Goodbye, Earth Angel, So Long, Earth Mother by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 4 September 1988
The Pop Life by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 14 September 1988
Michelle Shocked's Secrets by Pete Axthelm, Newsweek (US edition), 3 October 1988
Shocked by Nicole Pensiero, Philadelphia City Paper, 10-17 March 1989
Michelle Shocked, Taking Stock by Richard Harrington, Washington Post, 15 March 1989
The Return Of Captain Swing by Carolyn MacDonald, The Age, ~October 1989
From Racism To Rape, Songs To Shock You by Elisabeth Lopez, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 15 December 1989
Polities Gets The Shocked Treatment by Marcus Breen, The Sunday Age, Melbourne, Australia, ~December 1989
Shocked Moves Into Mainstream, Shows Intellectuals Can Swing by Robert K. Oermann, Gannett News Service, 13 April 1990
Shocked Value: She Took A Turn From The Words, Came Out Swinging by Patrick Macdonald, The Seattle Times, 18 May 1990
A Song For Victims Of Tian An Men Square by Chuck Philips, Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1990
State Of Shock by Suzy Freeman-Greene, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, ~February 1991
Electric Shocked by Brian Wise, The Sunday Age, Melbourne, Australia, 10? March 1991
Shocked Waves by Nicole Pensiero, Courier-Post, Camden - Cherry Hill NJ, 12 April 1992
Roam If You Want To by Taras Misko, RAVE Magazine, ~April 1992
A Change In Lifestyle For Michelle Shocked by ?, Scotland on Sunday, Edinburgh, Scotland, 22 August 1993
Shock Tactics by Kevin Courtney, The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland, 9 April 1994
Tour Reviews by Hal Espy, The New Yorker, 13 June 1994
No Re-Trial For Absent Party, The Times, London, 4 November 1994
Talent Crosses Musical Borders by ?, The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, Australia, 25 March 1995
An Unlikely Song-and-Dance Team by Steven Stolder, The San Francisco Chronicle, 22 October 1995
Michelle Shocked survives her share of jolts by Kevin Ransom, The Detroit News, 1996
The Education of Michelle Shocked by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, 25 April 1996
Michelle Shocked Back On Track by Heather Rayburn, Gannett News Service, 31 May 1996
Shocked Treatment by Steve Hochman, Los Angeles Times, 6 October 1996
Shocked values by Cynthia Joyce, Salon, 14 October 1996
Shocking by Jason Cohen, Texas Monthly, November 1996
20 Questions - Michelle Shocked by Neil Gladstone, Philadelphia citypaper.net, 7-14 November 1996
Look Who's Back In Charge by Nigel Williamson, The Times, London, 22 November 1996
Musical Bravery by Kevin Avery, CitySearch, June 1997
Michelle Shocked's Manager Wins Suit by ?, RollingStone.com, 8 October 1997
Q & A With Michelle Shocked by Aidin Vaziri, The San Francisco Chronicle, 15 March 1998
Shocking Revelations by Mike Alexander, The Sunday News Auckland, 29 March 1998
Some Kind Of Wanderful by Mike O'Toole, Rage, Brisbane, Australia, 8 April 1998
Here's The Good News by Matt Connors, Time Off, Brisbane, Australia, 8 April 1998
We're About to be Shocked Once More by Elissa Lawrence, The Sunday Mail, Brisbane, Australia, 12 April 1998
Good News At Last For Shocked Fans by Angela Neville, The Canberra Times, Australia, 30 April 1998
Shock to the System by Bill Smith, Willamette Week, Portland OR, 17 February 1999
Michelle Shocked by Nicole Pensiero, Philadelphia citypaper.net, 4-11 May 2000
Shocked Keeps The Voltage Up by Vit Wagner, The Toronto Star, 11 May 2000
A Huge Talent Resurfaces by Lynn Saxberg, The Ottawa Citizen, 13 May 2000
Bound To Be Glorious: The Long Hard Road Of Michelle Shocked by Emmett Williams, Music Manic, 17 May 2000
Shocked Treatment by Alan Sculley, The Sonoma County Independent, 8-14 June 2000
Michelle Shocked, Oregon Folklife Festival, 2000
Short, Sharp, Servitude, Boulder Weekly, 14 Dec 2000
Foley To Get Shocked At Bluesfest, Ottawa Sun, 4 July 2001
