Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  This interview was conducted while Chan toured with the group we put together, the Memphis Rhythm Band. She was also picking up work as an actress and being courted by the William Morris Agency, whom she asked not to handle her music work because, she said, “I don’t want to be a super-duper star, and that’s what they would want to market me as.” She’d found a place in the world where she was comfortable, and she was happy.

  I lost touch with Chan until she returned to Memphis in 2016 to front Hi Rhythm at a performance marking their induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. While recording The Greatest in 2005, she’d taken a shine to my daughters, and the first thing she said when she saw me was, “I’m a mom now!” My heart swelled for her. More than a happy ending, it’s a happy beginning.

  Kool Kween

  Stop Smiling, Issue 28, October 2006

  ROBERT GORDON: I know you’ve recently given up drinking, and I thought it’d be interesting to talk about cigarettes.

  CHAN MARSHALL: Cigarettes?

  RG: Do you love cigarettes?

  CM: [Laughs] I need to make a bumper sticker: “I heart cigarettes.” There’s something antifascist about smoking. I’ve just been doing it for so long. I started when I was in second grade. My mom would come home from work, before we’d go out with her, and she’d light a cigarette—Kool Kings. We’d sit on her lap and play around for a minute, then she’d go take a shower. She’d always leave her Kool King lit in the ashtray, so that’s how I started smoking. I remember first grade and kindergarten, I would beg her, “Please, please don’t smoke. You’re going to die.” Then, when I was in second grade—I’ll never forget it—I thought, Fuck, I’m hungry. All we had was bread, which was kind of old, and the toaster had caught on fire so many times that I was scared of it. I used to put mustard on my bread and we didn’t have any mustard. That cigarette was sitting there, so I started smoking it. Do I hate smoking? Yeah, because I’m damaging my lungs and I want to be normal. But for me, normal is smoking.

  RG: What do you miss about drinking?

  CM: Oh, my Lord. I miss that feeling of warmth. Like when you drink scotch, you down it in a big gulp and there’s just something about that association—swallowing the scotch, tasting it in your mouth, that smoky flavor. It almost psychosomatically chills you out. I miss that. I miss being chilled out.

  You can tell by all the talking I’m doing that I miss being laid-back. But I don’t miss being depressed or so chilled out that I don’t want to talk to friends. I don’t miss being so depressed that I don’t want to see people.

  RG: What’s been the hardest part about quitting drinking?

  CM: The hardest part is remembering things that I’ve done on tour, on stage, with friends, in hotel rooms, different situations that were just really stupid. That’s the hardest part—remembering. Like taking my shirt off at the Chateau Marmont, or hanging out all night with these homeless Muslim guys in Spain. Realizing that I put myself at risk. For instance, I’m not allowed back at that hotel.

  RG: What happened there?

  CM: All these photographs in the New York Times were really disturbing me. The [2004] election was coming up. There were all these mosques and synagogues that were being bombed—just really depressing images, and I kept cutting them out and sticking them all over. I had heavy traffic coming in and out of my hotel room. At the pool, I was just clearly shit-faced, getting people in the pool to sing along and running around topless. I pulled Kirsten Dunst’s top down at one point. You know, just drunk—someone who doesn’t realize their actions until they get reminded.

  If you drink every day, I highly recommend trying not doing it for a while. Being on the road, touring, the many bars … you meet so many different strangers. I drank to create a bubble so I wouldn’t really have to be there all the time. And alcoholism runs in my family. I thought, Oh, it’ll never affect me. I’ve got a control on it. But there’s a good aspect: It helped me understand alcoholics I’ve known my whole life. It helped me understand their perspective and the crazy things they do that were often hurtful—traumatizing at times. It helped me understand that I can’t take that personally, even though it’s really hard to accept that sometimes.

  RG: You’re referring to that story about your dad entertaining at a piano bar?

