Cat Power: Love for Bobby

“I never had a favorite artist – apart from Bob,” Cat Power once told the Guardian. »Never before have I heard a man sing so protectively about women.«

Security and security are basic needs that, from a distance, it can be said with a certain degree of certainty that the singer, guitarist and composer Cat Power alias Charlyn Marshall did not always experience in her childhood.

Marshall, who everyone calls “Chan,” was born in Atlanta in 1972. The “Welt” recently claimed that the girl grew up with her grandmother because her “hippie parents” were overwhelmed with the baby – the truth is probably more complex. The caregivers in Marshall’s childhood apparently changed frequently. In addition to grandma, the defining figures are her stepfather with his large record collection. The mother loves David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alias so much that she calls herself “Ziggy” and dyes her hair red. The father sings in a band.

At 16, Chan bought an electric guitar. The instrument sits unused in the corner for years. »Guys kept promising they would teach me. After a few years I would be able to play reasonably well,” recalls Marshall in an interview with the Guardian. “One afternoon I tried the thing out myself and thought: ‘It’s really not that difficult.'”

The man the artist so tenderly calls “Bob” is already in her life; she discovers him in her stepfather’s LP collection: Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. However, Marshall’s career initially had little to do with his folk records; She runs wild in Atlanta’s punk and experimental scene. “Alcohol was part of my upbringing,” she later says with typical frankness. »When I came to New York City, I felt like I had survived something.«

In 1992, Chan Marshall moved to the Big Apple, discovered the inscription “Cat Diesel Power” on a baseball cap and from now on called herself Cat Power. Two years later, she recorded her first two albums in one go in the Chinatown district. Her songs sound as if they were “written in the moonlight on a rickety porch in the Deep South during a ‘dark night of the soul,'” as her biographer writes. Cat Power’s fourth album “Moon Pix” was released in 1998, a vulnerable, raw, magnificent work.

The artist’s praises from critics are bad for her. “I didn’t feel comfortable in my body and I had depression.” She only dares to go on stage if she has had whiskey and pills. Cat Power plays solo concerts, the repertoire consists of cover versions: Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, and of course Bob Dylan. The songwriting skills of her role models are her salvation, in two senses: they build up her battered self-esteem and they help her take the next step in her career.

»The Covers Record« was released in 2000. It is her most successful album to date, Cat Power’s first of several albums with purely foreign repertoire. Bob Dylan is always present, even in her own songs: “Song to Bobby” is her declaration of love to the great singer/songwriter: “I want to tell you… What I feel in my heart from the beginning ’til my dying day.”

She was never bothered by the later Nobel Prize winner’s singing, which was often perceived as raspy: “I just love the guy. When I listen to his songs, I never notice that his voice sounds bad in any way. I notice that his lyrics are fun.«

In 2022, the artist, now richer in several top 20 albums, gets a call. Within a very short time she has to decide whether she wants to play in the venerable Royal Albert Hall in London. »Fuck, yeah! “But only Dylan!” was her first impulse. »Let’s do something beautiful, elegant. No improvisation, no fucking deconstruction. Let’s make it real and simple.”

In November 2022, Cat Power and her six-piece band will re-perform an entire concert, song for song: Bob Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall Concert” from 1966. The name comes from a mislabeled bootleg (the recording is actually from Manchester). A legendary live recording because Dylan could be heard here for the first time on the electric guitar.

Cat Power plays all 15 songs from back then, first acoustic, then electric, in the same order. Even the famous “Judas” insult that Dylan received for breaking with purist folk traditions can be heard from the audience.

Fortunately, the singer doesn’t overdo it with her faithfulness to the work. She sings “She Belongs to me” from a first-person perspective: “I’ve got everything I need/I’m an artist/I don’t look back.”

The harmonica playing of the then 24-year-old Dylan seems downright poor compared to that of the 50-year-old Cat Power; With her it is heartfelt, worthy of the blues, with the Hammond organ hissing and Marshall’s long-time colleague Erik Paparazzi making his guitar wail.

You can hear it on the “Cat Power Sings Dylan” album, which was released at the end of 2023.

Cat Power will travel the world in 2024 and will also be coming to Germany at the end of this month for three concerts in Hamburg, Halle (Saale) and Dortmund. She’s on tour almost all year long, playing none other than Dylan. What makes these concerts so unique is her voice. Characteristically deep and rough, less self-confident than the original, tender, almost brittle. The biggest difference: every note is right.

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