Upon entering the door, we surprise Chan Marshall (Atlanta, 1972), the woman hidden behind the stage name Cat Power, writing her memoirs on a piece of writing paper that she found in her London hotel room. “It will be a somewhat dark story,” says the singer, with the top button of her jeans unbuttoned, a set of teeth grill worthy of the most fearsome of rappers and the tone of a southern mother. The book will focus on her childhood, “that moment that defines the human being you will become.” Hers took place in Georgia and South Carolina, where she grew up surrounded by poverty, alcohol and racism in the tobacco fields — “I was able to finish stripper, drug addict or prostitute,” she says—and with two absent parents: she did not meet her mother, whom she remembers “arriving dressed in black, like a rock star,” until she was five years old. There was also her music: her grandmother, who raised her until the untimely arrival of her mother, used to take her to church and play records by Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. That was, in fact, her religion.
At age 16, Marshall’s best friend drove to pick her up from school. He remembers that they smoked marijuana to the rhythm of Aerosmith, until an old song started playing on the radio: ‘Desolation Row’, the poem that Bob Dylan recorded in 1965, an 11-minute song starring an endless number of characters against a background of urban chaos. Among them, Abel and Cain, Casanova, Cinderella, sailors and the victims of a lynching; certain critics compared it to a Fellini scene set in North American territory. It seemed to the young singer that Dylan was talking about her life. Since then, she idolized him. “It was the song of my adolescence. I was very hung up on him. When Patti Smith told me that she was practically her boyfriend, I looked at her and felt jealous. I thought, ‘Bitch, Bob is mine.’ Shortly after, she discovered ‘To Ramona’. “I had never heard a song written by a man where I felt so seen, understood and protected. “There I already fell in love.”
She grew up surrounded by poverty, alcohol and racism in the tobacco fields of the southern United States. “I could have ended up being a stripper, a drug addict or a prostitute,” she says.
Marshall has just made one of his dreams come true: covering Bob Dylan’s legendary Royal Albert Hall Concert on the London stage of the same name (although the original recital took place in Manchester, despite the title by which he is known due to a bootleg mislabeled). On his new album, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert (Domino / Music As Usual), the singer reinterprets, song by song, the 15 songs that the musician played more than half a century ago, when his adoption of the electric guitar caused an anonymous spectator to shout “Judas” at him from the audience ( Marshall proposed to Courtney Love that she shout “Jesus” at his London concert, but in the end she didn’t show up.)
Marshall, who has recorded several cover albums throughout his career, notified his idol of the existence of this project. “I don’t think he gives a shit, he’s pretty busy.” Do you know him well? “That is a good question. Can you know someone like Bob Dylan well? But he knows that I love him.” What encouraged the project is the parallelism that he observes between the sixties and today. “So many bad things are happening… In the United States, the present is an exact copy of what happened during the civil rights struggle: trans people are attacked, the planet burns, we have no right to water and books are burned in the bonfire,” Marshall replies. “I thought it was a good time to return to these protest songs, to the increase in volume that they represented.”
The Cat Power concert could have had dire consequences: there are few groups as fundamentalist in the world of music as Dylan’s staunch fans. The singer opted for a very faithful reinterpretation of the originals – much more so than those of Dylan himself, who usually plays almost unrecognizable versions in his concerts – although her exegesis of the prophet never sounds like the vulgar copy of a devotee. “She is an artist, she doesn’t look back. / She can take the darkness out of the night / and paint the day black,” Chan sings in the opening verses of ‘She Belongs to Me’, as if he were drawing a self-portrait. Her versions redefine the originals by providing a feminine counterpoint with the dramatic vibration of her dark voice.
The best examples are his translations of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, ‘Just Like a Woman’ or an incredible ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, more on the verge of blues than ever, along with a ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ that, despite the disaster that could be coming, ends up being an exceptional finishing touch to the electric part of the concert, perhaps less successful than the acoustic one. “That Dylan tour changed the history of music; It’s scary to imagine everything that wouldn’t have happened later,” says Marshall. Not only for plugging folk into the electric current, but for opening it to all possible fusions, to the advent of “Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and the Sex Pistols.” As Chan recalls, just a decade later, in 1976, the latter released ‘Anarchy in the UK’. “Even the idea of music as a platform for social change comes from there. If today Taylor Swift asks her followers to vote in the elections, it is also thanks to that moment,” she says about the new global pop star. “I don’t know her, but I have respect for her. We have friends in common who speak well of her. She is a fighter. Nobody expected a songwriter of her caliber to end up being so popular, although she makes sense: she’s white, she’s pretty, she’s young and she comes from country”.
“I once turned down a million dollars to change record labels. “As a singer, I placed myself on a spectrum that did not interest me.”
He says it with a hint of bitterness: there was a time when Cat Power could have been colossal too. After his debut, What Would the Community Think (1996), they offered him “a million dollars to change record companies” and move to a higher level with a view to world domination, which would later only briefly touch with The Greatest (2006). “I rejected it. I don’t think you have to suffer for your art, but at that moment it seemed to me that I didn’t deserve it, that that money was not for people like me, that historically my family had not had the right to that. As a singer, I was placed on a spectrum that didn’t interest me. “It didn’t seem healthy for me as a human being,” he explains. Since then, he has repented from time to time. “When I had a child alone and my record company fired me and no one in the whole world wanted me to continue doing concerts, except for a French lady, yes, I regretted it.” Why did all that happen to him? “I can not say it on the record”. She was saved by Nick Cave and Lana del Rey, who asked her to open for them. “And American Express, which kept me alive for nine years. Someday I will thank them.”
In June he announced that he had given up alcohol, after some problems with addictions. “I did it as a mother, for my son. I realized that I had to stop celebrating things with tequila and red wine, that I was 50 years old and I had to take care of my body. I’m done with all that shit, and it’s been great,” she confesses. However, she saves a drink of “a mezcal made by women from Oaxaca” for when she gets her first Grammy. “I’ll toast with him, I have everything planned.” She once wanted to be the best. Now it is enough for him to sleep well at night.
Cat Power
‘Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert’
Domino / Music As Usual
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