Into The Light by Stewart Oksenhorn, Aspen Times, 13 July 2001
Michelle Shocked's Righteous Birdsong by Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Eagle, Great Barrington MA, 25 August 2001
Shocked Brings A More Spiritual Edge On Tour by Erik E. Esckilsen, Boston Globe, 29 August 2001
Shocked Treatment by John Threlfall, Monday Magazine, Victoria, Canada, 1-7 November 2001
Nothing's Shocking by Mike Bell, Calgary Sun, 2 November 2001
Eclectic Shocked Plugging In by Darryl Sterdan, Winnipeg Sun, 2 November 2001
Shocked Continues Trouble-Making Ways by Shawn Conner, Vancouver Courier, 5 November 2001
The Unique Sister by Lynne Snifka, The Anchorage Press, 8-14 November 2001
Michelle Shocked by Lucas Hendrickson, NashvilleRage.com, April 2002
Shocked Brings Mighty Sound To Her Own New Label by Mark Lowry, Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, 17 April 2002
Shocked Returns With New Double CD by Andy Stonehouse, The Daily Camera, 19 April 2002
Singer-Activist Walks The Talk by Sandra Barrera, Los Angeles Daily News, 20 April 2002
Shocked Treatment by John Lehndorff, Rocky Mountain News, 24 April 2002
Michelle Shocked Finally Finds Joy by Neil Baron, The Reno Gazette-Journal, 25 April 2002
A Conversation with Michelle Shocked, Puremusic, May 2002
Disenchanted As Ever, Chronogram, May 2002
Michelle Shocked To Play Birchmere, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg VA, 2 May 2002
'Natural' Progression by Larry Katz, Boston Herald, 8 May 2002
Michelle Shocked Unlocks Her Musical Cage by Larry Getlen, Bankrate.com, 9 May 2002
Going Deeper, Blues Revue Extra, May 2002
Bio Terrorism, by Dave Wielenga, Orange County Weekly, 7-13 June 2002
All Wrapped Up, by Steve Hochman, Los Angeles Times, 13 June 2002
[OFFSITE] Michelle Shocked Still Standing Her Ground by Scott D. Lewis, The Oregonian, July 2002
Eclecticism Of Music Reflects Variety Of Life by Dave Tianen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 13 August 2002
Michelle Shocked Finds Spiritual Clarity by Wallace Baine, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 29 August 2002
Michelle Shocked's Indie Triumph by Brian Wise, Telstra Entertainment, Australia, 23 October 2002
Interview with Michelle Shocked by Talia Soghomonian, NY Rock, December 2002
Joy And Faith by Eric van Domburg Scorpio, Heaven, Vol.5 #1, The Netherlands, Jan/Feb 2003
Shocked Treatment, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, 14 March 2003
Shocked War Response by Julian Porter, DIG Internet Radio, Australia, 21 March 2003
Michelle Shocked by Christie Eliezer, Beat Magazine Issue #853, Australia, 2 April 2003
Shock Factor by Julian Porter, Time Off, Brisbane, Australia, 16 April 2003
Shocked But Unfazed by Chris Beck, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 21 April 2003
The New York Times, 4 September 1988
Goodbye, Earth Angel, So Long, Earth Mother
by Stephen Holden
One of the most encouraging signs of vitality in American pop this year has been the excitement surrounding records made by young women who eschew the traditional trappings of pop glamour to project a defiantly androgynous self-sufficiency.
Tracy Chapman, K. D. Lang, Sinead O'Connor and Michelle Shocked -- women whose de-glamorized images and tough-minded songs cut against traditional male-dependent stereotypes -- are cracking through the mainstream to reach an audience eager for something more substantial than cotton-candy fluff and heavy-metal bluster.
Quirky, sometimes political, and feminist in spirit, their music is being promoted by an industry that is as thoroughly male-dominated today as it was 15 years ago, when a separatist women's music movement evolved with its own labels and distribution system. While that movement continues, the drippingly sentimental folk-pop style of most so-called women's music remains rooted in a shopworn archetype of the folk singer as a healing earth mother.
