Biography

From postcard sent out to promote Arkansas Traveler album, c. 1992.
MS: My dad and mom met when he was working the Tilt-a-Whirl for my Uncle Johnny, walking between the moving cars taking tickets, living dangerous, a young James Dean, at the State Fair of Texas. I've seen a photo of them heading off to the Senior Prom in my Uncle Huby's '59 Cadillac and he was handsome but she, she was beautiful. I think it happened that night.

I have always been fascinated with the details of my conception. I interviewed my father so's I could write this and it was:

"Now Bill, try to remember.....was I conceived in May '61 or June of '61?" He told me some story about rigging his driver's license so's he could buy beer and it said he was 21 but really he was 20 and the guy gave him the marriage license allowing how he'd be 21 in 3 days he'd go ahead and issue it without my grandma's signature. And I asked my grandma what she said when my dad told her he'd got married. She pursed her lips and said "I don't remember!"

But I remember. Not what she said, but what my mother said. In church each Testimony Sunday she would stand in front of the congregation and bear witness to the tragedy of her young life, (my conception) and then, lip trembling... "and I was not married." I would squirm there on the front pew we always sat in, a shining example of a Mormon family (eight kids, for chrissakes!).

Now you know my deepest secret. I was born illiterate.

From interview by David Dye on World Cafe radio show, WXPN, Philadelphia PA, 10 July 2003.
DD: I didn't realize that you have a Latin American heritage. Is that part of your family or... how does that work? MS: Yeah, I don't know. Since I don't have the genealogy I tend to not really make much claim to that fame. But yeah, my mother's family came -- this is a fact -- from New Mexico. Belen, New Mexico. A little town outside of Santa Fe... Albuquerque and the story they told was that my great-great-grandfather was a "conquistador from Espania and he came over with Cortez and they conquered the New World". And I'm just thinkin' that that's what any -- you know we call in Texas a 'wetback' -- that's what any illegal immigrant from Mexico would claim as their grand and noble heritage but I'm just a little sceptical [laughs]. I don't know the truth of the story though, but I've told you what I know.

From performance at Szene Wien, Vienna, Austria, 13 July 1995.
MS: My father, who she [Michelle's mother] divorced when I was three years old.

From performance at The Junction, Cambridge, England, 30 May 1996.
MS: I was raised in the Army. My stepfather was in the Army y'all. We travelled around the world. Lived on army bases in Germany, on the east coast of the United States, all over the United States, in fact.

MS: When I was 16 years old my stepfather, he got out of the army and we moved back to East Texas where my folks come from.

From interview by David Dye on World Cafe radio show, WXPN, Philadelphia PA, 10 July 2003.
MS: Yes, I was raised a fundamentalist by my mother. My stepfather was on his way to Vietnam and on the ship heading to Vietnam was converted to Mormonism.

From interview by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 9 Oct 2002.
MS: I was the oldest of six and then when I was twelve my step-brother and sister joined the family and then a foster child so I went from being the oldest to the fourth oldest in the course of a summer.

From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: When I was 16 I left home and went to Dallas. My father lived there. And he started buyin' old houses there in East Dallas, puttin' his carpentry skills to work and fixin' 'em up. So I worked with him every summer after that.

From performance at The Junction, Cambridge, England, 30 May 1996.
MS: I had run away from home when I was 15 years old and not only did I feel abandoned but I felt that I had abandoned my brothers and sisters. And I missed them. But I was never in touch with my family after I left -- real sad.

From "House Of Blues - Blues Breaks #97-180" radio show broadcast during week of 10 February 1997.
MS: My dad was one of those hippie cats that was pretty progressive. He was like the first white English teacher at a all-black school durin' the sixties, you know, when there was all the upheaval. He considered himself something of a cat and he had a collection of both Texas singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker and he also had a reasonably modest blues collection. And he gave up teaching school to go into the business of buying old houses and living in 'em and fixing 'em up and selling 'em. So I was helping him during the summers and he had a record, you know, the old record where you leave the arm up and so all day long I would put on either Leadbelly or Lightnin' Hopkins were my two favourites. Big Bill Broonzy was another one. For eight, ten hours a day I would listen to one side or another of these albums and I didn't realize at the time I was getting, not a broard sense of the blues but a pretty deep one.

