explained. “It encouraged me because I didn't know how to play. With the other boys there was a real agenda to have a band, and it was almost embarrassing to me. It seemed so small-minded to me. Like, ugh, how obvious, how corny. So we'd just make sounds.”
With the confidence honed through practicing with Glen, Chan quickly added a few more players to her makeshift band including guitarists Mark Moore and Damon Moore (who are not related). With a couple of gigs booked for this yet-unnamed group, Mark Moore called up Chan at Fellini's and demanded that she, as the lead singer and frontwoman of this casual collection of players, come up with something. “There was a line of people,” Chan has recalled. “Mark was yellin', ‘We need a name!’ This old man came in wearing a Cat Diesel Power cap. I was like, ‘Cat Power!’ and hung up the phone.” That was it. Cat Power was born.
The name made absolutely no sense. First of all, Chan is a dog person. (Her chronic allergies kept her from having pets as a child, but she now has a French bulldog named Mona.) Secondly, the phrase “Cat Power” is conventionally associated with CAT, the logo and abbreviation for Caterpillar farm machinery. CAT POWER is displayed prominently, in all its yellow-and-black glory, on T-shirts and trucker caps (like the one worn by the Fellini's customer) advertising the company's tractors, bulldozers, and other machines. “Cat Power” represents hard labor, dirty fingernails, greasy-spoon diners at truck stops, long nights on the road, burlap, flannel shirts, dusty back roads, horse feed. It means early mornings, calloused hands, sweat, the smell of hay, Wrangler jeans, and country music. The name seemed impossibly ill suited to the enigmatic, fragile songstress with the dark soul who selected it.
Chan has since said she regrets naming her band so impulsively. “I didn't think about it,” Chan has said. “I never thought that this would be what I would be doing.” In fact, Chan says, she chose the name Cat Power out of defiance at being bossed around by her bandmates. “The guys said, ‘You're the lead singer.’ ‘Why am I the lead singer?’ ‘Because you're the girl,’” Chan has remembered. “I was so angry that I was just kiddingabout suggesting the name, kind of like, ‘Fuck you.’ But I wish I'd actually thought about it, because it doesn't mean anything.”
In hindsight the name seems uncannily apt; it's intriguing but reveals almost nothing about the artist behind it, which is perfect for a woman who wants to hide in the public eye. Cat Power has been both a straight-up blues-rock group and a willfully weird chick folk singer; it's been a Memphis soul revue and an austere guitar group. Even the name's gritty association with farm machinery, which initially seemed so incongruous with the ethereal elegies Chan was writing, now feels like a necessary representation of this sleek Chanel model's workingman past.
After a few rotating lineup changes, Cat Power became a trio with Mark Moore on guitar, Glen Thrasher on drums, and Chan on vocals. Though Chan was close with Moore (they allegedly dated for a while), it was her continued
friendship with Thrasher that propelled the band forward. Thrasher, a slight, pale, spectacle-wearing rock boy, was one of the most influential people in Atlanta's music scene and vital to Chan's development as a singer and songwriter.
His role as a local guru has largely passed, but Thrasher still acts as if he's behind an intellectual velvet rope. Numerous attempts were made to interview him for this book, and though he would respond to e-mails and suggest he might talk, Thrasher mostly just explained why I wasn't qualified to speak to him or write about Chan.
“Glen is a piece of work,” Henry Owings,
Chunklet
founder and longtime Atlanta scenester says, shaking his head. “He's kind of a throwback to that total weird agro artsy-fartsy confrontational asshole grating dick in Cabbagetown:
With the confidence honed through practicing with Glen, Chan quickly added a few more players to her makeshift band including guitarists Mark Moore and Damon Moore (who are not related). With a couple of gigs booked for this yet-unnamed group, Mark Moore called up Chan at Fellini's and demanded that she, as the lead singer and frontwoman of this casual collection of players, come up with something. “There was a line of people,” Chan has recalled. “Mark was yellin', ‘We need a name!’ This old man came in wearing a Cat Diesel Power cap. I was like, ‘Cat Power!’ and hung up the phone.” That was it. Cat Power was born.
The name made absolutely no sense. First of all, Chan is a dog person. (Her chronic allergies kept her from having pets as a child, but she now has a French bulldog named Mona.) Secondly, the phrase “Cat Power” is conventionally associated with CAT, the logo and abbreviation for Caterpillar farm machinery. CAT POWER is displayed prominently, in all its yellow-and-black glory, on T-shirts and trucker caps (like the one worn by the Fellini's customer) advertising the company's tractors, bulldozers, and other machines. “Cat Power” represents hard labor, dirty fingernails, greasy-spoon diners at truck stops, long nights on the road, burlap, flannel shirts, dusty back roads, horse feed. It means early mornings, calloused hands, sweat, the smell of hay, Wrangler jeans, and country music. The name seemed impossibly ill suited to the enigmatic, fragile songstress with the dark soul who selected it.
Chan has since said she regrets naming her band so impulsively. “I didn't think about it,” Chan has said. “I never thought that this would be what I would be doing.” In fact, Chan says, she chose the name Cat Power out of defiance at being bossed around by her bandmates. “The guys said, ‘You're the lead singer.’ ‘Why am I the lead singer?’ ‘Because you're the girl,’” Chan has remembered. “I was so angry that I was just kiddingabout suggesting the name, kind of like, ‘Fuck you.’ But I wish I'd actually thought about it, because it doesn't mean anything.”
In hindsight the name seems uncannily apt; it's intriguing but reveals almost nothing about the artist behind it, which is perfect for a woman who wants to hide in the public eye. Cat Power has been both a straight-up blues-rock group and a willfully weird chick folk singer; it's been a Memphis soul revue and an austere guitar group. Even the name's gritty association with farm machinery, which initially seemed so incongruous with the ethereal elegies Chan was writing, now feels like a necessary representation of this sleek Chanel model's workingman past.
After a few rotating lineup changes, Cat Power became a trio with Mark Moore on guitar, Glen Thrasher on drums, and Chan on vocals. Though Chan was close with Moore (they allegedly dated for a while), it was her continued
friendship with Thrasher that propelled the band forward. Thrasher, a slight, pale, spectacle-wearing rock boy, was one of the most influential people in Atlanta's music scene and vital to Chan's development as a singer and songwriter.
His role as a local guru has largely passed, but Thrasher still acts as if he's behind an intellectual velvet rope. Numerous attempts were made to interview him for this book, and though he would respond to e-mails and suggest he might talk, Thrasher mostly just explained why I wasn't qualified to speak to him or write about Chan.
“Glen is a piece of work,” Henry Owings,
Chunklet
founder and longtime Atlanta scenester says, shaking his head. “He's kind of a throwback to that total weird agro artsy-fartsy confrontational asshole grating dick in Cabbagetown:
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