American musician Cat Power’s tribute to Bob Dylan is a hit with everyone but her son.
Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Concert is coming to QPAC March 12. Power begins her tour in Sydney and it takes in the Port Fairy Folk Festival with a gig at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide on March 10 as part of Adelaide Festival.
Power says she loves Australia and in the mid-1990s lived briefly at Byron Bay, where she did some recording. Her Dylan show has been a huge hit and it mines that period in 1965 and 1966 when Dylan went electric, much to the chagrin of many of his folkie fans.
Dylan caused outrage in 1965 when he switched from acoustic guitar to electric at the Newport Folk Festival in the US. That outrage spanned the Atlantic Ocean when he took to the stage at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966. Some members of the audience were also upset when he went electric in Manchester at a concert that was mistakenly reported as having been in the Royal Albert Hall in London. Hence the name of Power’s concert, which she has actually performed at that famous venue in the British capital.
That concert was recorded and released as a live album in late 2023 and features classics such as It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues; Mr. Tambourine Man as well as songs from Dylan’s seminal album, Blonde on Blonde.
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Power (real name Chan Marshall) doesn’t mimic Dylan but, like him, she has a compelling voice. It’s distinctive, some have said raspy, certainly husky and atmospheric, and perfectly suits the music of the man she admires so much. She’s a Dylan tragic. Not so much her nine-year-old son, Boaz.
“He’s not happy with Bob,” Power says in her southern drawl when we chat by phone. She’s in Florida. “He just wants his mom home.”
‘I don’t do this show for approval … I do it for love’
Power says she could sing like Dylan if she wanted to because she is steeped in his oeuvre. But she doesn’t need to mimic him to pay tribute.
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“I just love him as an artist,” she says. “He’s gifted.” And he’s aware of what she is up to.
“He knows what everyone is doing,” she says. “I know that he knows. I hope he approves, although I don’t do this show for approval. I do it for love.”
She then tells me how she was in Glasgow when Dylan was playing there (he had an estate in Scotland which he sold in 2023). She approached his management to get into a sold-out gig. There was apparently nothing available.
“Then I happened to bump into Bob on the steps of the hotel where he was staying,” Power recalls. “He got me in to see his show. Two nights before that I had performed his music at the Royal Albert Hall.”
Some people might think that was random but for Power it was a kind of spooky synchronicity. She believes in such things, I think. Because in the course of our interview it gets a bit weird … in a rather wonderful way.
She tells me of two ghostly encounters with Jimi Hendrix, who famously covered Dylan’s song All Along the Watchtower. One of her encounters was the apparition of an elderly African-American man with a little moustache, much like Hendrix’s. That encounter was at the Royal Albert Hall. The elderly man (was it Hendrix?) gave her a kind of blessing for the show.
I get a little shiver when she tells her story, which I have no reason to question. As Hamlet says to Horatio in Shakespeare’s play, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
As well as playing the Royal Albert Hall, she played in Manchester where Dylan outraged fans in 1966. Dylan had toured to Australia earlier that year and the kerfuffle over his defection to electric guitar continued throughout that year. In Manchester in 1966 there was a cry of “Judas” from the audience and that happens regularly as Dylan aficionados try to replicate the past.
Is Cat Power living in that past? Well, according to her, Dylan’s music is a kind of continuum and is as compelling now as it has ever been. For her, and for many others, his music is the soundtrack of life itself.
“I’ve been listening to him since high school,” Power says. “I have loved him for a long time. I wanted to do something beautiful while Bob is still on this earth.”