Cat Power (15 page)

For Chan, the notion of redemption through strife was deeply appealing. Her childhood had left her believing she was illegitimate, not literally but figuratively. She felt unworthy of love, unworthy of having money, unworthy of success or recognition. Hard work became the aspiring singer's welcome penance. “Chan was the hardest-working kid on the Lower East Side,” Foljahn remembers. “Everybody else was pretty slack, but she was working three or four jobs at all times. Nobody ever had any money, but she did because she was working four jobs. She was always at work, and then going to shows when she wasn't at work.” Chan remembers the life she first led in New York as difficult but rewarding. “It was hard to find a job,” Chan remembered. “The economy was different. It was dirtier. A lot more drugs. A lot more homeless people. There was a struggle, but in that struggle you were forced to be amongst reality and see reality.” The fight to survive instilled a sense of resiliency and competence in Chan, which she needed if she was ever going to break out and admit to herself and the world that she wanted to play music for a living. “The voices that come out during a period of struggle, they're remarkable. There's a fearlessness,” Chan explained. “When I was younger, there was struggle. And that's when I started writing songs, 'cause I didn't have a job and I didn't know anybody.”

Chan may not have known very many people when she first arrived in New York, but she was surrounded by other survivalists who were her philosophical soulmates even if she wasn't aware of them. In a pre-Internet world, entire relationships were built on a shared love of Pavement's
Trigger Cut
EP, or the fact that you'd seen each other more than once at the same ABC No Rio show, or that you tended to hit the
Odessa diner on Avenue A around the same time each afternoon for disco fries and coffee. The Lower East Side was a village in the same way that the West Village was in the 1960s. When gentrification hit in the early 2000s and the neighborhood became upscale so went the last place on Manhattan with any truly bohemian feel.

If you take the F train down to Second Avenue on a Saturday night, you can do a walking tour of places Chan frequented when she moved to the city. Max Fish, the Lower East Side's most storied dive bar, which had Cat Power's
What Would the Community Think
on the juke-box from its release in 1996 through much of the rest of the nineties, is still there. You can count on it for a cheap cocktail and decent music, but from Thursday through Saturday nights it's overrun by slick bridge-and-tunnel kids looking to channel a night in the life of a grimy urban hipster. The Pink Pony Café is still serving strong coffee, hangover-abating omelets, and hair-of-the-dog cocktails during the day, but the theater spaces and boarded-up storefronts that used to surround it on Ludlow Street have been replaced with boutiques, sleek, sterile clubs, and gourmet delis pimping New Zealand-lamb-and-mint-jelly sandwiches and Vitamin Water. Other downtown institutions like Katz's, Veselka (a surviving source of good borscht and pierogi), Lucy's, Holiday Bar, and Niagra still open their doors, but the community of misfits Chan knew has dissipated.

“If I had come here now, maybe I would have gotten a job at a trendy place. I'd have been a bartender. Life might have been easier,” the singer has said. “Now the way New York is, you don't see those characters, you don't find that inspiration to survive in the struggle because you don't see other people surviving struggle. You see people already secure. You see younger people who have the fortune of coming from a family who can afford to pay NYU's tuition. When I come back here and see
my old friends, we still go to the same places, they still have that history of reality that's getting paved over and repainted. That's life. Things change. I'll always love New York for what it stands for. I knew there were smart people who lived here. People who were artists. People who came from all over the world. It helped me.”

Through a friend of a friend, Chan was able to sublet a room in a communal-style apartment house on Third Street owned by Seth Tobocman, a political activist known for publishing leftist radical comic World War III Illustrated
.
Chan was paying about fifty dollars a month when she first moved in; almost twenty years later, she still rents the same room for a slightly increased rate. Chan's roommates were mostly political activists like Seth, and as a result the hallways of their shared living space were blanketed in pamphlets and flyers. “It was really just a room,” Foljahn recalls. “The guy who owned the apartment was an old Red. He was an old rebel, old-school Lower East Side, and very cool. There was always propaganda-type stuff up on the walls.” Foljahn remembers Chan's room as tiny but packed. “She had a little window,” Foljahn remembers. “The room was stacked with books and records and suitcases and weird art. It was all kind of old-lady stuff.”

After Chan got settled, she spent much of September and October walking around the city in her beat-up brown oxfords, wearing layers of men's flannel shirts to protect her against the biting fall air. “I had this romantic idea that I'd come to New York and be a baker,” Chan has remembered. “I wasn't good at baking, but I kept passing a bakery on Mott Street and wishing I could work there—the flour, the silence, the smell. You get to be alone.” Baking bread was one of the only jobs Chan didn't work in her first years in New York. She waited tables at a restaurant on First Avenue and First Street called the Levy, and she unloaded trucks in the Meatpacking District for twenty-five dollars a day. “The way that I had been living was potatoes and rice,” Chan has said. “Or stealing cans of tuna from Key Foods.” She also took a job organizing the apartment of a woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Days spent arranging things according to someone else's hyper-particular system appealed to Chan. “I used to be a maid for this woman,” the singer remembered. “She had all these little pills and things in the right spaces. I love organizing.”

