Cat Power Read Free Page B

New York City, becoming the first person in her family to leave the South for good.
    When Chan first started playing her unusual breed of dour blues rock, she was marginalized by many as a cute girl with a dark past and an indie record deal. But Chan propelled Cat Power to international fame and her artistic potency went well past the sell-by date of most of her contemporaries. When success didn't exorcize the demons she'd been running from since childhood, Chan experienced a psychological breakdown and public tour cancellation that could have signaled the end of Cat Power. Instead, her return marked the most triumphant moment in her career and heralded the most spectacular critical and commercial success Cat Power has ever had.
    “God shined on her,”
Spin
editor Charles Aaron says of the
Greatest
shows with the Memphis Rhythm Band, a collection of extremely venerable bluesmen with decades of experience. “It made her realize she's not existing in this whole indie-rock world where whether you can or cannot sing is viewed as an interpretive thing. It's like, ‘Okay, either perform to the very best of my ability, or I will be humiliated onstage.’ They'll be nice. They're perfect gentlemen, but in their hearts of hearts they'll be like, ‘Who is this child? Who is this white girl that we have to do this with? Whatever. Pay me.’ But she stepped it up.”
    Before Chan was hospitalized in the winter of 2006, her shows were fearful. In the fall of 2006, after the
Greatest
tour ended and Chan stopped playing with the Memphis Rhythm Band she performed withsterile professionalism. But for a short, precious time between the spring of 2006 and the fall of that same year, Chan reached her potential. She got there. Onstage she was wounded and healed and sane and insane and young and old and feminine and masculine all at once, and it was magic. Then, like her best songs, the moment passed, disintegrated into the ether, and we were left, as was she, to wait for its return.

Even though Atlanta is now an urban center, congested with labyrinthine freeways and tract housing, much of the city still embodies the feeling of traditional Southern life. Downtown, locals leisurely stroll the streets and chat
naturally with each other at the grocery store or gas station, and at dusk it's not uncommon to see Atlantans gathering for a predinner cocktail out on the porch or stoop or backyard. Even where signs of a more sterile suburban life exist, the old ways persist. In the middle of a Thursday in July, at the Starbucks in Peachtree Center, you can find an Emory prelaw student passionately arguing politics for hours with a dread-locked African American Vietnam veteran he met that day. Two hours and several cups of coffee later, they exchange e-mails, then part ways, the student off to his campus apartment, the veteran off to the shelter where he sleeps. This Atlanta—the one defined by a happy contradiction between traditional values and progressive liberal thought—is Chan's Atlanta.
    The singer hasn't lived in the South full-time since she was twenty, but no matter what's going on in her life—whether she's caught up in one of Cat Power's epic European tours or enjoying a minibreak at Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld's country home—Chan always finds time to come home for hush puppies and barbecue. And even though she'll help bake the sweet-potato pie at Christmas in North Carolina or gallivant around her old Atlanta stomping grounds with friends from high school, compared to the rest of her family, Chan is practically a Yankee. She's the first person in her family to move north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Chan's mother and father still live down South (her mom in Greensboro, North Carolina, her dad in Atlanta), as does every other living blood relative from her sister, Miranda; stepfather, Leamon; half brother, Lenny; niece, Audrey; nephew, Ian; brother-in-law, Mike; grandmother, Lillian; grandfather, Richard; and half sister, Ivy, to