From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
RH: When did you know "I'm a songwriter"?
MS: I might have been the last one to know because I started writin' songs, I was fifteen/sixteen, playing guitar and really needing that outlet for dealing with the stuff that I really couldn't process.

From article titled "Going Deeper", Blues Revue Extra, May 2002.
MS: My dad is a flaming liberal, which in East Texas is tantamount to being a Communist. He had gone to East Texas State University and got an English and history degree and had become an English teacher. In the course of teaching, he eventually decided that it wasn't for him and started buying old houses and fixing them up.

From interview by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 9 Oct 2002.
JM: It wasn't a particularly musical household as far as I've read. And yet both you and your brother are musicians. How did you get started?
MS: I give credit to my father -- my biological father -- 'cause you have a sense that I grew up with my step-father. He was 35 years old and not particularly musically inclined but he worked with his hands. He was a carpenter and contractor and in the evenings when he'd get home he decided to teach himself to play the mandolin. And what a great role model that ended up being for my brother and I. Music is something that you can enjoy and appreciate. You don't have to be professional or that skilled at it but just to enjoy it and entertain yourself. So we started playing instruments around the same time.

From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
MS: And I was going to school -- I put myself through college as a matter of fact. There came that day, two years and I'd gotten all my requirements out of the way and I was asking my dad, "Now what?" And he gave me some good advice. He said, "You know, whatever I learned in life I always needed to be able to communicate it to people."

OK, well there's a communications college so I went and got a degree but I was pretty determined at that time to get the most impractical degree I could because it was in the '80s, you know, and the culture had shifted so much that everyone was looking at education as this kind of vocational or professional curiculum. So to be as impractical as I could there was a very, often, 'dusty corner' communications degree called Oral Interpretation Of Poetry. And it slays me to this day that essentially this is what I am now professionally making my living doing. It's very annoying but at the time it was intended to be just something that, "Ah they won't be able to hire me with this one." [both laugh]

MS: And around that time in college I met a gal who encouraged me to hook up with her and we started singing/performing. She turned me onto some really great and tasteful music: Old & In The Way and Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris and stuff like that. She put together the repertoire and I would throw in my originals. At some point, I guess maybe around the time, this guy came after I'd graduated and said, "Would you sing into my walkman a few of these songs?" And I get a letter in the mail sayin', "Hey, guess what! I played it for my friend on the BBC in England and they like it." I go, "Aw, maybe I'm a songwriter." [both laugh]

No, I think I spent some time in New York at a collective, you know, a songwriter music collective and there were songwriters there that I could really get that kinda insight into.

From article titled "Going Deeper", Blues Revue Extra, May 2002.
MS: I ran away at 16, but I finished high school in Gilmer. For one semester I went to a junior college in Jacksonville, Texas. Then, I can't explain why, but I left a circumstance that was kind of nice -- there was a scholarship program that covered housing and tuition, and I was a music major -- and I don't remember anything about it, I don't even know whether I went to classes. I left and went to Dallas, where I worked 30 hours a week reading telegrams. After that I went to the University of Texas. It was time to pick a major, and it was then that my dad and I had one of those really important conversations. He said, "Whatever you learn in life, you always want to be able to communicate with people." So I chose communications.

From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: I was arrested in San Francisco during the Democratic convention. Some people think I'd, you know, be a fool for that. But, then I went down to Dallas and did the same thing at the Republican convention [laughs]. I wasn't trying to get arrested. We had been inspired by this action we heard about in London, a group of friends called Stop The City where they would go around to different corporations that had been involved in... well I don't know what it was in London but I'll tell ya what we were doin'. There had been a lot of corporations that had contributed money to both the Democratic and Republican Parties and also happened to be making a lots of money off of the arms... they were makin' a lot of money off of people dyin' that's what they were doin'. So I got arrested once for conspiring to commit a misdemeanour, which is a felony and, in Dallas, arrested for public obscenity as in, "1-2-3-4 we don't wan't your f***in' war".

Well, you have to give 'em a name when you're arrested, don't you. Well, what are they gonna do, arrest you if you don't give 'em your real name? ????? ?????.