  CM: Yeah. It was my twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth birthday. My boyfriend at the time—the love of my life, Daniel—him and his sister, Margaret, had blindfolded me in Atlanta. They said, “We’re going to take you somewhere.” I thought they were taking me to a male strip club, which I’ve never been to. This is actually a funny story. Just because it happened to me makes me hurt, but it can be turned around and told like Larry David. So we’re driving further and further, and I thought, Fuck. Are they taking me to where my dad plays piano? Sure enough, we pull up and when they start to open the door to the place, I heard him playing and singing. It was kind of dark, but there was a light on me. I’m sure if my father was asked, he would deny that he said what he said. I went in front of the piano. First, he said what he says to everybody: “Hey, sweetie.” My boyfriend and his sister went to the bar and I was there by myself. He finishes whatever song, and he’s a funny guy, so he would do little intros to songs. When he was about to play the song, he said, “This next song is about my first wife and those couple of kids. Thank God they’re gone.” Something like that. That’s a fucked-up story. It’s really hurtful. It’s about my mom, but then he attached “a couple of kids” to it. That would be me and my sister. I immediately felt my eyes crying.

  Today, as a woman—I was younger then—I think now I would have been like, “Fuck you.” I would have left, and that would have been that—I would’ve been stronger. But my eyes were watering. Daniel comes up behind me—he didn’t hear what he said—but his sister was hysterical. She walks right up, interrupts him, says, “Hi, I’m Margaret. You remember me? Chan’s boyfriend’s sister.” He says, “Oh yeah. Hi, sweetie. How are you?” And she’s like, “Chan’s here.” “She is?” She goes, “Yeah. It’s her birthday.” “It is?” So then he got on the mic: “This is my daughter, Chan. She’s a recording artist in New York City.” He wanted everybody to see our interaction, like we’re tight, you know? He gave me this hug and I felt so physically repulsed by him that I felt like I was going to vomit. That’s when I started crying and just left.

  But it could be a comedy. As you get older, you start to understand people’s roles. Someone’s your father, or you were born at a certain hospital, or you have four fingers instead of five. There are things that you can’t control in life. I think it used to really affect me, but now I realize that it’s not his fault that he got my mom pregnant. I’ve become more understanding that he hasn’t really been a good father. That’s not the choice I would make in a husband or as a mother.

  RG: Didn’t he buy the piano that you learned on?

  CM: I lived with him off and on for a few months at a time. We got shuffled around a lot—to my grandmother, different schools, back again. When he got a piano, I was about fifteen or sixteen. I moved back in with him. I was never allowed to touch it. I’m a gentle person. I’ve always been a gentle person. I’ve never been a brat or a bitch, really wild or anything. I would sit down, and I didn’t know how to play piano. He confused the sound of me not knowing how to play with me not making music. He would say, “Chan, it’s not a toy. Do not play on the piano.” It was so insulting, because he knew how much I loved to sing.

  RG: How did you learn to play?

  CM: I went to a New York recording studio when I was around twenty-six. I played guitar. I sat down at the piano, and I’d been listening to this song by Nina Simone called “Wild Is the Wind.” David Bowie did it too. And there’s a piano in the studio. While they were setting up mics I started to play on it. They said, “Okay, we’re ready to have you play guitar.” I said, “Could you press record? I want to record on the piano.” That take is on The Covers Record. “Wild Is the Wind” was the first time I ever played piano.r />
  RG: You reached in and pulled something out of the song that other people didn’t hear.

  CM: That’s how I always do covers. With “Satisfaction,” I had been driving around Atlanta with my cassette tapes in my truck. I had the Stones’ Hot Rocks, and “Satisfaction” was on there. I’d go in my house and I didn’t have a tape deck, so I picked up my guitar and fooled around with the notes. That’s how I made up the “Satisfaction” version. It was because I just wanted to hear it, you know? It’s not like I was trying to make it different or anything like that.

  RG: When did you start playing guitar?