Whether or not today's new breed of young, androgynous pop women identify themselves as feminists, neither their songs nor the images they project cater to stereotypical male fantasies of the female pop singer as angelic doll, earth mother or foxy vixen. Romance may have a place in their songs, but when relationships are discussed, it is rarely in terms of finding true love and living happily ever after. The kind of betrayal that once automatically evoked tearful heartache and painful self-questioning is nowadays more likely to incite anger and disgust.
Over the last 35 years, the messages women have been been communicating in pop music have undergone a stunning reversal. Pop hits of the early 60's like "Where the Boys Are," "Johnny Angel," "Soldier Boy," "Bobby's Girl," "Leader of the Pack" and countless others portrayed a young woman's love as ecstatic, quasi-religious hero worship. A decade later, once the sexual revolution was in full swing, the message was similar, although more sophisticated and bittersweet. Anxious desperation had replaced blind faith. Joni Mitchell sounded almost weary as she pleaded, "Help me, I think I'm falling in love again."
Since the mid-70's, increasing numbers of women have turned away from cliches of romantic salvation to explore other solutions to the pop equation. Performers as different as the punk-rocker Patti Smith, the hard rocker Joan Jett and the disco diva Grace Jones have toyed with the role of sexual aggressor.
Annie Lennox of Eurythmics has tried on and discarded dozens of images as blithely as one might flip the remote-control switch of a television set from program to program. Joan Armitrading and Suzanne Vega have extended the vocabulary of folk way beyond political/romantic platitudes. Young women entering pop music today have an extraordinary variety of nonconformist personalities and images for reference. They range all the way from Cyndi Lauper's endearing, impulsive kook to Laurie Anderson's intellectual vaudevillian.
The pop success story of the year -- one whose lessons are just now being absorbed by the record industry -- has been the indefatigable march to the top of the charts by Tracy Chapman. In an assembly-line climate where conventionally glamorous performers like Madonna, Belinda Carlisle and Whitney Houston are cloned the minute they become popular, Ms. Chapman is an inimitable anomaly.
The 24-year-old black singer and composer with short-braided hair and a stage wardrobe of the most casual street clothes soared to the top of the charts without the benefit of any sexy image-making. "Fast Car," the album's initial hit single, is a gripping first-person narrative depicting a tragic cycle of inner-city poverty and single parenthood. In mood and style, the record breaks almost every rule of pop marketing. Its story is downbeat, and its folkish music not designed to fit snugly into a commercial radio format.
Almost as dramatic has been the acceptance of K. D. Lang, a crewcut Canadian tomboy and performance artist-turned-singer, whose second album, "Shadowland," has reached the Top 10 on the country music charts. An album of mostly obscure torch songs arranged in a period style by Owen Bradley, Patsy Cline's onetime producer, the record is an unlikely hit, the more so because Ms. Lang's boyish looks and attitude belie the music's dreamy romanticism.
Like Linda Ronstadt's albums of standards with the late Nelson Riddle, "Shadowland" re-creates the sound of another era. But where Ms. Ronstadt's nostalgia was consistent with the lovelorn persona that her earlier records had exalted, Ms. Lang's album is a studied experiment in role playing. The crooning on "Shadowland" is barely recognizable from the punchy rockabilly singing on her debut album, "Angel With a Lariat."
In a harder rock mode, the Dublin-born singer and composer, Sinead O'Connor shaves her head and wails original songs written in a strong, uncategorizable mixture of folk and rock. Ms. O'Connor defies sexual stereotypes in her songs as well as in appearance. In "Don't Call Me Joe," the final cut of her successful debut album, "The Lion and the Cobra," she announces, "Don't call me sweetheart/ Just call me Joe."
"Short Sharp Shocked," the first studio album by Michelle Shocked, a Texan-born, London-based singer and songwriter who bears a striking physical resemblance to the youthful Bob Dylan, has also created a stir. Four years ago, the singer, who is a grass-roots political organizer, was arrested while demonstrating at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. She thereupon christened herself Michelle Shocked after her own reaction to being arrested. A news photograph of the incident adorns the cover of her new album.
