By WINTER MILLER
Published: September 20, 2006

Another day, another fifth of Scotch.

And that wasn’t all. Chan Marshall said her mornings began with a minibar’s worth of Jack Daniel’s, Glenlivet and Crown Royal. Mini bottles depleted, this indie singer-songwriter, known as Cat Power, would nurse a bottle of Scotch over the course of the day. On nights she performed, she took the antianxiety drug Xanax.

By the time she would weave onstage, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, Ms. Marshall, 34, was wasted. And it showed. It would seem that every fan has a Cat Power concert story: the time she mooned the audience, cursed out techies, talked to a squirrel (outdoors), played three chords and changed her mind (song after song) or played fragments of a few songs and then told everyone to get out, even encouraging fans to sue her.

That was the old Chan Marshall.

The new Chan Marshall is, by most accounts, significantly improved, as critics have widely noted this year. Reviewing one of Cat Power’s performances at Town Hall in June, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote, “To see her so comfortable onstage was no small surprise to her longtime fans,” and Time Out New York called the shows “triumphant, in the classic show-biz sense.”

read the rest at:

www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20.../20cat.html