mother's unpredictable mood swings but also the demons that brought them on. “Because my mom was unstable growing up, it's been a fear of mine since I was a little girl—that they were going to take me away,” the singer has said. Growing up with a mentally ill parent taught Chan to be afraid of her own mind.

In contrast to the instability Chan associated with her mother, Charlie Marshall, the charming almost rock star, was easy to idealize. Chan's perspective on her dad and on her parents' split has evolved since she was a kid, but she spent most of her adolescence and much of her twenties stubbornly worshiping him. Not only was he the cool parent, with
the good taste in music, easy warmth, and relatively mellow personality, but he was also not there—and his absence made him easy to romanticize. “I was so trained as a child to accept him because he was never around,” Chan has remembered. Father and daughter also had a special affinity for each other beyond the usual absentee-parent idealization: Charlie is a musician, and Chan always loved music.

Seeing their dad was so rare that when Charlie did get time with Miranda and Chan, it was treated like a holiday. “I'd go pick them up and I'd have 'em for the whole day,” Charlie remembers. “We'd go to the mall and Myra would put pretty dresses on them both and they'd have brand-new shoes if we were doing something special, going to the movies or whatever. I'd hold Miranda's hand in my left hand and I'd have Chan's in my right and Chan would be almost like tap-dancing, she'd have so much energy. She's like a little bunny rabbit, and Miranda would be walking with me and we'd be talking, and Chan'd be just like bouncing like a rabbit.” On these outings Charlie would treat the girls to an icecream cone, though Chan couldn't have the real thing because of her food allergies. “She had to have sherbet,” Charlie remembers. “So I would get sherbet too. Miranda would have the ice cream and she'd be gloating right and left. I asked Chan later, I said, ‘You knew all those years that I hated sherbet.’ She said, ‘Yeah, I knew it, Dad—it didn't make it any better!’”

Very early some weekend mornings, Charlie remembers Myra dropping the girls off unannounced at his house then driving away, leaving them to timidly knock on their father's door, hoping he would wake up and let them in. This sort of behavior angered his second wife, Sandy, with whom Charlie has another daughter, Ivy Elizabeth, born in 1981. “The kids didn't know what to do,” Charlie remembers of these moments. “Sandy would be yelling at me, and the kids, they're caught
right in the middle. In a broken home you have the continuance of life A or life B and the kids, they're out there somewhere in the ozone and they don't know what their place is or what they're supposed to do. It's not their fault.”

As Chan grew up, she continued her emotional chameleon act at home with her mom while idealizing a father she barely saw and sustaining what few friendships she was able to forge at her string of new schools. Outwardly Chan was participating in childhood, but inwardly she was learning to turn to herself for real companionship. The more comfortable Chan got with the idea that she could only truly count on herself, the more time she spent in her own head, and the more active she became creatively. “I would write stories,” the singer has said. “That was the only way I could say something.” Chan's entire life was defined by other people's needs and expectations. She had to be docile around Mom, charming around Dad, willfully gregarious at each new school. But walking home from the bus or during study hall or alone in the room she shared with her sister late at night, Chan could tell herself the truth.

Chan wrote poems and mysteries and other short stories, and she also started writing music. When she was in fourth grade and living in McLeansville, North Carolina, Chan Marshall wrote her first real song. “I had this neighbor who had a piano,” Chan has said. “I'd only seen pianos in church or in my dad's apartment, and I was never allowed to touch instruments. I grew up in a house that had alcoholism problems, and there are different codes of living when you grow up like that. I didn't go to other people's houses much.” Chan was compelled by the piano: She wanted to have it all to herself, and one day she got the chance. “My neighbor's parents weren't home, and she was watching TV,” Chan has remembered. “So I snuck into her den and I played this song. I called it ‘Windows.’”