  CM: You know Dexter Romweber? He used to have the band the Flat Duo Jets. When I was around sixteen, I went to see the Cramps play. I’d been listening to stuff since I was twelve. My stepdad had all these old records: Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday. The Flat Duo Jets opened and I couldn’t believe it—here was this guy playing music similar to the old records my parents had, but I could never talk about them at the different schools I went to because everybody just knew about Madonna or Duran Duran. So I saw that and I was like, Fuck. There are people who actually like old styles of music. Dexter had this old Silvertone guitar, and I immediately fell in love with it. A couple years later, after my dad kicked me out and I got a job at this pizza place, my friends knew that I loved Dexter, so they brought him in. I was so excited. When another friend was selling his Silvertone, which was identical to Dexter’s, I bought it for seventy-five dollars. I had no intention of ever playing it. I had it in the corner near my bed like a piece of art or a vase. It was a cool object, and I didn’t have much furniture, just this guitar and a futon mattress. Over the next year, on days off, I’d wake up late and fiddle with it. I used to want to be a writer because I love words, and I loved singing, so I’d make up little ditties. Then I started meeting more and more musicians—all dudes, by the way. Atlanta has a big rock community. All these dudes that I was meeting were guitar players. When they found out I had a Silvertone, they thought it was cool and wanted to teach me how to play. One was kind of Iggy-ish, one would be psychedelic, one would be more folksy. So I said, “I don’t want to learn from you.” I wanted to teach myself. I was afraid I’d have their technique, and I wanted to create my own technique. I was stubborn.

  RG: And smart.

  CM: Well, thank you. But more stubborn than smart. So we’d get drunk and start jamming. That’s how Cat Power became a band. Then it became, “Let’s play a show.”

  RG: Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth was an early ally of yours. How did he find you?

  CM: Well, I’d moved to New York and I got this call from Gerard Cosloy, who runs Matador Records, which has been my label these past ten years. I didn’t record for him then, but he was friends with my friend. He said, “Do you want to open up for Liz Phair, solo?” I didn’t know who she was. I saw her on the cover of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop thing, so I thought, She’s gotta be good. Gerard liked her. He said, “You’ll get two hundred dollars, and you won’t even get billing.” I’d been working three jobs a day in New York. I was like, “Two hundred dollars and I won’t get billed? I’ve got nothing to lose.” So I showed up, played six songs, and got a standing ovation from the Town Hall. I walked offstage and the stage manager said, “Cat! You wanna go back on? They can’t get enough of you.” I said, “That’s all my time here. That’s all they said I could play.” They were just freaking out. I had one friend there, and I went and opened the side curtain to get her. All these people—maybe eight journalists—were saying, “Can we get an interview?” Then one of them said, “My professor loves your CD.” I said, “I’m not Liz Phair.” And they all turned around and walked away. Isn’t that hilarious?

  RG: That’s our press: never interested in the story, only the star.

  CM: Steve Shelley heard my sound check and invited me to lunch. He said, “You sounded cool. Where are you from? Do you have any records out?” When we were having lunch, I heard someone say something about Kim and Thurston and I realized, Fuck. That’s Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. I just got up and left the table. I was really, really shy. I was twenty-one. After I played, Steve came up again and said, “I’d love to put out a record with you.” I had really bad trust issues. I didn’t trust people. But I wasn’t a band. I was just a waitress, an artist’s assistant, and a maid. I wasn’t interested in putting a record out. Six months later, getting to know Steve Shelley a little bit, we ended up playing together, and he said it again. So I gave some songs to this Italian label and did a record for Steve. Gerard said, “You know, Chan, we’d love to do a record with you.” I was so flattered because I had all these friends with amazing bands in Atlanta that hadn’t seen the light of day.

  RG: Did you handle the business yourself?

  CM: When I went in the Matador office I said, “I don’t want an advance.” I didn’t know how it worked. I thought I was in control by saying, “I don’t want any advance.” I had no idea what I was signing. But it’s been a good relationship and I can’t complain. That’s how it got started. Steve took me to Memphis, where I met you. I was younger and I didn’t understand mixing records. I thought it was evil. I thought it was recorded and that was it. I didn’t know you had to mix. When they started mixing, I was with Stuart Sikes, who engineered it and who produced The Greatest with me. I said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I don’t know what they’re doing.” I was pissed off that they had to mix it.

