Cat Power Read Free Page A

Power show I've ever seen.
    Delayed gratification has always been Chan's signature stage move. During her earliest shows she would often stand feet away from the mike so that the audience could hear exactly enough to know what they were missing in not being able to hear more. This sort of vocal titillation was defiant, as if she resented being onstage and wanted to taunt her listeners. When Chan reappeared at Town Hall that night, beckoned by the increasingly insistent “Where is my love?” refrain sung by her backup vocalist, that sense of performance as being punitive was gone. In its place was unadulterated joy.
    Onstage at Town Hall that night, the contrasting sides of Chan Marshall, which had been struggling vigorously against each other for most of her then thirty-four years, united for a brief two hours of fragile perfection. She was both shy and confident, glamorous in her gown and tomboyish in her ponytail and bare feet, nervous but happy when she played the piano alone, and forceful like a blues diva when she led her band through songs off her recently released album,
The Greatest
. Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who was in attendance, wrote on his blog that the show was one of the best he'd ever seen. “This combination of Memphis rhythm section and her hesitant … phrasing was … a very strange idea,” Byrne wrote. “The result is somewhere in the middle of two worlds. Some new thing came into being that had elements of both worlds but that was neither.”
    Those who are familiar with Chan know two main things about her:She has the voice of a damaged angel, and she's probably crazy. Beginning very early in her career but reaching an apex during 1998 and 1999 when Chan toured in support of her fourth album,
Moon Pix
, Cat Power played a series of shows during which Chan would regularly self-destruct onstage. These displays were so gory—a combination of genuinely alarming psychosis and weirdly compelling performance art—that the singer soon became as famous for her eccentricity and mental instability as she was for her music. In the following years Cat Power released three more albums (2000's
The Covers Record
, 2003's
You Are Free
, and 2006's
The Greatest
), each of which earned her increasing amounts of mainstream media coverage. She used her access to the press to speak with disturbing candor about the history of mental illness in her family, the scary household she grew up in, and the paralyzing sense of worthlessness she felt every time she stepped onstage, walked outside, or took a breath.
    When Chan opened her mouth to sing, fans and critics heard generations of poor Southerners crippled by a sense of inescapable illegitimacy. We longed to hear that voice really open up, to surpass the limitations imposed on it by Chan's evident self-loathing and insecurity. Every implosive Cat Power performance carried a sense of rooting for the underdog. We the fans knew what she had, what she was, what she was worth, and we longed to make her know, to make her see. If she saw and heard what we saw and heard perhaps she could get onstage and sing with strength, confidence, and freedom the way she did when she was just a little girl, singing hymns in church.
    Chan has been struggling since birth. She was raised in a wild and unstable home, exposed to drugs and alcohol as a kid, endured her parents' divorce, attended countless different schools before dropping out of high school at seventeen to work in a pizza parlor, and by the age of twenty she was pregnant. If Chan Marshall had amounted to nothing,it would have surprised no one, especially not herself. And yet just as consistently as she has been underestimated, she has also defied expectations. Chan learned from her parents' mistakes and stayed clean while many of her friends became casualties of the nineties heroin scene. When she got pregnant at a young age by the wrong guy, she had an abortion, collected the money she'd wisely saved, and moved to