And, of course, I'm sure you all got the joke -- 'Chell Shocked, right. It was inspired by growing up as an army brat myself and feeling like I'd seen war even though I'd never been to the front. 'Cause my stepfather, he went to Vietnam and he came back really different. My mom hadn't been married to him that long. I think she'd already been divorced once so she wasn't really ready to divorce again. So I grew up in a really strange environment -- with a man who'd been shell-shocked by war and couldn't ever talk about it.

From performance at CBGBs, New York NY, 18 March 1996.
MS: Used to come here back in 84/85. Stand right over there in the corner. Used to have a mohawk and a ring in my nose and I was all kinds of gnarley. Homely... homeless and homely. Lived in a squat down over on 10th and... Seeyar(??). Oh Lord, I'm forgettin' it.

From interview by John Platt on City Folk Sunday Breakfast, Fordham University, WFUV, New York NY, 30 June 2002.
MS: I got here [New York] in November of '84 right before ol' what's-his-name got into office... Ronald Reagan, yeah. I couldn't remember. I was having trouble remembering his name. Sorta like he does. Then I was here again in '86.

MS: I lived on the Lower Eastside. I lived down on 10th between C and D. Gerry The Peddlar's squat. I was up on the 4th floor kind of baby-sitting this german shephard. [laughs]

From a Benefit for the homeless at The Palace, Hollywood CA, 21 November 1994.
MS: The way I experienced it homelessness doesn't happen overnight. It's a gradual process that I describe as diminishing self-esteem in the face of diminishing resources. Well I ran away from home when I was sixteen and I first moved in with friends... but things stopped bein' quite so friendly. And then I moved in with relatives... but we stopped relatin'. So I moved in with lovers... and how quickly that can turn to hate. When people first invite you into their homes they have very good intentions. They know that you're tryin' hard and they want to help you. They really do have good intentions but sooner or later you wear on their nerves and they're never quite honest enough to tell you that they want you to leave now so instead, what they do, is they start criticizin' ya for little things like are you leavin' the toilet seat lid down, or the kitchen cabinet doors open. And when you find yourself without a place to live time after time for these soughts of infractions your self-esteem does begin to start to drift away. You can imagine that the circumstances that made you feel that you had to runaway from home as a solution wasn't too good to begin with.

So I fell into a group of street musicians playin' out on the streets near Santa Cruz [San Francisco] and then we'd walk into the hills at night to sleep. One mornin' I was walking back into town to meet up with my friends and these policeman drove by. They drove past me and I got a little paranoid. I don't know whether it was my paranoia or their good police instincts but they turned around and came back and stopped their car right next to me. I got really scared and I started runnin'... down a blind alley. They jumped out of the car and they grabbed me and they said, "What's your name! What's your name!"... and I forgot what it was. They took me to the local mental hospital and shot me up full of thorazine. And let me tell you something about thorazine: if ya didn't think you were crazy before they give it to ya you sure as hell do after they done. They don't explain that the side-effect of thorazine is it makes your neck go like this... just kinda involuntarily... and they don't tell ya it's gonna do that.

So after about three days I realized I hadn't died and gone to hell and I called my father on the payphone in the lobby. He came and got me and he brought me back to Dallas where my friends met up with me and we started this cycle all over again -- playin' music on the streets and sleepin' with bands or cars or old trailers... wherever we could manage. I lived in the 'Western Section' of a book store one time.

I don't know quite what happened the second time but I found that my friends had called my mother. She came and got me this time and took me to the psychiatric hospital again. Well, this time when I got out -- not because I was cured or anything but because the insurance had run out -- I pretty much left Texas and I headed for New York City cause I knew there'd just be too damn many of us there. And I met this therapist, this woman named Isabel Pierce, and she told me, "Chelle, you're not crazy. You're just poor."

Not too long after this I felt pretty bleak about the way the country was turnin'. Well if you think about it, this was in 1985, we had a Republican in the White House and Democrats in Congress. And this here Benefit, I suppose, being five years old has seen quite a shifting spectrum itself from havin' Republicans in the White House and Democrats in Congress, Democrats in Congress and Democrats in the White House, we got Democrats in the White House and Republicans in Congress. We've had homeless people the whole damn time.

