Cat Power: A Good Woman

When I’m depressed and for reasons I still don’t quite understand I absolutely must listen to something even more depressing, only the music of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power seems to do the trick these days. She replaced Nick Drake in this regard many months ago and has been in heavy rotation around my house ever since. So when one of my graduate students (thanks Alexis!) informed me that Marshall was the subject of a new biography (*Cat Power: A Good Woman*, by Elizabeth Goodman, published by Random House), I moved it past all the other books to the top of my reading list (and yes, I am geeky enough to maintain an actual reading list).

Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.

There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.

Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.

So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.

Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”

These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.

The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.

Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”

Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.

I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.