Cat Power and the Glory
by Steve Tignor (Puncture, summer 1996)
photos by Steve Connell

The first time I heard Chan Marshall was at the Cooler in New York. The dim, low-ceilinged, blue-stainless-steel space was split in two. Up front, people were sitting, spread out, staring at the stage; most seemed to have come alone. In the back, people were huddling around candlelit wood tables, chatting loudly. Onstage was Chan, shoulders slumped a bit, playing guitar now and then, getting drowned out. Her straight brown hair was cut short in the back but fell forward to nose level. She wore a brown-checked shirt loose and untucked, over sagging blue jeans. Her black shoes protruded almost clownlike. Her vocals were half-enunciated, ethereal, fading out just as her voice reached the mike.

In the middle of the first song, a woman stood up near the stage and shouted back over the audience, "If you people want to talk, why don't you go into the other room?" That got a few grumbled replies from the tables: "Play some Skynard." I turned and saw two guys in rugby shirts smiling sheepishly, embarrassment dragging down their stab at bad taste. Marshall, cradling the guitar face up and giving a puzzled "how does this thing work?" look, snapped out at the crowd for the first time and smiled. She was the least obtrusive presence in the club. From my spot, my friend and I could hear her singing about as well as we could hear conversations at tables behind us. Chan (it's pronounced "Shawn") kept coming back to the names "Jesse" and "Jackson" with increasing melancholy. The song seemed to be about someone having a baby. She didn't narrate the story explicitly; her words circled the events, wrapping an aura of ambivalence and sadness around them.

Her public, up front, allowed her their languid attention. In one corner, a big guy with bushy black hair, wearing gigantic black boots, leaned back in his chair and seemed to doze. Across the room, a girl in a brown print dress sat at the edge of the stage, hypnotized, her mouth open, staring upward. The music--narco-slow, rising and falling in impressionistic waves, guitar lines crunched, then crumbling in her hands--was not played to them, but was left to hover in the air.

The best moment for me came when she began singing, out of the blue, the line "James Carr isn't insane."

"Check it out, James Carr," I said. Lately, I'd been playing James Carr (a '50s Memphis soul singer) for this friend ad nauseam.

"Yeah, so? I still think he's insane."

But at that point I was ready to make some connection between Chan Marshall's singing style and James Carr's. Despite the indie trapping of her show, her voice--the way she flung it up and out, the lines she bent, the scary beauty it conjured, the nerves it bared, and struck--sounded like soul to me.

So when I talked to Marshall a couple of months later, I asked her about James Carr, whether she was a fan.

"Do I listen to James Carr? No."

"So then what was that whole 'James Carr isn't insane' thing about?"

"Oh that! Yeah, when we were recording in Memphis, we took a break during mixing. We were sitting around a tables and I was drinking a beer. Suddenly this huge shadow moved across the table and I look up and there's this big guy who's black, looking down at me. He had on a red stain shirt and a pinkie ring. He said, 'I heard y'all are doing some recording'. I said, "Yeah, we're doing the mixing.' His eyes got real narrow and he looked right at me and said, 'Well, how do you feel about doing the mixing?' I started laughing and we talked for a long time. We got along. I went back into the other room and someone said, 'God, isn't James Carr insane?'

"I said, 'No!'"

So much for my theory.

The first time I hear Cat Power on record was in my apartment. I had bought her early single "Headlights" b/w "Darling Said Sir" (on Making of Americans) and was listening to it on headphones at about 3 a.m. Guitars clanged in like a cross between Lou Reed and the sound of an assembly line. Marshall's voice slid into the middle, traumatized and conversational, repeating the line "Last thing I remember ..." a couple of times without bringing herself to finish it. From there the guitars stayed clamped, VU with the groove wrenched out, 100% tension. Chan's voice hovered in near-whispered asides, shot itself upwards, and unraveled a first-person story of a woman lying in the road after a car accident. The most frightening moment came when, without any break, she moved from the present back to the normal, conversational words someone was speaking into her ear just before the accident: "Get up around eight/Let's make some coffee and get real stoned/Hey, let's play a record or two." Those words would have been banal and overdramatic ("see what can happen when you least expect it") if they didn't sound like so much fun. They grounded the story and at the same time told the truth that we deny everyday: death exists on the same banal plane as the rest of our lives.