Well I left the country and I went to Amsterdam...

From article titled "Michelle Shocked's Secrets" by Pete Axthelm, Newsweek (US edition), 3 October 1988.
Shocked eventually made her way to Amsterdam. "I found out I could take care of myself on the road," she says. "I'd just squat in some building, protest a nuclear base or something, and move on." Eventually a cheap rail ticket took her to Sicily. "Then some guy offered me a ride to Rome, raped me and offered me money for it afterward. That drove me to a women's separatist commune."

But Shocked is clearly not suited for organized groups. "I got kicked out of there, too," she says.

From article titled "Good News At Last For Shocked Fans" by Angela Neville, The Canberra Times, Australia, 30 April 1988.
She says she was informed by letter one day that she had an album on the charts which was doing quite well. It was called The Texas Campfire Tapes, a bootleg made by someone who had asked her to sing into a tape recorder while performing at a festival.

When asked quite casually if this made her see red, she says, "I was mad, but in a different sense of the word".

"I had only been released from a mental hospital six months prior to this. I was living homeless in an abandoned building in Lower East Side New York in very difficult circumstances. When the recording was made I had just come back from living as a squatter in Amsterdam."

From interview for (BBC?) radio, Redcar, England, 29 October 1987.
INTERVIEWER: You've settled in England for a while. You said, I think I read, that sought of in London where you are now is probably the only place you'd want to settle at the moment.
MS: 'Based' is really a more accurate word for what I'm doin' here but it does so happen that when I do have time free I'm at my houseboat there in Tottenham. And that's really nice 'cause a lot of musicians come through. For example Brendan Croker's here with me tonight as well and my friend [The Eastside] Flash has come over from Texas 'cause he was in Germany. So yeah, people stop through London all the time so it's a real good crossroads.

From interview by John Platt on City Folk Sunday Breakfast, Fordham University, WFUV, New York NY, 30 June 2002.
JP: Did you live on a houseboat once upon a time too?
MS: That was also a fullfilled fantasy of mine. I lived in London on... it was called a narrow-boat. You know, those long boats that cruise up and down the Thames and the canals.

From article titled "Michelle Shocked Unlocks Her Musical Cage" by Larry Getlen, Bankrate.com, 9 May 2002.
MS: I signed with Mercury in November of 1987. In the summer of 1988 I was introduced to a lawyer.

From article titled "A Conversation with Michelle Shocked" by Frank Goodman, Puremusic, May 2002.
MS: So, when I negotiated my contract with Mercury, I basically did a licensing deal with them. For ten years, they owned the masters and just paid me a royalty. But after ten years, ownership of the masters reverted back to me. If they want to manufacture any of those records now, they have to pay me a licensing fee, which is different than a royalty.

From article titled "Michelle Shocked Finds Spiritual Clarity" by Wallace Baine, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 29 August 2002.
"I'm too cynical and too jaded to go in and be convinced and changed by someone's barnburning speech," she said. "What happened was, I was there developing musical ideas, listening closely to black gospel."

From article titled "Michelle Shocked Finds Spiritual Clarity" by Wallace Baine, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 29 August 2002.
What she discovered in that African-American church was a force in the music that cut through her well-earned religious skepticism. "What I discovered was that, that music had so much in it. And if there is indeed substance there and that substance is real, it's sheer arrogance of me to deny that it's not real.

"So that's how I found myself, quite to my surprise, moving in the direction of 'born again.'"

From article titled "20 Questions - Michelle Shocked" by Neil Gladstone, Philadelphia citypaper.net, 7-14 November 1996.
How did your feud with Mercury Records begin?

It started as a result of me moving in a direction that emphasized my love for R?. The folks at Mercury just didn't have the vision for a white girl on their label — who's being marketed as a singer/songwriter — to change gears.

In 1992, I proposed to Mercury that I do a collaboration with Tony! Toni! Tone!. Tony! Toni! Tone! was into it, but Ed Eckstein [president of Mercury until the end of 1995] flat out refused. I said: "OK, well, then here's a gospel influenced project I'd like to do." They weren't too into that, either.

