Last night, Sam and I went to the London Palladium to see Cat Power performing Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert – I’ve been listening to her album incessantly for months, and to the Dylan live recording too. The Palladium is a gorgeous theatre on Argyll Street, just south of Oxford Circus. Built in 1910, it has an illustrious history: Duke Ellington played there, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and in 1963, the Beatles. (It also hosts Britain’s Got Talent auditions.)
The Dylan show that Power has been performing recently was in fact recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, but it was wrongly titled on the bootleg editions that first emerged. It’s apparently in this concert that the famous ‘Judas’ heckle happened – in the second half, when Dylan’s electric band came on, and he played the blistering songs that only became more aggressive as the booing mounted, after the acoustic half of the set.
Power has a fascinating, unsteady stage presence. Her body language is nervous, uncomfortable, awkward. She moves in a rhythm that often seems unrelated to the music itself – that strikes me as more about the management of an intense anxiety. It’s a form of reassurance, a communication to herself, an attempt to contain her own discomfort. But from the opening note – ah, my God – what a voice. It’s so resonant, so warm, with husky undertones that never feel too airy. (It’s not entirely unlike Dylan’s voice, in fact; the nasal aspect of his sound that lots of people dislike is always undergirded by a very sonorous structure.) Power’s voice has grown deeper and surer over the years – but there is always an edge of incipient breathlessness in it, and that edge was very much there, live.
I’d heard about Power’s struggles with stage fright, and you could really sense it at the Palladium. She doesn’t approach the stage or the performance with relish; she approaches it with trepidation and uncertainty. The first song – She Belongs To Me – was a slow whoosh of pure voice. I felt like we were stepping into water, sinking down into something deep. Her voice reverberates as if it comes from somewhere underground, or from the heavens, even. It feels like such a relief to hear it – it has something so soothing; perhaps it’s like we’re hearing it from inside the womb? The resonance is so wide and profound, it feels like you’re in direct physical contact with it when you hear. This, I thought, it’s going to be amazing.
Not long after, in the second song, I think – Fourth Time Round – she seemed to waver, to lose her footing. I think one can sense this mostly in the way her voice is landing. In her renderings of these songs, she bends and warps Dylan’s phrases in such generative, beautiful ways – phrases which he already danced around, stretching them like elastic. She’s mostly so in control of this playfulness, this essentially improvisatory aspect of what she’s doing with the material. Occasionally, though, you could sense she loses her way a little; or, more accurately perhaps, she just thinks she’s lost her way, and then I could feel a fleeting sense of panic, a flame beginning to catch. Her voice becomes slightly more breathless; it occasionally catches, and I thought I could feel her anguish at these tiny moments of almost inaudible rupture.
And then she’d find her footing again. Visions of Johanna was gorgeous; Desolation Row was devastating, Just Like A Woman felt precarious again, and Mr Tambourine Man nearly did me in: that song has always had such a sweet soulfulness to it, but I absolutely love how she transforms that song: no longer a strumming number, it’s picked, and it has the simplicity and cadences of a lullaby.
And here’s the thing about what Power does with these acoustic songs: she leans into their architecture, their basic harmonic elements – and she also slows them down, she extends the moment. And so, this acoustic part of the set is just so exposed, so exposing. She’s there, at the mike, with just a guitarist nearby, and there’s nothing but this: her voice, with a delicate, unobstrusive instrumental structure under it. But how terrifying it is to open up your voice! To trust that its structure can sustain the risks you want to take with it. She must know how gorgeous and powerful it is, to hear her voice in a venue like that, her voice that is so rich, like a forest floor – but whose capaciousness has been radically opened and transformed by Dylan’s songs. How terrifying, for so much to weigh on that: just your voice, the arrangement of minute mechanisms inside you, the combination of innate skill and learnt manipulations that make up the sound.
And then, right after the exquisite sweetness and vulnerability of Tambourine Man, the band kicks in – Tell Me, Momma -- and it’s like Power is set free. Two keyboards, three guitars, and drums – a bigger structure behind her, and she lets loose. Her shoes – vertiginous heels – come off, and she moves around. She turns towards the band and seems to be having a more straightforward kind of enjoyment, the joy of communality, of being sustained by others. She becomes more playful. Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat is just a riot, Ballad of a Thin Man arch and imperious; Power moves and pumps her arms through this half with rapture, and the crowd is rapturous in return. It ends, of course, on Like A Rolling Stone.
The Dylan album has been, I think, a kind of ambivalent totem of self-possession which has galvanised Power into a greater, more expansive relationship to her own voice. The original album, like the concerts of that year, is not without its own battles: the booing, the heckling Dylan endured during that tour became almost unbearable. The footage from those years is unbelievable – the expression of someone so determined to do what he wanted to do, in the face of such presumption on the part of audience, journalists, critics: the presumption to dictate what an artist does, and to berate him when he refuses to be their puppet. The electric sets of that time have a belligerence and doggedness – Dylan digging his heels in – that is tremendously powerful. And the acoustic songs in that period: was Dylan unsure about them, less invested in them? I’m not sure. But for Power, her ambivalence about those pared-down acoustic songs – those songs she has pared down to their elements, and rendered in the most bare, exposed way possible – is palpable. They are a vehicle with which she is confronting her voice in its purest form, and perhaps confronting, too, her desire to perform in its most unadorned form.
Because it’s clear that these songs terrify her, but that she has to sing them, she needs to sing them – and needs perhaps to hear herself encountering her shakiness, and transcending it. There’s something she’s getting through when she moves through the set. Is she proving to herself that she can do them? That, in the battle between her fear, and her desire, her desire can win out? I think so. And perhaps that’s the thread between the two albums: the battle for Dylan to push forward and do what he wanted to do, and the battle for Power to get through something difficult; to do, perhaps what she both does and doesn’t want to do. To press on. When she hits the electric set, she’s soaring, she’s on a high: she got through it, she survived. With the help of Dylan’s work, and with the help of her audience.
In Mériam Korichi’s brilliant new book, Spinoza Code – a riveting account of the recent discovery in the Vatican of the manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethics, unpublished in his lifetime, entrusted by Spinoza to a German mathematician called von Tschirnhaus who brought it, under his cloak, to the capitals of Europe to disseminate Spinoza’s ideas – she writes that the Ethics advocates not deferring to authority (religious or political); not to ‘let oneself be dispossessed of what is really one’s own, even as the self is not enclosed, reducible to an identity, is always to be made, extended, hybridised. The self? It’s a certain individual capacity to act and to think, which the encounter with others augments or diminishes.’ (That’s my translation from the French.)
What Cat Power is doing in her encounter with us, the audience, and with Dylan, her muse, her totem, is encountering – and experiencing the edges of – her own self, her own voice, her fear and her desire. We always have that choice, I guess; to be the other who can augment, or diminish, someone’s capacity to act and to think; someone’s act of constituting and extending their own self. Perhaps every encounter between a writer, a musician, an artist, and the audience involves precisely that question – but with Power, live onstage, it’s unusually palpable; it’s a high-wire act, and it’s absolutely glorious.
Cat Power can really sing. We’ve seen her a couple times early in her career. Once she couldn’t get off her seat at the bar and finally came onstage and wasn’t so hot. Another time she sat at the piano transfixed with fear and finally left the stage. I am glad she has overcome herself enough to get through a performance cuz she is an amazing talent. As are you.
Beautiful insights into the qualities of voice.