Cat Power by Elizabeth Goodman Page A

For every real polite person like Ben from Smoke, there's a Glen Thrasher, where it'd be like, ‘Wow. You're a fucking dick.’”
    It's unfortunate that Glen's bitterness has become so deep-seated, because his accomplishments are impressive. He grew up in Atlanta and began venturing into the city's derelict neighborhoods when he was a teenager, seeking out new music, new art, new material for
Lowlife
, the zine he published from 1984 to 1992. Gerard Cosloy, Matador Records cofounder and the man who would eventually sign Chan, admired Thrasher's writing and first read about Cat Power in an issue of
Lowlife
. During the 1980s, Glen also cohosted an experimental radio show,
Destroy All Music
, that featured expertly selected sets showcasing the local bands that were Cat Power's forebears.
    Thrasher put on annual debauchery-filled
Destroy All Music
festivals, which allowed the bands he promoted on air to get together and play live. The gleefully chaotic, performance-art-meets-rock shows he hosted inspired many of the artists who shaped the Atlanta music scene in the 1990s. “Destroy All Music was three or four nights of noise improvisers,and punk-folk groups would play,” Bill Taft, who played in both of Benjamin Smoke's bands as well as other local influential groups like the Jody Grind, remembers. “They'd sing their songs, they'd roll around on the floor, all their instruments were covered in fur, they'd eat glass—they wouldn't eat glass, but it was like that. None of their songs had verses or choruses, and they were all very focused moments of emotion, very intense dirges. It exorcised demons.”
    Glen Thrasher had an uncommonly refined ear for scouting exceptional musicians like Chan, as well as the organizational skills to unite a handful of disparate groups into a genuine musical movement. “I really can't stress enough that Glen is very modest,” says Grace Braun, whom he also nurtured. “He can be quite curmudgeonly when he feels like it but unlike some people in the city, I've never heard him stand up and say, ‘I did this and I made this person and I am the reason why they are famous.’”
    “The first time I saw her she had Glen Thrasher playing drums, which is basically how she started out—it was just her and him,” Jeff Clark of
Stomp and Stammer
remembers. “She had just been playing a very short time, a matter of months. It was in the basement of the Dark Horse Tavern.” The Dark Horse Tavern used to host Brunch That Hurts, a series of comically debauched events featuring hangover-curing cocktails and lots of local rock bands. “Everybody would play around two P.M. ,” remembers Kemp. “Everybody was hungover, and whoever kinda showed up to play, played. There were people who showed up there who hadn't been to sleep.”
    These early Cat Power sets consisted of a mixture of the spare anti-songs Marshall had been writing on her Silvertone, plus a collection of covers—mostly old blues standards and songs by Bob Dylan. “She didn't really play that many shows before she left, but she'd gotten a lotof good press, and everyone started talking about Cat Power and Chan and how cool it was,” Clark remembers. “There was nobody else doing anything like what Chan was doing.”
    Though Cat Power was jockeying for position amid a sea of other respected local bands, it's worth mentioning that with the exception of the Rock *A* Teens, who had a record deal with Merge and were somewhat known outside the Atlanta area, none of the major Cabbagetown rockers ever made it. The entire scene existed in a vacuum, with all the breakups, make-ups, and rises and falls in favor noticed only by those who were directly involved. “The Cabbagetown scene was more about being a freak on drugs, being an artiste smoke-and-mirrors jazz heroin freak something-or-another,” says another Southerner, Charles Aaron. “Playing music was only a small part of whatever your personal transformative performance and your