The last time I saw Cat Power wasn’t
that long ago. It was January of 2005 at a warehouse art space in Hudson, NY—the same place I had been taking a workshop in teaching Shakespeare for the masters program I was enrolled in. In the same spot where I’d been forced to recite a soliloquy earlier that day, Chan Marshall sat by herself, hunched over an upright piano, a guitar resting at her feet, delivering not whole songs but tantalizing fragments. She would tease her audience by belting out the first few measures of “Blue Moon” and then get frustrated and stop, insisting the stage lights be turned off so she could recede further into the shadows of her long, matted hair before finally giving up and being practically carried out by organizer Dan Seward of Bunny Brains, who swept her up as mysteriously as he had delivered her to a crowd of isolated college students hungry for entertainment amidst a long and lonely winter break.
Maybe I’m a sucker, but while many have dismissed Marshall’s affected stage presence as mere contrivance, I couldn’t help but be drawn in. But I think that this was mostly because of the immaculate quality of her voice, which was more expressive and powerful than perhaps any live vocal performance I’d ever heard. The fact that it poured out of the frail, nakedly vulnerable figure on stage posed a contradiction that had surprising impact.
Three years and two albums later, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect last Wednesday as I awaited her performance at a different kind of warehouse—the inescapable Terminal 5. I’d heard good things about her last tour for 2006’s
The Greatest with The Memphis River Band—in short, that she had curbed some of the quirkiness and still gave an exciting, but more satisfying show, especially in collaboration with other musical talent. This maturation is evident in her latest release,
Jukebox, a mostly-cover album that features Marshall’s newly deeper, slightly grittier voice, new collaboration in the form of the band The Dirty Delta Blues, and a re-imagined “Metal Heart”, which transforms an introspective lullaby into a true power ballad. And so, beneath a giant disco ball, craning over the heads in front of me in, with someone’s elbow in my back and spilt beer on my shoes, I waited in anticipation amidst a vast and restless audience, several times bigger than the crowd of maybe 150 back in Hudson.
It was indeed a different Cat Power that finally emerged on the stage. Sporting a high pony tail, man’s vest, and fingerless, studded Michael Jackson gloves (which I'm told has to do with her recent friendship with Karl Lagerfeld--but still), Marshall bounced onto the stage, strutting her stuff and batting her thickly lined eyelashes to Sinatra’s “New York” and the Hank Williams update, “Ramblin’ (Wo)man.” Ironically, it was this Chan Marshall that seemed more contrived than her former self. She may have movie star looks but she’s no natural diva. Her strut was awkward at best, its choreography relying heavily on lassoing t-shirts into the crowd for uncomfortably long intervals while her band jammed patiently behind her.
The two opening songs, also the first tracks on
Jukebox, were disappointingly unvarying from the album, but what was even more disappointing were the muted vocals and distracting feedback, clearly the fault of the venue. People started shouting out “Turn up the vocals!”, and anyone who has been to a Cat Power show is familiar with Marshall’s sensitivity to the vocalized demands of her audience. But she kept her cool and played on, finally launching into “The Moon,” the first, and one of the few Cat Power originals of the night, receiving cheers from the audience at the first distinctive notes. The fact that, like Jukebox, the show consisted mostly of covers, and entirely of songs from the last two albums, was a distinguishing quality of the show, perhaps indicative of Marshall’s own desire to move past the tortured Cat Power of her youth.
In fact, when she announced, “This is a song from when I was a young girl,” the crowd knew “Metal Heart” was coming, whose former and recent versions very recognizably epitomize her artistic and personal maturation. The
Jukebox version, with its crescendoing assertiveness, has so much potential for a cathartic live performance, but the delivery was also surprisingly sterile. And her voice--once so potent and enveloping in that small room in Hudson--now struggled to compete with the bad sound system, the enormous space, and what seemed to simply be a lack of vigor.
But after all, the song
is a decade old. Perhaps it’s unrealistic of us to expect something resembling the Chan Marshall of her—and in the case of many of her fans—our formative years. But it’s not just that we have gotten older. I think we were just looking for a stronger, more genuine expression of adulthood last Wednesday night.
[Photos by Abbey Braden]
Imagine every stereotype of the “indie rock star” that you can. Imagine a tall, malnourished, flannel-wearing, Brooklynite that has spent more time gelling his hair than writing his songs. Now imagine a fat, florescent-sweatshirt wearing man with a voice so honest it can make you cry, bashing the Brooklynites over the head with mini-MIDI guitar. That is what it was like to see the Spanish Prisoners, a band epitomizing the malaise and mediocrity that swathes over New York’s rock scene, open for the marvelous Daniel Johnston.
His first set was unrelenting in its honesty, bringing songs of unrequited love and the beauty of the mundane. However, the slightly marred by a second set where the Spanish Prisoners accompanied Johnston, sucking any sincerity right off the stage.
[Words by James Herron]
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