At the end of the song I sat up and pulled off the headphones, scared of the dark, as creeped-out as I'd been one night when I was 13 listening in bed to Blue Oyster Cult's "Joan Crawford Has Risen from the Dead."

"Is your father a musician?"

"Yeah, he plays the piano in Atlanta. He used to be a singer and one of his bands in the '70s recorded a single. But now he works on his own music-- I'm not sure what to call it-- blues, or roots music, I guess. I lived with my mother in North Carolina, mostly. Except I went back to live with my father after I dropped out of school, when I was 16. I really got my act together for a while and almost finished high school. But then I had to leave my dad's place, and I never finished.

"I didn't really play musician until I came to New York later, when I was 20. An old boyfriend had a guitar and I started making up songs. I think I played a show in Brooklyn where people saw me.

"Mainly, I was alone in New York, except for a close friend. It could be such a weird, silent place, really. Everyone with their eyes down. It almost reminded me of the South, the stillness of everything. My main memory of the South, growing up, is visual; a still landscape, very beautiful. We had this old run-down graveyard behind our house. I remember running over a mud bridge trough a tobacco patch in bare feet. God, now that's pretty Southern.

"I came to New York to get away from things that were happening there with me. I had a friend pass away, and other people were just so crazy. I still love going back. It's a part of me and I don't even realize it when I'm gone."

Ben and Lauren and I were sitting around drinking and listening to Cat Power's Myra Lee LP (Smells Like) on an extremely hot, humidnight in Brooklyn. In the haze, the record's half-collapsed flirtations with songs, its constant fade to black, and the sound of Chan's voice twisting itself free of the warmth it naturally projects, seemed the perfect soundtrack to our inertia, our lapsed conversations. Lines hung in the air: "I am not what you are." "Where are the dreams of the babies going?" "My heart fell at your feet." "I'm not made of successful things." And most relevant to that night: "I think you need ice water." The music, and the evening, were getting downright lugubrious.

Compared to the first single, Myra Lee and Dear Sir (an EP on Italian label Runt), suffer a bit from the attempt to fit Marshall's songs into an indie-band format. Guitarist Tim Foljahn and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelly provide solid accompaniment, but they can't help making her sound more conventional. It's not really their fault. Marshall, like the best soul singers, seems to write her songs via her unpredictable vocalizing. Check out the end of "Rockets," where Shelly and Foljahn briefly settle into a groove that Sonic Youth would have stretched and built on. Here, it's too rock-and-roll for the song Chan has written. They're forced to abandon building the groove so they can slow it back down.

Listening to Myra Lee that night, I couldn't help wondering what Chan Marshall's music would have been like if she hadn't begun within the confines of the indie-rock world. If she had lived 30 years ago, stayed in the South, and become the most eccentric soul or country singer of her day. It may be a corny idea, but I'd like to her sing more standard, four -square songs, letting her voice take off on interpretations of traditional American music. I'd like to hear this talented woman take control of all aspects of her music, and try to make a more ambitious record--in part because popular female singers in the past (Aretha, Etta James, even PJ Harvey) have often been at the mercy of Svengali-like male producers; and also because I think Marshall's is too soulful for this era's ironic, broken-down style of rock.

Still, both LPs retain a dark atmosphere. Dark enough to annoy my neighbor, a 35-year old ex-junkie who plays drums in a Johnny Thunders cover band. I could almost see him next door--skin-tight black jeans, punky black hair thinning, purple elevator shoes-- flicking his cigarette around in anger: "Fucking alternative-rock kids." He must have decided to give us some real rock (not that they'll appreciate it, I imagine him thinking): through the wall, guitars suddenly came thundering. Chan's slow-motion vocal twists were engulfed.

"Hey, that's the Undertones," Ben said, coming to life. And it was. Their best song, in fact, "Teenage Kicks," and it sounded good. I turned off Myra Lee and we got up to dance and stumble around to the music coming from behind the wall. By song's end Ben was doing a handstand, quarters and nickels dropping from his pockets to the floor.