Ms. Shocked is a superb natural storyteller in a rambling southern country-folk mode. A wry sense of humor animates songs that evoke her East Texas background in such precise detail that you can almost taste the pungency of the landscape. "V.F.D." (the initials stand for volunteer fire department), the most atmospheric song on her new album, is an extended vignette, in which the narrator recalls the time she and a friend played a game of throwing matches into the dry grass, closing their eyes, counting to 10 and racing into the field to stamp out the fire they had started. Eventually they ignite a blaze that can't be put out. The townspeople suspect arson, but no one discovers the culprits.
While the song has the ring of a true story, it is also an apt metaphor for the singer herself and for a generation of smart, restless young women who are entering a pop world where they no longer need to be typecast. Instead of envisaging love, marriage and family as their ultimate destiny, they are free to throw musical matches into volatile cultural tinder.
The New York Times, 14 September 1988
The Pop Life
by Stephen Holden
Bucolic memories and populist politics coincide on "Short Sharp Shocked" (Mercury/Polygram), the first studio album by 26-year-old Michelle Shocked. Ten years ago, the crewcut singer and songwriter fled her Mormon background in East Texas to lead the itinerant life of a socially engaged folk singer, traveling all over the United States and to England, where her current home base is a London houseboat.
"I go out of my way to call myself a dissident," Ms. Shocked said in a recent interview. "Living outside the United States in an election year is one way of expressing my feelings about the American political climate."
After Tracy Chapman, Ms. Shocked, who in addition to dissident calls herself "anarchist, populist, and feminist," is arguably the most talented among the new breed of postpunk female folk performers who flaunt deglamorized images and write songs that usually avoid the sort of romantic reflectiveness exemplified by Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Judy Collins.
"I don't have a lot of musical influences but the ones I have run real deep," Ms. Shocked said. "They include Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, bluegrass, and Texan songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt."
Last April, Mercury/Polygram Records released, "The Texas Campfire Tapes," a crude live recording of Ms. Shocked performing at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas four years ago. On it the singer's voice competes with the sounds of loudly chirping crickets. The music on "Short Sharp Shocked," her studio debut is a crisp, understated mixture of acoustic folk and light rockabilly. The record brims with happy-go-lucky charm and smart-aleck humor. Among the more memorable songs are three pungent evocations of the singer's East Texas adolescence. "(Making the Run to) Gladewater" describes a typical Saturday night in a "dry" county where local youths flip coins to see who will make the 30-mile drive to buy beer across the county line. "Memories of East Texas" and "V.F.D." paint the East Texas landscape in bright sharp images. "Anchorage," the album's first single, is a letter to the singer from an old friend who has married, moved to Alaska, and started bringing up a family.
Ms. Shocked's 10-year odyssey has carried her from Austin to San Francisco to New York to Amsterdam where she became involved in the squatter's movement and the politics of the homeless. The singer, who will not reveal her original name, christened herself Michelle Shocked after being arrested in a demonstration at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. A black-and-white photo of the incident adorns the cover of her new album.
Oddly, for all of her political activities, the record includes only one pointedly political song, "Graffiti Limbo," an expression of sympathy for Michael Stewart, the New York graffiti maker who died in 1985 while in the custody of the city's transit police.
"Graffiti limbo/Where do you go?/ Graffiti limbo/When there ain't no justice?" she asks in a tone of low-keyed sarcasm.
Ms. Shocked doesn't see herself as a protest singer in the liberal broadside tradition of the 60's folk anthems.
"I have no strong compulsion to speak out publicly with my music," she explained. "I'm committed to letting people draw their own conclusions. I'm a populist in the broadest sense of the word."
Newsweek (US edition), 3 October 1988
Michelle Shocked's Secrets
by Pete Axthelm
An off-beat talent emerges with a haunting album.
Spooky. Her first album was recorded on a Walkman at a Texas picnic, with crickets as background sound. Her second comes wrapped in a cover showing her being choked by police at a demonstration at the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco. "Spooky," rolled over the tongue with soft childlike resonance, is a refrain from one of her best songs. It is about a ghost town, complete with a skeleton reaching through jailhouse bars and a saloon where the whiskey has held its flavor -- and its secrets.