It's not an exaggeration to say that this moment changed Chan's life. The uninhibited written expression of her own thoughts was consoling, but music was even better—it was beyond words. “I felt like I had a secret,” the singer has said of her emotional reaction to writing that first song. “Like I had made a life for myself.” Instantly, music became a source of relief from the rest of her life. “Growing up with this nonsocietal structure, you have no real guidelines to follow. You either go to church and, like my grandmother, you believe in God and hope for something to keep yourself sane and positive, to keep continuing the struggle. Or you turn to alcohol and drugs or mental unstableness. So that's why I write … exercise communication. Did the music help me break that cycle? Shit yeah.”

Music is the only element as integral to Chan's childhood as addiction and instability. Her father always had instruments around the house, and there were musicians around all the time, and her mom had a good voice and would sing to the girls. Church music was the foundation onto which the rest of Chan's musical influences were laid. On top of pensive, plaintive hymns and raucous gospel revivals came Myra's British bands and the blues, old soul, and classic rock that her dad and stepdad loved.

Chan used to sit cross-legged before Charlie's crates of old blues and classic-rock records. She would spend hours DJing for herself, playing tracks by James Brown, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, and Creedence. This was Charlie's music, and it became Chan's music as well. “Something serious happened when I found the Buddy Holly and the first Rolling Stones record,” Chan has said. “Playing those records, something happened to me.” Chan was particularly taken with a Dylan record she found in her father's collection. “He was all alone on that blue cover,” the singer has said. “I didn't know nothing about alone music. It felt like he was singing to me.”

Chan talks most often about her father's influence on her musical taste, but Lenny remembers his sister expressing interest in Leamon's records as well. “I'm certainly not gonna say that Chan got all of her influences from my father,” Lenny says. “But he had an old record collection—Eric Clapton, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones. He used to play them every day in the morning, and in the evening when he got home from work. I think she commandeered some of his records, and I think some of her interest in the blues came from my father's records.”

Chan's connection to Southern blues was reinforced by the fact that these songs—unlike any of the friends she made at the various schools she attended or the rooms she inhabited for a few months at a time, or the bookstores, cafés, and record stores she frequented in one town or the next—were always with her during her nomadic childhood. “I didn't know anybody, 'cause I went to a different school every year, so they were always my favorite songs,” the singer has said of the tracks she heard at her parents' houses. “The heart of the music and the simplicity of it— I'd go to all these different schools and nobody had ever heard about it, so I couldn't have a relationship with any peers who knew old soul.”

At home by herself at night, it was to her soul and blues heroes that Chan turned for comfort—but she was also a normal American teenager growing up in the eighties. She loved Duran Duran and Madonna and watched a lot of MTV. “As far as dressing, she would go through phases,” Lenny remembers. “For one portion she loved Madonna, who was just coming out with ‘Borderline’ and ‘Papa Don't Preach.’ Then she would go through other phrases. Her favorite movie for a while was
The Breakfast Club
with Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson. She watched that movie ad nauseam. She related to the Molly Ringwald character. She also really liked
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and was really into
Less Than Zero.”

Chan embraced mainstream pop culture, but she was also tapped into the sounds of the underground. Miranda was part of Chan's connection to indie music—she gave her a cassette of Hüsker Dü's 1983 EP
Metal Circus
when they were teenagers—but it was really radio that opened Chan's eyes to the kinds of bands that were her forebears in indie rock. “I remember when I discovered college radio,” the singer has said. “I was fourteen. I was in my room and my mom had given me this radio. I'd turn on the radio and tape stuff.
R.E.M.'s
‘Radio Free Europe’ —I was like, that's so cool! Then the next song was like Concrete Blonde, then the Cure, then the Go-Go's, and I had all this music on this one tape. I'd listen to that or I'd listen to the radio and tape more songs. I learned that there was this other music, and it's not like Billy Idol, and it's not like ‘What's Love Got to Do with It’ or all the eighties stuff, like Kajagoogoo or Debbie Gibson. There's more out there.”