"I guess I'm happy with the two albums. We recorded then in one day. Most of the time though, Steve and Tim ended up looking at each other like 'What do we do?' I wasn't sure what to tell them, since I had never really written songs with a band in mind It was hard to fit the whole thing together. Those guys just kind of..."

"Fucked thing up," I prompted jokingly.

"Listen to you! No, they were just kind of left hanging. Really, the only song I'd say I like right now is 'Ice Water.' I think that's a good one. 'Rockets' was just a hymn, like, stay in school, don't do drugs.

"Mostly I just make up lyrics while I'm playing guitar on the couch. I take things from my life, things that happen to my friends, or whatever, lines I'll remember. For the first single, a friend and I just got some beer and went into the studio. I had no idea what I was doing, and I'm not really happy with how it came out. It sounds too trapped.

"The album (What Would the Community Think, due on Matador in September) is more technical. I've learned how to work in a studio and control things. I'm doing the cover art for it, and I have these tech type things in mind.

"I just fell into this indie music scene or whatever it is. I don't like to think of it as a career. There's so many other things I'd like to do--go work on a boat in Alaska or teach kids their ABC's. I want to move back to New York, but everyone I know there is part of music. It keeps me on one track and away from other things I'd like to do. Is there a song, 'All my friends are rock critics?'"

Sometimes before work I find myself giddy for no reason at all and the only thing I want to do is play records. Just one more, I tell myself. But it never is, and I'm inevitably late for work. These days, there is a regular rotation of songs I play, changing from week to week. They're typically catchier songs, songs with a rush. This week's heavy rotation includes "If This World Were Mine" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell; "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" by Mission of Burma; "Ark Of The Covenant" by the Congos; and "Pretty" from the new Raincoats album.

One that I can't do without right now, though, is Cat Power's cover of Hank William's "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)." William sings the original like he's sobbing publicly, moaning to anyone who will listen. He's speaking to his old woman, who's got a new man. Chan, stopping and starting, breaking up lines, mumbling one verse and calling out the next, sings the song to herself. Hank is embarrassed but can't control himself; Chan is alone with her thoughts and resigned to this private lament. Where Hank floats on the surface of the song, singing to commiserate with the other lonely guys in the bar, Chan dives inside it and tests every simple painful line before letting it go. She commiserates with herself, and doesn't ask for your pity.

Anyway, the song sounds great between Marvin Gaye and Mission of Burma. Is there any higher praise?

The week before this story went to press, I got an advance tape of Cat Power's new album. I played it and immediately thought: better. Better and better. The songs get beyond simple chord repetitions; Shelly and Foljahn have learned how to play around her. And needless to say, Chan can still sing.

On the other two albums, everything sounded ad hoc, an extended demo; Marshall just sang, and the songs happened around her voice. Here Foljahn takes more control, doing what a guitarist does, fashioning rhythm, swelling it, filling in, getting the music from one place to another. While I still wish the songs were a little less vague, Chan's voice vibrating and quavering against the sparse background, more than makes up for their tentativeness. Is there such thing as anti-soul? She could be its pioneer. Rather than taking painful emotions and stylizing them like most classic soul singers, she cuts through any phony fluency and gets to the naked truth of a song.

The situations she creates seem to me akin to how painters describe the way they see the world. Not in facts or insights, but colors and atmosphere. She never pretends to understand anything, but instead sets down lines and obscure stories ("I've got a son in me/And he's related to you"; You look so impressive"; "If I was a photographer/Taking pictures of beautiful people/I might make a mistake and take a picture of you"; "Whatever happened to home?") that, somehow, she doesn't distance herself from. She refuses to comment, yet retains emotional contact. What it all means I'm not sure, but there's a dark beauty to this music which will only strike deeper as she learns to fill out her songs.

A very good record; a great artist in the bud. The next PJ Harvey? Nah.

-- Puncture, Box 14806, Portland, OR 97293. puncture@teleport.com.