"Keep some secrets, never tell," warns the enigmatic and wonderful Michelle Shocked in that song. "And those secrets will keep you very well."
The secret of Michelle Shocked's off-beat talent, an elusive isotope somewhere between folk, country and old-fashioned protest music, has gotten out in Europe. She tours widely there and is based in London on a small houseboat, next to a homeless man named Old Fred who squats in an abandoned ambulance with his dog, Trouble. Her second album, "Short Sharp Shocked," deserves to attract a wider audience in the United States. But if acclaim eludes her, Shocked will hardly be daunted. "I can always diffuse anger with a song," she says. "I'm free and I haven't been defeated."
Michelle Shocked -- has any musician thought of a better stage name? -- appears at a dinner date as an ethereal presence, hair close-cropped, eyes inquisitive, visions veering in uncharted directions. "I'm 25," she says, looking younger. "I figure I'll pick a good age and stick with it. I do know that I've still got a badge of innocence."
The badge has been hard won. Raised in Texas, Shocked left home and school when she was 16. In outposts from New York's East Village to San Francisco to Amsterdam, she squatted in empty buildings and took up the cause of other homeless kids. "I've used a doormat for a pillow and slept on top floors where odds were better that I wouldn't be found," she says. "Being a homeless young person is being a part of a despised class. That's why I write songs with a political context."
Some are stridently political, including "Graffiti Limbo," the most powerful one on her new album. (It is dedicated to a New York man who died after being violently subdued and arrested for besmirching a subway wall.) But more are, well, spooky.
In her music and her soft, intense conversation, Shocked is alternately whimsical, thought-provoking and haunting. "The Ballad of Patch Eye and Meg" echoes Jimmy Buffett, minstrel of the sea. "The Secret Admirer" is a capsule of the cocaine culture that Jay McInerney stretches into novels. "Anchorage" is a beautiful, plaintive cry from all women forced to settle for the mundane when excitement lies out there with the likes of Shocked.
But when she is addressed with what she calls "flattery overkill," she quickly interjects some cold facts. After she ran away, her mother, whom she calls a "Tammy Bakker type," caught up with her and committed her to a mental hospital. "It's typical of what happens to homeless kids," she says. "From society's point of view, running away is a crime. A lot of parents use hospitals that way." Her hospital stay ended when her mother's insurance coverage ran out: "I guess you're only crazy when you have insurance."
Cheap fares: 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. That was when she wrote her ghost-town song. She began it with what sounded like a cliched introduction: "This is my most recent song... Who cares?" The last phrase became the song title.
But Shocked cares, about sexism, racism and runaways. Her unconventional style can be compared with the populism of Woody Guthrie, the literate storytelling of Tom T. Hall and the wit of her friend and mentor, undervalued songwriter Guy Clark. But the closest definition comes down to caring. And surviving. One autobiographical tone poem, sung while her guitar is silent, concludes: "She never found a job where she was not fired/ But she never found a town where she was not hired."
Guy Clark once wrote another line that applies: "I wish I had a dime for every bad time/ But the bad times always seem to keep the change." Michelle Shocked has done more than her share of bad time and somehow picked up the change and parlayed it into a voice that both entertains and matters. An evening with her is intellectually challenging and emotionally draining. It ends with a warm hug and a retreat to some of her friends at the bar. Then she sees something, or someone, she doesn't want to be around. She is gone without a trace. Spooky.
Philadelphia City Paper, 10-17 March 1989
Shocked
by Nicole Pensiero
Two years ago a London producer taped her making music around a campfire at a Texas folk festival. Released on vinyl, the "Texas Campfire Tapes" jumped to number one on the British Independent charts.
It takes a moment to figure out why she throws you off a little. Then it hits you: the voice is so mild, sweetened with a soft Texan twang. After hearing Michelle Shocked sing -- her intoxicating soprano slipping into every role from mischievous teenager to desolate survivor of a dead coal mining town -- you're caught off guard by how, well, regular she sounds talking. Can that be the same person who belts out -- with oh-so-subtle sexual overtones -- that if love were a train she'd ride her a slow one?
