Scores of shaggy haired students packed Oberlin’s Dionysus club, while patchouli scented lines of the ticketless overflowed out the doors. An hour late, a glassy eyed Chan Marshall plops herself down onstage, and proceeds to stare into space for the greater part of five minutes. She lazily instructs the crowd to sit before strumming a generic blues riff on her guitar. This blues riff would be the beginning and ending of every song she played on the guitar that evening.

Actually, she only played two “songs” from start to finish, and they weren’t even hers. She’d begin a song and forget the rest of it, or just plain decide she didn’t want to play it, and out the blues riff would come. Occasionally she’d switch to the piano, where every song ended and began with a Vegas lounge style maneuver, followed up by senseless hit-every-key pounding. The crowd became restless, and all the gender-identity-crisis kids who so eagerly pushed in front of me for a better view began to filter out. The hippies whispered and exchanged confused glances, while Chan arbitrarily strummed notes and chattered nonsense.

I guess when you’ve shared the stage with Patti Smith, and have been asked to perform one of your
own albums in it’s entirety for All Tomorrow’s Parties, the college circuit doesn’t matter so much. The evening was less show and more Chan Marshall stoned in her basement. The nonsensical mess was almost saved with a cover of “House of the Rising Sun” until it gave way to more autistic blather. I suppose this is the risk one takes in going to see Cat Power; if she chooses to play songs at all, they probably won’t even be her own. I’m glad I passed on the Wexner Center show, where she will most certainly have the same disorienting effect on a bunch of art snobs. Joanna Newsom eat your heart out, Cat Power still holds the crown as queen of indie kookiness.

Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 4:06 pm | Leave A Comment | Comments Feed
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