At first Chan was focused purely on not starving. She lined up as
much work as possible, paid her bills on time, spent her money sparingly, and kept her head down. After she had been in New York for a few months, she started to relax somewhat. On a rare day off, she would hit the Salvation Army and pick up a new work shirt or pair of used jeans. She would sit alone with an after-work beer at SoHo burger outpost Fanelli's on Prince Street. Slowly but surely it began to sink in that she was actually making it in New York City. “I was the first person in my family to ever leave the South,” Chan has explained. “I thought, ‘I went to New York, I could go to Europe!’ None of my family had ever been.”

Chan has a very generous, warm, and giving side. She's passed out keys to her New York and Atlanta homes to most of her friends in case they are in town and need a place to stay, and she loves giving people gifts, from trinkets she'd bring home from Australia or Japan for Judy Ibbotson's son to birthday and Christmas presents for all her friends. But at the same time, Chan is very protective of what's hers, an instinct honed through growing up poor. “She's tough, she's really tough,” Foljahn says. “That's the thing that people don't realize. She's been through some really hard shit in her life, and she will survive. Whatever happened when she was coming up was gnarly shit, and she's got a real vicious—like, ‘That's my bowl’—instinct, I've seen that. It can snap. She can get angry with someone if they're taking her shit, and then she'll turn around and give it to somebody else who doesn't have any.”

As Chan became more comfortable in New York City, her thoughts returned to making music. She and Glen started attending rock shows and, just as she had done back in Atlanta, Chan let the onstage bravery of other performers serve as inspiration to her. Of the shows that Chan saw in her first few years in New York, experimental punk and free-jazz at the gloriously dilapidated club ABC No Rio on Rivington Street made the most significant impression. “The lights were superbright, and there
was a naked girl and some guy beating metal,” Chan has said of her first experience there. “It was so inspiring.”

“She developed in that community in Cabbagetown,” Charles Aaron says, “but she needed to be somewhere else. She needed to be in a musical community. It could have been Athens—someplace where there are a lot of great musicians and a lot of clubs, a lot of working people, a lot of people who are better than you.” Inspiration and challenge are exactly what Chan found in New York City. Once again Chan was drawn to artists who displayed no attachment to conventional attitudes about performance. When she arrived in New York, Chan was battling the idea that making and playing music was off-limits, that it required skill and formal training she didn't have. The shows she saw with Glen during her first two years in New York helped chip away at that ideology.

“I come from rock ‘n’ roll—my dad's a musician, it's this whole thing,” Chan has explained. “Seeing Anthony Braxton playing noise jazz excited me because there was no social projection. People would just sit there and sometimes they wouldn't even pay attention. I was like, ‘Man, these people don't care what they're doing.’ That was what originally stimulated me to play—just making stuff up and not knowing what you're doing and there's so much energy and you make a million mistakes, but it felt really exciting and strange and wrong.”

Once her taste for seeing live music was renewed, Chan couldn't get enough. She saw shows at the old Knitting Factory on Houston and at venues Cat Power would later play like the Cooler on West Fourteenth Street and CBGB. “You ended up at CB's and CB's Gallery a lot,” Tim Foljahn says. “Brownie's, the Mercury Lounge a little bit, there was the Pyramid, and the Continental Divide was happening.” Foljahn has particularly good memories of the Meatpacking District's two-hundred-capacity venue the Cooler, which he describes as a “mainstay” throughout
much of the 1990s. “It was an old meat locker, and when it started out it was really great,” the guitarist remembers. “It was about half jazz bands, and you'd go in the back and there'd be a cooler full of beer and there'd be nuts—you had like a back room where you could be, and it was just so deluxe. Then, of course, the nuts went away and then the beer went away and everything just got coked up and weird, but it was always a good club.”

Foljahn also remembers a certain lawless attitude about when and where performances took place on the Lower East Side. If you found a space that had enough power outlets to support a few amplifiers and enough room to hold a cramped trio and a few fans, you had yourself a venue. “People were doing shows in weird spots,” Foljahn remembers. “I saw shows in Two Boots
Alphabet City's premiere pizza joint
.” Foljahn remembers playing his first show as Two Dollar Guitar with Blonde Redhead at the Levy on First Avenue and First Street, where Chan worked when she first arrived in New York. “You could still get away with that ‘Oh, we're going to start having bands now’ attitude. People don't really do that anymore.”

While Chan was absorbing the sounds of the city, she and Glen began playing shows as Cat Power. The first one took place at a warehouse in Brooklyn, which Gerard Cosloy, who would later sign Cat Power to Matador Records, attended. These early gigs were really bizarre, and willfully so. Chan wanted her performances to channel that same defiant antiperformance ethos that she so admired in the avant-garde artists she'd been following. At Cat Power's second show, a random saxophonist and a naked, screaming Japanese girl were also in the lineup. “It was inspiring because these people weren't judging you—maybe they weren't even listening,” Chan remembered. “I knew I was naïve and I knew I didn't want people looking at me. Those experiences
seeing
those shows
, they helped me feel confident that maybe I didn't know what I was doing, but that didn't mean it was wrong.”