And there's something else about Shocked -- her offbeat, dry humor -- that makes you wonder if the person with the pensive, nearly heartbroken expression in all the promo shots is really her.
The low-key, polite way that Shocked articulates herself seems in sharp contrast to everything you've heard ahout this self-described picker-poet: the difficult upbringing, the years as a runaway and squatter, the time spent (against her will) in a mental institution. You wouldn't be surprised to hear some righteousness in her voice, some "I've lived to tell about it" pride.
But Michelle Shocked remains an unpretentious enigma. And when she tells you she's disappointed in herself for being disappointed that she didn't win the Contemporary Folk Recording Grammy (Tracy Chapman received the honor), you can't help but feel that this woman's honesty goes far beyond the often painful reminiscences of her songs.
"When I was recording Short Sharp Shocked somebody told me, 'Hey, Michelle, you might get the Grammy for this one.' And I immediately responded with, 'Sod you, and sod your Grammy awards.' And then you know, the nomination came up and it did matter, which I'm ashamed to admit. I mean, there are so many great people who never even get a chance to record..."
Despite the fact you tell her that, hey, anybody nominated for a Grammy would want to win, you get the feeling that Shocked -- for so many years an underground musician -- feels guilty ahout wanting some kind of mainstream acknowledgment.
Still, for all the changes of the past year -- the record contract, the critical acclaim, the television appearances -- Shocked seems, like the eye of a tornado, to stand quite calmly while everything whirls around her.
Speaking from a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, only three days after her first performance with a backup band on The Tonight Show, it's apparent that Shocked has been able to reconcile her political beliefs with the commercial aspects of the music industry.
"I mean, being on the Carson show made me glad for the opportunity, but it also meant I had to play the game," she recalls. "It was more like the tiger was riding me than I was riding the tiger. My vision is truly to help people speak for themselves, and my music, hopefully, promotes the painful growth involved in speaking for yourself. I want to work toward a sense of community and I think I can still do that even if it involves the very finite concept of promotion. If someone else isn't going to take that opportunity, I sure as hell am."
Shocked says that her unusual background may leave people wondering if she is attempting to 'mythologize' herself to create an image that will attract a very specific audience.
"All I've ever wanted to do is lay my cards out on the table and tell where I've been," she says. "I mean, I don't feel I have to come out with all this feminist stuff because I am one... my experiences, my travels, my life has led me in that direction. I certainly can't disassociate myself from my experiences. I put my money where my mouth is."
Shocked's passionate interest in politics -- particularly squatter's rights, sexism and runaway kids -- is directly linked to her own truth-is-stranger-than-fiction life story. Raised in Gilmer, Texas, by a strict fundamentalist mother, Shocked ran away from home at 15 to check out the music scene in Austin. From there, she traveled to New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam, squatting in empty buildings and taking up the cause of other homeless kids. In between, her mother -- whom Shocked has described as a 'Tammy Faye Bakker type' -- tracked her down and had her committed, against her will, to a mental institution, where she spent time until her mother's insurance money ran out. Shocked was also raped while hitchhiking in Italy, an experience that, for a short time, drove her to a women's separatist commune.
Shocked acknowledges that her well-publicized background has left some people unsure of how to approach her or her music. Are her songs going to be overtly political? Or angry? Is her music going to be as disturbing as that photograph on her album cover where the cop is choking her?
The answer to those questions is a qualified no, as her songs are simultaneously non-threatening and thought-provoking. Those who are listening, she says, seem to be attracted by "a new kind of outlook... a promise of change" in her music.
And if she's occasionally recognized in public now, Shocked says she just pulls out that "cliched Texan response of 'Aw, shucks, ma'am, it weren't nothing.'"
