from Ray Davies interview (by Chris Heath), on the release this month of Other People's Lives, his first solo album:
So you think that by grasping international pop stardom you'd taken a wrong turn?
Yeah. Yeah. And I've been fighting against it ever since. The people around me are confused by it. This thing I did this weekend--a benefit in Stockholm for AIDS in Africa--I did on the condition that there were no cameras when I was performing. Consequently, no pictures were taken and I didn't get any publicity. But that's the way I am. As soon as I know it's a hype, there's something inside me that turns off. I think I was just obstinate and stubborn all my life, and it hasn't changed. [laughs] I was born that way.
You seem amused by it.
I'm trying to learn to live with it. I'll either laugh about it or I'll break down and cry. Because I really have missed so many opportunities for myself because I have refused to enter the door where all the lights are on and the cameras are rolling, some starlett on my arm. Play the game, go out and get the right awards. I find that very very difficult to do because there's a part of me that would rather be living in an attic somewhere, having meetings with fellow attic dwellers to overthrow the world. [looks at me curiously] Are you from Watford?
You know, that's about the rudest thing anyone's ever said to me. [Watford is a drab, unremarkable town just outside London.] Absolutely not.
Okay. Good.
Why did you say that?
I don't know. I thought I'd just break the ice.
Consider it broken.
Okay.
All She Wrote (mp3), the LP comes out this week.
Lola (mp3), for old time's sake (love this so, too--and here's to Linda Florentine while I'm at it, because who could ever look at a chainlink fence the same way again, speaking of not-girly boys?)
from GQ, Feb 06, bio/review Cat Power and the new cd The Greatest:
There are only two kinds of Cat Power shows. There are the good ones, when Marshall managed to overcome the paralyzing discomfort she feels onstage and plays her songs--which tend to be either slow and winsome or slow and bone-chilling forlorn--without false starts or abrupt endings. And then there are the bad ones--the ones where she fixates on some small issue, like a buzz in her monitor or the thought that she may have replaced her keys, to the point that it makes her unable to perform and she ends up backstage on a couch, exhibiting many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Tonight's show fell into the latter category . . . The diehards stayed rapt and quiet, as if they had stumbled upon a grazing unicorn and didn't want to spook it, but the casual observers stopped listening and started ordering more drinks. . . "I'm sorry" she says . . . I just feel crazy and weird right now." She says it again, in a loud whisper: "I'm sorry." [forgive me]
(She talks like that girl we all went to college with, the ninth-semester pottery major with the good heart and the acid-cured synapses, who always had some crucially important but inscrutable point to make about freedom or the sun or a rainbow in a puddle outside a Bob Weir concert.)
The bandleader at the Greatest sessions was Teenie Hodges, who was Al Green's longtime guitarist and co-wrote "Take Me to The River." On the first day of recording, Hodges brought Marshall a bottle of Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey. "It's not like giving somebody a bottle of Jack Danniel's," Marshall says. "He has asked where I was from, and on purpose gave me Georgia moonshine." This meant more to Marshall than Hodges could have known, since she'd recently discovered a clause in her tour rider forbidding club owners to provide her with liquor. "I was like, really?" Marshall says. "It was, like, a protective measure that they took because I'd, like, lost it, I guess and was drinking too much. As people do sometimes. So [the gift] made everything warm and friendly." I wonder why she's telling me these things. I'm not sure if she's the most self-conscious person I've ever met or she's utterly devoid of the basic self-awareness that keeps most people from acting weird (and saying potentially self-incriminating things).
There is talk of going to a bar later that night, but I start to feel like I've gone about as far up this river as I'm willing to go . . . On the way back, I'm thinking of [the photo shoot]. We were on a narrow street where the photographer has been taking pictures of Marshall sitting in a chair on the lawn of a rotting two-room house. Poloroids from the shoot were spread out on the hood of the photographer's rented Gran Torino convertible. Marshall thought her arms looked fat in all of them. Finally, she found an image she liked. It was an early test shot of the lawn and the chair, without Marshall in it. "That one's good," she said, and I could have sworn she smiled.
In This Hole (mp3) (whoa, love this so)
The Greatest (mp3)
