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Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Chan Marshall Sings The Blues

Neumu's Michael Goldberg writes: All Tomorrow's Parties 1.1 is an album of unreleased songs by some of the artists who will appear at the Los Angeles version of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in March. What I find most interesting about it is that it contains a version of the Robert Johnson song "Come on in My Kitchen" as performed by Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power.

I first heard "Come on in My Kitchen" on an album released in the early '70s. It was by Tongue and Groove, a trio featuring Lynne Hughes, who had sung in the legendary '60s San Francisco band The Charlatans, Charlatans keyboardist Michael Ferguson and a guitarist named Randy Lewis. Hughes sang the song as you might imagine Maria Muldaur would have sung it back when "Midnight at the Oasis" was a hit — all old-time country-bluesy turn-of-the-century Nevada City-whorehouse style.

Chan Marshall doesn't sing it that way. She sings it the way that Nick Drake would have sung it, perhaps. Slow, drowsy, resigned. More like folk song than a blues. She sounds beaten down, singing Robert Johnson's words. She's overdubbed her voice to produce a strange harmony, and someone (Marshall herself?) plays some bottleneck; it fits, but still doesn't make this sound like any blues you've heard before. It is the blues, though. The real down-and-out blues.

The way Marshall sings the song, it could be a funeral dirge. She's singing about a lover who has strayed. She's pleading for him to come back, but she sounds like there's little chance of that. And once he leaves, she sings, he won't be coming back again.

You could imagine that ghosts are singing this song; it's less a song than the wind blowing through leaves some moonless night. It's all atmospheres, all mood.

Listening to Marshall sing "Come on in My Kitchen," you feel no hope; actually, what you hear is the absence of hope. Last weekend I saw "Kandahar," a film about a woman's attempt to locate her suicidal sister in Afghanistan before she takes her life; the film ends as the woman is captured by the Taliban before she can get to her sister. Chan Marshall's song is the hopeless sound of the women in Afghanistan, of women who must still wear burkas, who can't work, who are beaten by their husbands, who have no rights.

Chan Marshall's "Come on in My Kitchen" is so subtle, so — well, almost slight — yet so powerful. Late at night, give this version of the song a chance, and it will get inside your head, spook you. But be careful. It could take you down a very dark hallway to a place you most likely don't want to go.

The InsiderOne Daily Report appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9 AM PST, except when it doesn't.




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