But you suspect that Shocked realizes (even if she won't admit it to herself) that her talent is something quite worthy of attention. A blend of country, folk, blues and swing (which Shocked describes as 'blues with an upbeat sound'), her music is, most noticeably, refreshingly uncluttered. But all the conflicting images about Shocked have left people wondering just what is she, anyway? The stage name, coupled with the weird photograph on the cover of her first major label release, Short Sharp Shocked, automatically brought the image to mind of a punk rocker. The promo label attached to that album, noting that the record should be filed in the "Pop/Rock" section of the store, did little to shed light on the reality of Shocked's music. While there is one hard-rocking (and uncredited) tune on the album, Shocked is unmistakably a countrified folkie, who has tried, in her own words, "to capture both ends of the spectrum of the human experience."
"A poet once said that until we have a society where people can feel as comfortable about crying in public as they do with laughing, you're going to have a messed-up society," Shocked says, "I guess that's what I'm trying to do with my songs -- show the good and bad. Let people feel it all when they listen."
Shocked's Lana Turner-like discovery was both unusual and fitting. Sitting around a campfire at the Kenville, Texas, Folk Festival two years ago, Shocked was taped onto a Walkman by producer Pete Lawrence. Lawrence then went back to London, debuted the tape on a radio station, released it on vinyl and watched the aptly-named "Texas Campfire Tapes" jump to number one on the British Independent charts. By the time Shocked knew of his intentions, the record was out, complete with the sound of pickup trucks and crickets in the background.
Polygram then came courting and while Shocked reportedly turned down a six-figure advance -- urging the label to sign up an additional artist with the money -- she did agree to put out a studio album. But the rebel in her soul did not initially mesh well with the concept of something so planned, and she reportedly told producer Pete Anderson (best known as Dwight Yoakum's guitarist/producer) that she was doing the record under protest. Anderson understood Shocked's leeriness about the formal recording process and tried to keep everything as 'live' as possible, whether capturing Shocked and just one other instrument or backing her up with San Francisco-based hardcore band M.D.C.
The result is an album where the songs, richly seasoned by Shocked's Texan heritage, sizzle in electric roadhouse rock.
Even if Shocked is a little too off the beaten path for the mainstream music listener, the talent is there, bright as a beacon. Polygram figured that people would listen and they were right.
It was understandable that Shocked got thrown in with the abundance of impressive women singers to make a mark in 1988: Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, Tracy Chapman, Toni Childs, Melissa Etheridge. But there was a major difference: while the others were heading toward rock or at least what would be safe to call a more urbun sound, Shocked seemed headed straight for the Mason-Dixon line. And her songs carried on the true 'picker-poet' tradition that Shocked talks about: rather than alluding to emotions, she was creating entire little novels in each tune, complete with quirky characters and twisting plots.
While Shocked acknowledges that she's not far removed from the style of the Nashville 'new traditionalists,' (particularly fellow Texan Lyle Lovett), her songs have gotten little airplay on country music stations. She won't comment much about that, other than to say it might have something to do with getting lumped into what she calls the "new-women-making-music-category," whose artists have been directed to album-oriented radio.
"There's no doubt that my music is pure roots, rural Texas stuff," she says. "I mean, I can picture a tune like 'Gladewater' fitting right in on the country stations... it hasn't happened yet, but it still might."
Shocked is currently in the middle of a 25-city tour that will bring her to the Theatre of the Living Arts for two shows on March 16. After the tour concludes, she's heading back to the studio to record a new album. And while the upcoming album, like Short Sharp Shocked will feature other musicians, Shocked plans to continue touring with just her voice and trusty acoustic guitar.
On stage, Shocked is everything you would expect and then some. Without the help of a band -- and sometimes without the assistance of any instruments at all -- Shocked always looks and sounds like she's having a damn good time up there, telling her stories in between the songs. But she'll switch gears in midstream, going from a rollickin' good ol' boy tune to one that is so unflinchingly unadorned that all you can focus on is the conviction in her voice.
The Steve Goodman-penned "Ballad of Penny Evans" is one such song. Told from the vantage point of a young Vietnam war widow, Shocked becomes so involved in the raw pain of the lyrics that, for those four minutes, she is Penny Evans, and the audience is stunned into silence, like someone who has been told a friend's deepest fears.
It really doesn't matter, then, if Shocked's listeners have never seen east Texas' "piney green rolling hills," or if they even know what a cudzah vine is, much less what it looks like. There is an intimacy to Shocked's music, a unique way she captures the themes of innocence and experience that seems to transcend cultural boundaries.
