Cat Power A Good Woman

by GOODMAN, ELIZABETH

• ISBN13: 9780307396365
• ISBN10: 0307396363
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-07
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

With an unsettled childhood and unfinished education behind her, Cat Power headed to New York to pursue music. Her rapidly rising popularity was matched only by her appetite for drugs and alcohol. Now sober, Power--born Chan Marshall--is finding her place on the world stage. bw photo insert.

Author Biography

ELIZABETH GOODMAN is the editor at large at Blender magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, Spin, and Nylon.

Excerpts

1.

Redemption

June 9, Town Hall in New York City. Cat Power’s sold-out engagement at the prestigious, eighty-six-year-old venue where Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis once performed featured the Memphis Rhythm Band, a full Southern soul orchestra. They were all onstage. Chan Marshall was not, and people were starting to worry. This show was originally scheduled for February, but had been canceled for what were then referred to as “health reasons.” By now everybody in the venue knew what that really meant. Chan had suffered one of the most highly publicized mental and physical flameouts in the modern rock era, with the New York Times reporting on the details of her institutionalization and one million fans all over the world wondering if her return to the stage would bring the same vulnerable beguiling presence they’d come to cherish and rely on. Chan Marshall had been long gone all winter, and almost for good. Would she be back with the spring? And if so, how damaged would she be?

After nearly an hour, the singer finally took the stage barefoot, wearing a strapless beaded Chanel couture dress carrying a hot-pink commuter mug filled with what she kept triumphantly insisting was chamomile tea, not single malt scotch, or wine, or beer, the preferred onstage beverages for most of her career. So invested in Chan’s well- being were many of the fans in the audience that this revelation itself drew applause. The gown’s pale, creamy tone showed off her deep tan and lithe frame, achieved during winter months spent trading booze and dark hotel rooms for the Miami sunshine, novels read by the pool, and Pilates. She looked happy, which, for anyone who knew her personally or had followed the evolution of her career, was stunning to witness: the mental-hygiene equivalent of onstage pyro.

She was tentative as she led the band, who were clearly pulling for her as well, through the first few songs, relying on weirdly equine galloping dance steps to neutralize the tension.

During the minimalist ballad “Where Is My Love” she left the stage for a while, prompting the background singer to add a wry tone to the lyric. It seemed like Chan was gone too long and a sense of here-she- goes-again nervous energy permeated the crowd. Her eventual return drew another wave of relieved whoops and applause. She flashed a huge grin, cantered over to her piano, and proceeded to sing with such smoky, lived-in authority that it was as if she finally knew her lines after fifteen years of tense rehearsal. It was the best Cat 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

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Excerpted from Cat Power: A Good Woman by Elizabeth Goodman
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