Chan Marshall aka Cat Power is certainly the anti Beyoncé, I am even afraid that these two names in the same sentence could annihilate each other as matter and anti-matter do. I am saying this because Cat Power at the El Rey, and Beyoncé at the Staples Center were two of the concerts recommended for this week by the LA Weekly. Beyonce is all about being in control, while so many things seem to be out of Marshall’s control? I have never seen Beyonce (and not planning to anytime soon) but I am ready to guess that every minute of her show is planned ahead, every one of her moves on stage is clinically calculated… whereas Chan Marshall’s erratic behavior is legendary and Monday night was no exception, why would it be? She is always true to herself, speaking a lot between songs, or rather mumbling some internal dialogue which sounded almost too personal, giving us a constant apologizing-I-am-sorry discourse intertwined with a constant fuck-fuck-fuck discourse. Certainly, nothing is calculated during a Cat Power concert, nothing is planned – she barely followed the setlist and she hardly knows what she is gonna play next –nothing seems to be an act, nothing seems fake as she does not hide behind any stage artifice.
This time, she was touring solo, there was no band to back her up (except opener Nico Turner playing on one song) as it was the case during her ‘Sun’ album tour. As a result, her heartbreaking songs and fragility were even more visible. Her behavior on stage was eccentric as usual, she always looks as if she was kind of intoxicated, but I am not sure of anything anymore, I met her in person a few months ago, and she was beyond charming and nice, beside being a little off. It was during a signing and she was chatting about 20 minutes with every single person despite the fact there were 200 people waiting on line!! She is just like this, a little off, probably refusing to plan ahead, arriving on stage with Bob Dylan’s ‘If You see Her, Say Hello’ in the background, but half an hour late (however she has done much worst than that), and singing her bluesy heart out with devastating songs using her only guitar or piano.
But, tell me, which other performer sees his or her performance interrupted just after the third song by a torrent of flowers delivered by fans, and followed by an effusive demonstration of love with gifts, books arriving on stage as if it was Christmas three weeks in advance? Only Chan Marshall sees this and it went on for a little bit, since Chan wanted to thank everyone… till someone shouted ‘Let her play!!’ She actually continued to play for a long time, in a disorder manner, picking songs from her typed setlist, suddenly deciding to sit at the piano, lighting a cigarette, puffing on it twice then crushing it under her boot a second later. I know that some people find her curious antics, her abrupt stopping in the middle of a song, her constant adjustment of the sound (‘more reverb?’) accompanied with hand gesture, and her overall unfocused performance,… err, let’s just say… distracting, but this palpable love between Chan and her audience was truly magical, each one of her sorry was followed by a hundred supportive ‘I love you’, each one of her awkward moves followed by a million of laughs.
Plus there is this smoky and amazing voice that everyone loves, often interrupted by some throat clearing, these songs bleeding into each other or finishing abruptly, and all these false starts… if there is a performer who doesn’t care about playing the songs the way they were recorded, it is Cat Power! And man, did she sabotage ‘The Greatest’, one of my favorite songs ever! But when there’s so much heart in a performance, so much honesty revealing inner torment and lack of assurance (and may be stage freight?) how could you not love her?
And there was an ever more surprising thing, she didn’t even play one song off her last album ‘Sun’ during the set, may be because she was tired of them (she just toured this album) or may be because the songs aren’t easy to play with a sole guitar or piano? But she is so used to decompose, to pull apart everything she plays (including the Rolling Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’), that it shouldn’t have been a real obstacle for her, right? Still, instead she was mostly playing songs from her oldest albums ‘Moon Pix’, ‘You Are Free’, ‘What Would the community Think’, barely touching ‘The Greatest’… Nevertheless she played a moving rendition of ‘Hate’, probably the most devastating song of the album, with aching, going-to-the-bottom-of-depression lyrics such as ‘In the wind I crunch I want to die/They can give me pills/Or let me drink my fill/The heart wants to explode far away/Where nobody knows/Do you believe she said that/Do you believe she said that/I said I hate myself and I want to die’. However, there was nothing like depressive thoughts on stage, Chan was happy, laughing a lot, just inundated by the good vibes produced by the love feast going on. I just hope nobody does a Fiona-Apple-coup on her during a show and shouts something that could hurt her, because this could potentially trigger a disaster. She seems to rely so much on her fans’ love, this is where she gets her strength. And when she hits these moments of grace, these are the most chilling ones you can experience at a concert, as she is a performer keeping her audience on a tightrope, as everyone is constantly afraid everything could fall apart the next minute, whereas she manages to produce a series of imperfect miracles.
