cat power show

hello all! i’m posting for the first time because for a moment everything is working properly on my sick computer. the following is both a show review for cat power at the orpheum on february 7, 2008 and a failed attempt at a first draft of a memoir for my creative nonfiction course (which required intention, opposition, and resolution for the main character as well as unmediated sensory details). oh well.

Last Thursday, after class, I caught the 8:10 Greyhound to Boston to see Cat Power perform at the Orpheum. She’s touring for her newest record, Jukebox, a sort-of follow-up to 2000’s The Covers Record. I guess her backing band, calling themselves the Dirty Delta Blues, is a collective of famous bluegrass musicians that some get excited about, but I don’t recognize any of their names. I don’t know who opened, because we were late, but I suspect it was Appaloosa, a blonde former Berliner credited with “saving [Cat's] life” in Cat’s myspace blog*. Cat’s real name is Chan Marshall, pronounced Sean, phonetically Shawn Marshall; I don’t know what Appaloosa’s real name is, but I think it’s such a beautiful stage name, I almost don’t want to know. Appaloosa’s Easter Demos CD was $9 at the merch booth, so I bought it, and I still love that first song, “The Day (We Fell In Love)” that I was infatuated with over break and made the first track on a killer mix CD for my friend Adrian. It’s like Nico is singing over a multilayered series of pleasant beeps and the electronic blips of keyboards and cheap drum kits.

We arrived late, like I said, for the last half of Cat’s set. Which was fine because most of what we missed was that interminable period of time between the supporting band and the main act, when the most interesting thing to do is note the songs that are chosen to play over the PA. Our seats were underneath the balcony, and since the Orpheum is a restored nineteenth-century theater, peeling gold leaf filigree and angels on the ceiling, hard seats, and shabbily carpeted stairs, the acoustics are pretty terrible, especially underneath the balcony where the sounds all fuzz and melt together.

Even from our seats underneath the balcony, I could see Cat enough to be surprised by how thin her ponytail was, and, more distinctly, the silhouette of a young man in the third or fourth row. He was standing and at least decently muscular, decidedly not indie-skinny, with short, almost-buzzed-looking hair. He looked clean-cut, like the kind of guy who would wear loose fitting khaki painter’s pants. I mean, wear them well. I imagined that his shirt was red, long sleeved but with gray stripes around the collar and where the sleeves would have ended on a regular t-shirt. I imagined he had dirty blonde hair.

Actually, I didn’t notice him until later. We were busy being thrilled to have even gotten there. While trying to navigate the T from South Station to Downtown Crossing, Franny asked me if I was sure that the Orpheum wasn’t located in Foxboro, and I said no, that’s Gillette Stadium, but still it got me nervous. And then some guy with a huge suitcase asked us for directions, and I couldn’t help him because the Boston I know is the product of daytripping at the Museum of Science with my parents and cousins and a summer spent in Cambridge between junior and senior year, and my parents were in love there before I was born, so I have an unbearably romantic affinity for the place. There are few things I love more than imagining my parents young and skinny and in love. We walked past Boston Commons and I remembered a summer afternoon spent in the botanical gardens. I remembered going to see Arcade Fire at the venue in the spring and knew we were almost there. Everything always reminds me of everything else.

I didn’t notice this guy until Cat Power, or actually her keyboardist, asked us all to stand up and dance. Cat Power agreed, she said this was dancing music, and I don’t need to be asked twice to dance. We were sitting between two rows of middle-aged people who looked kind of tired, like they might have first heard Cat Power on their local Clear Channel-owned soft rock station. They didn’t feel like dancing, apparently, because they did some requisite toe-tapping, but then they sat down quickly, like it was a relief to return to their seats. As I watched everyone in the theater sit down in hesitant waves of wanting to please Cat and yet being afraid of looking silly, I noticed him.

He stayed standing the entire time. Past the amount of time it would be appropriate for the drunk guy -- and there is always that drunk guy -- to be standing; he gets tired. Long after his friends had all sat down, he remained. Constant. I liked that about him. When Cat traversed the stage, his head moved to follow her. I imagined what she saw of him: his face, kind of happily dazed, mouth slightly open, because I decided this must be his first time seeing her. I imagined him lying on his bed in his UMass Amherst dorm room, stretched on the bed with his hands folded behind his head, gazing at the ceiling, thinking only of her. His friends come knock on his door, want to invite him to go out with them and meet some girls, but he would rather listen to The Greatest, and when Cat sings forlornly, “Where is my love?” He says to himself, “I’m here. Don’t you know I’m right here?”

It occurred to me that he was in love with her. Devoted, in a very serious way, to someone he has undoubtedly never met. I began to get bored with the concert itself and its poor acoustics, and shifted my focus to him. Sometimes Cat would shimmy in his direction, but there was a part of me that wanted her to stop. Whether she meant to or not, she was teasing him, because he could never have her. She’s a star. And he’s just some guy who’s in love with her. Bummer.

She’s a professional, though, and maybe she deals with this all the time. Maybe some audience member at every one of the shows on her North American tour is this in love with her. Maybe sometimes she wants to go out with them, get to know them better. Have a beer after the show or whatever it is rock stars do. I know she is a recovering alcoholic, so maybe not a beer. She doesn’t seem the like coffee type, either, so maybe she wants to ask him out to tea. I can see her flirting now: wrapping her little hands around a warm ceramic mug, shrugging her shoulders, swishing her thin ponytail. Laughing at his jokes and making self-effacing comments. Wearing an oversized sweater. Maybe this is exactly what she wants, like that Weezer song. Remember “Across the Sea” when Rivers Cuomo croons “I could never touch you, I think it would be wrong” to his half-Japanese penpal? It’s like that. She knows that she can’t have what she thinks she wants because she can’t ever really love him like he already loves her. How does Cat Power meet guys? Can she only date people of similar, indie-rocking fame? Who would that be? I don’t know, Conor Oberst? He’s too young and self-indulgent for her anyway.

Closer to the end of the show, but before the encore, members of the audience ironically held their lighters in the air and waved them for her. Some people held cellphones. Everyone was sheepish, like they were taking part in a joke they knew wasn’t clever or even funny. Some tired little thing.

This guy, though, he wasn’t insincere. I watched him raise his lighter above his head, his long right arm stretched to the angels on the ceiling rather than waving goofily like everybody else. He flicked his lighter once, just once. Arguably the most graceful use of a lighter I have ever seen, none of the frustration of trying to light a cigarette on a windy day, travel mug in your other hand, making it impossible to cup the cheap lighter that won’t stay lit for more than a millisecond. I could see the flame from my seat. It never wavered. For three songs, this guy held his thumb on the nub of a button on the lighter.

And I knew from twelve rows back that nobody will ever love someone like he loves Cat Power.

After the set finished, and the band left stage, we all whooped and hollered and clapped and cheered for them to come back, and that is always the second more boring part of the show after waiting for the main act to begin. Cat came back on last. She sang a couple songs from The Greatest, and they were really, truly beautiful even under the balcony. Finally, it was all over. I was still watching the guy. Cat bowed and waved from all corners of her stage, and I saw him walk to the center and hand her what could have been an unpublished script. A huge stack of 8.5” x 11” plain white sheets of paper bound together with those big black plastic clips. She very graciously took it from him, tucked it under her left arm, and kept smiling at the crowd. Then she left the stage and we gathered our coats and scarves and retraced our steps back to South Station.


*This appears to be lost to the ether. Whatever.