  RG: For The Greatest, it seemed like Stuart was running the board and you were running the floor. There was a partnership there.

  CM: Oh, definitely a partnership. Of course I have ideas. We don’t fight, but sometimes I have to say, “Back the fuck up.” But I chose Stuart for a reason. We became friends in Memphis. We kept in touch. We cared about each other, and that’s why we worked so well together. There was no power struggle. He has a wealth of knowledge about microphones and amps and vintage equipment.

  RG: It was a lot of fun for me to put the Memphis Rhythm Band together for you, getting that mix of Memphis soul and indie rock. I’m amazed you’ve been able to take the whole group on the road.

  CM: They have given me an enormous gift—living the dream. When I was six years old playing “The Gambler” with my grandmother on a tape recorder, or singing some of those songs from The Color Purple when I was in junior high in my gym locker with the basketball girls, they’d say, “Oh, you can sing, girl. Where did you learn to sing like that?” I just love singing.

  RG: How have your solo shows changed or been informed by your experiences with this large band?

  CM: I just feel much more confident. I feel like I have control over my voice, which I never felt I had before. With these guys, I’m figuring out how to relax and not be so hard on myself.

  RG: You’ve become a recording artist almost by chance. Have you got any sense what you would be doing if not this?

  CM: I don’t know if I’d be alive. If I had stayed in Atlanta, I’m sure I would have gotten on heroin. I’m sure I would’ve gotten pregnant. I’m sure I would be HIV-positive, like a few of my friends who have been and are. Who the hell knows? Maybe I would have been happy still being a waitress or working at a bank. Maybe I’d have three wonderful kids. You never know. About six years ago, my grandmother said—to her it was a great compliment, and it is to me because I know what she’s talking about—she said, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy that you didn’t turn out to be a prostitute or a drug addict.” Because my family isn’t educated, doesn’t have money. There have never been any fathers. What she meant by that is: “I’m so happy that you got out and are able to make independent choices without being a wife.” I know what she meant. I feel the same way.

  RG: It seems like there’s also a part of you—I’m thinking of the song from The Greatest, “Where Is My Love,” that—

  CM: Longs for stability and a regular life?

  On the set for the “Lived in Bars” music video. Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, left, and Chan “C
at Power” Marshall. Also, Martha Synk doing the Funky Chicken and Gillian Johnson held by Chan. (Courtesy of Brad Jones)

  RG: A family.

  CM: Oh, hell yeah. I think everybody—especially women at my age, thirty-four—really starts thinking about it. A lot of my friends have gotten married. A couple of them are having their second child. A lot of my girlfriends are single. It’s not like I’m the only one left. But because I’m not close to my family, there’s a question: Where is my family? I think my friends are my family. I hope to make a greater, stronger bond with my mother before too long. It’s just that I’m so different. I’ve gone through so many different changes, it’s hard for her to really understand me. They remember me from when I was a kid and think that’s how I still am: quiet and passive and very agreeable. I’ve grown up. I had to be that way for a reason. That reason hasn’t changed. But I have and they don’t—I love them all and I think I put way too much thought in trying to help something that might just be me wanting to be close.

  RG: Do you think they don’t want to be close? Or they do but they don’t know the you that you are now?

  CM: From meeting different people and traveling and relationships and seeing their families—most of my friends, their parents, call every day or every other day. Or they have lunch together, or with siblings. They have things in common. I never had that with my siblings or my parents. I never had that communication.

  RG: When we were together a few months back, you were real happy dating the boxer.

  CM: He dumped me.

  RG: Oh no! Let me go beat his ass.

  CM: It’s really sad. I got attached to somebody, and I hadn’t been attached to someone in a long time. We were friends for a couple of months before we started dating. He’d come over every day after work, or he’d call me during work. I’d make him dinner, we’d shoot the shit, hang out and play catch or jog.