The way I found out about their lack of support for that project wasn't by them saying "you can't do this or that." When I went to the studio I was told I couldn't record because Mercury hadn't submitted the purchase orders. I asked the label why and they said, "we believe the music you're proposing to go and record is stylistically inconsistent."

I asked: "how do you know, you haven't even heard it yet?"

That's when I was taken into the business affairs office and told the real reason. They told me, "you know when you negotiated for the rights of all of your recordings, you cut too good of a deal for yourself."

From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
MS: I haven't played acoustic guitar for about seven years now. I knew that if I really wanted to develop and learn how to play the electric guitar proper I was goin' to have to put down the thing that I was comfortable and familiar with and start walkin'... [the walk].

From article titled "The Education of Michelle Shocked" by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, 25 April 1996.
Shocked used to visit Texas a lot, usually to see her father in Dallas, a mandolin player named "Dollar" Bill Johnston who had a profound impact upon his young daughter. Dollar Bill used to take his young daughter, Michelle, and her brother, Wilco's Max Johnston, to bluegrass festivals around the country, and it was there that she picked up the folk and country sounds that would mark her best work. But Shocked says she has not been back to Texas in two years, since her last tour through these parts, and she doesn't much keep in contact with her father anymore.

"I'm not on good terms with him," she explains in a deadpan voice. Shocked's mother, who was divorced from Dollar Bill when Michelle was a kid, once committed Michelle to a Dallas psychiatric hospital 12 years ago. Michelle stayed there till the insurance money ran out, then she left home and never looked back except to see her father. Now, she has removed the rearview mirror altogether. "My father invited my mother to the hospital when my grandmother died, and I thought that was pretty insensitive."

From performance on the Morning Becomes Eclectic radio show, KCRW, Los Angeles CA, 3 April 2002 hosted by Nic Harcourt.
MS: We made a move, about the same time I'd say [as the contract dispute with Mercury Records], to New Orleans. We were there just soakin' it all up. The 'Mama root' is in New Orleans as far as I'm concerned. More about that later.
NH: What made you decide to head over there. I mean musically, obviously it's a city that offers so much and is very deep.
MS: Yeah. I say the 'Mama root' 'cause that's a New Orleans phrase for it. You've heard that saying 'the cradle of jazz' but even more than the cradle it's the Mama rockin' that cradle. I went there and I got so infused with living jazz, you know. Not concert hall jazz but living jazz, street jazz, jazz you dance to. And that lead me eventually to what I think is the real, real 'Mama root' is Gospel.

From performance at The Junction, Cambridge, England, 30 May 1996.
MS: I've been ??? for over three years now 'cause I've been fighting with my record label back in the States. They wouldn't let me record for them but they didn't want me to record for nobody else. So I got free in February of this year.

From performance at Cat's Cradle, Carrboro NC, 15 November 1996.
MS: We've been doing this [touring] now for almost eight weeks and it's pretty much gonna be the end of this chapter in my life. Not that I'm particularly sad to see it close. It's been a four year running battle -- a pissing match -- with the label formerly known as mine. And I finally won my freedom in April after I sued them in August of last year for violating my 13th Amendment rights. Remember history lessons? That's the amendment outlawing slavery.

From article titled "Shocked Keeps The Voltage Up" by Vit Wagner, The Toronto Star, 11 May 2000.
Contracted to produce four more albums, Shocked enlisted sports attorney Leigh Steinberg who, citing the amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits slavery, persuaded the label to relinquish its hold on Shocked and cede ownership over her output to that point.

That's why you won't find any of Shocked's CDs in record stores today. Her three most recent albums, Kind Hearted Woman, Artists Make Lousy Slaves and Good News, were released as limited issues and sold only at gigs.

"In gaining ownership over my entire body of work, I had to agree to let the (earlier) catalogue go out of print. But it's a temporary situation."

From performance at Cat's Cradle, Carrboro NC, 15 November 1996.
MS: And so now it's [Kind Hearted Woman] been released on a label out of L.A. called Private Music. I just went in and told 'em, "I need one thing from you and that's respect." They said, "OK. You sure you don't want any money?" I said, "OK, well, maybe that to."