When Chan Marshall isn’t sitting in front of a piano, her standing stage persona provides enough distraction to seriously hinder audience enjoyment—jittery, jerky movements, mischievous grins, strange, frightened dance steps, bursts of frenetic energy that appear both nervous and winsome. But in a venue well-equipped to support her extraordinary voice, all that can seem endearing, especially since the release of The Greatest (2006)—an album of penetrating dynamics and wondrous depth—and Marshall’s finally overcoming her notorious stage fright to fashion herself into a mature and dedicated performer.
Her most recent New York engagement, however, proved that unless those conditions are just so, a Cat Power show is an almost-certain trainwreck. Manhattan’s Terminal 5, tucked way down between 11th avenue and the West Side Highway in the West 50s, can be a top-of-the-line place to see a show; its airy-hangar-meets-the-Addams-Family-mansion feel drips personality. But when Cat Power and her oddly named foursome Dirty Delta Blues took up there, it was one crowd energy-killing, sonically misdirected moment after another, with almost every selection swallowed up by boomy feedback and a muddy vocal mix. That’s fatal to a singer like Marshall, obviously, and after the second song, the shouts from mid-floor to "turn up Chan’s mic!" got louder and more frequent, especially after singular complainers realized they weren’t alone.
What a mess. In a better equipped room, it would have been easy to forgive Cat Power’s performance flaws: a decent band that except for Jim White’s taut drumming downplayed its best elements (Blues Explosion guitarist Judah Bauer’s slippery slide fills were all too rare, and Gregg Foreman’s keys mix was too loud and phlegmy); a focus on Marshall’s mediocre new covers record "Jukebox"; and, again, Marshall’s distracting stage maneuvers (at one point, she left the band to its own devices and returned about eight minutes later to throw a few T-shirts into the crowd, get bored with that, and chuckle some).
But to have solid acoustics and her vocal nuances out of the equation is to cripple her entirely, and it meant for exactly two exciting moments in the show. First was the opening "New York" (Marshall’s woozy, boozy reworking of "Theme from ‘New York, New York’"), and only because of its obviousness and its placement at the beginning of the show when excitement was at its healthiest. Second was the closing version of Otis Redding’s "I"ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," which Marshall bent to the most bluesy curves and gossamer lilts of her extraordinary voice, hinting at what might have been had Jukebox been assembled with more interesting and better-suited material.
A $32 ticket (before fees) to hear Marshall and a spare, bluesy band perform sound as though they were playing underwater and act as though a crowd would love to linger on every last indulgence and precious misfire is, to these ears, a soak. It’s because I’ve seen Cat Power a handful of times and pull it off just once—the much loved Memphis Rhythm Band tour in 2006—that I’d even consider going again.
