Cat Power is odd yet mesmerizing
What becomes a legend most? In indie rock it's the girl with the most complications: the maladjusted honey-throated waif who can't get through a song, let alone a show, without veering to the edge of sanity. The regular-people rules don't apply to such fragile, fertile souls as Chan Marshall, who has recorded seven albums as Cat Power. Her set on Wednesday for a near-full house at the Berklee Performance Center was riveting, as much for the artist's thrillingly loose grasp of performance etiquette as her beautiful music.
Joined by veteran guitarist Mabon ``Teenie" Hodges and the 12-piece Memphis Rhythm Band, Marshall performed her recent Southern soul album ``The Greatest" nearly in order, leaving out one song. Why alter the chronology just barely and jettison ``After It All"? That's one among many little mysteries that made Marshall's show an enchantment.
At times, actually the whole time, it was like watching two people in one body: the gifted interpreter with a gossamer voice and a twitching, hopping freak. When she wasn't stringing pearls at the microphone (Marshall has traded in her howling for genteel phrasing), the artist was in constant, cockeyed motion -- throwing punches between the gauzy verses of the title song, cracking her knuckles and shoving her sneakers en pointe to pass the downtime on gospel-tinged ``Living Proof," dancing spasmodically during ``Where Is My Love," a languid torch song.
Left to her own devices during a solo encore, Marshall eked out most of a pair of Nina Simone songs. ``Who Knows Where the Time Goes" closed with a confused conversation: ``I don't know. I don't know," she muttered to the piano before finding the chords to ``Wild Is the Wind." A primitive and stunning cover of ``House of the Rising Sun" followed, proving that communion trumps guitar skills when it comes to inhabing the heart of a song.
The final 15 minutes of Marshall's distressing, transcendent performance were its finest. Her changes to ``Hate" were small but telling: ``I do not hate myself and I do not want to die" she sang, and the addition of the word ``not" was comforting -- especially after she canceled an entire tour earlier this year because of medical problems. The band returned for an epic, electric read of ``Love and Communication," replete with trumpets and sawed violins and a glam-rock guitar solo, after which Marshall bowed six times, clicked her heels, and lay down. She rose up for a shadow of a fragment of an a capella rendition of ``I Can't Give You Anything But Love," raised her pink to-go mug to the adoring throngs and announced her sobriety, and then left us with a picture-postcard cover of the Everly Brothers' ``All I Have to Do Is Dream." Indeed, it is.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com 