Still, she laughs about the possibility that she might be on her way to becoming a folk icon -- that for some people she's a kind of musical hero.
"I'd rather be your anti-hero," she replies.
So far, it looks like Michelle Shocked can be anything she wants.
Washington Post, 15 March 1989
MICHELLE SHOCKED, TAKING STOCK
SUCCESS AND THE SINGER'S RADICAL POLITICS
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Michelle Shocked -- of course that's not her real last name, more a bridge between her first name and her occasional mental state. She calls her music "folk with a vengeance" or "hard-core folk," which was certainly the case with her debut album, "The Texas Campfire Tapes." Like fellow string bean Texan Buddy Holly, Shocked made her first recording with the crickets. Not the bass-drum-guitar Crickets, but those little leg-rubbing crickets. How those tapes came to the public is already pop legend -- the musical equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in a Hollywood drugstore.
In 1986, Shocked (her real last name remains a secret) was at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas -- as a fan, not a performer -- when a visiting Brit, Pete Lawrence, heard her swapping songs with other festival goers on the fringes. After he asked whether he could record her on his Sony Walkman, Lawrence sat Shocked by a campfire (hence the title), and simply turned on the little tape recorder, which captured not only Shocked but assorted chirping crickets and cars passing by on the interstate; the slight variability in the vocals has been attributed to low batteries.
Next thing Shocked knew, the album was released in England, which has an ongoing fascination with American primitives and outsiders: "Texas Campfire Tapes" quickly went to the top of the independent charts, probably the first album that cost more to buy than it did to record. Soon afterward, PolyGram came courting and Shocked moved into the major league of pop, with her first studio album winning many critical honors and earning her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Tonight, Shocked performs at the 9:30 club.
Shocked, 26, was raised in East Texas between the extremes of a Mormon fundamentalist mother and stepfather and a "devout atheist" father. She ran away from home at 16 and gradually embraced a radical individualism that took her to San Francisco, Europe and New York and involved her in a number of social causes (the brutal photo on the cover of her recent album "Short Sharp Shocked" is from a newspaper clip of the singer being arrested in a 1984 fair-housing demonstration in San Francisco).
Back then, music was simply a part of Shocked's life, not the focus of a career. Social idealism, fueled by her experiences as a homeless person and as a two-time psychiatric patient (she was committed by her mother until insurance payments ran out), was the driving force. That led her to live in squats and work for less-than-minimal wages. "I was so extreme," she recalls. "I wanted to live on $3,000 a year because that's what you can make without paying taxes, which would then buy bombs which would then be dropped on people in South America."
Someone suggested to Shocked that such positions made her "just another knee-jerk anarchist," she laughs. "Well, like most of my politics, they're aspirations. I try to be real true to my roots and not adopt an ideology to substitute for my ignorance."
The move to PolyGram, the success of both the new album and its singles, "Anchorage" and "When I Grow Up," videos for those songs, the media attention -- all have forced Shocked to take stock of her political outlook. "Now I'm caught in a different sort of argument altogether," she admits.
No one seemed to have noticed that the publishing company for Shocked's "Campfire" songs was based in Washington: The address turned out to be the same as the Youth International Party, the Yippies ("That's my publishers," she chuckles). Now, Shocked has been embraced by the yuppies as well, an irony not lost on her. "You drop out of the system and you write about what you see, and as a consequence of that, you've got something they want to buy. So then you start looking at what you can do with the opportunity and you try and balance it. Now I'm caught in the yuppie myth that I always claimed was a media contrivance, where people who worked outside the system thought they could work inside the system to change it. I don't believe it, but that's exactly what I've done."
Still, the idea of using her success to subvert the pop oligarchy must be sweet for Shocked, who had never even performed in a club or concert when her first album topped the British independent album charts. She'd participated in the music fringes in Austin, where songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt were the modern edge of older influences like Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly (who, come to think of it, also was discovered in a field recording of sorts); and in San Francisco, where Shocked connected to the hard-core punk/skateboard scene, the latest wrinkles of alternative culture stretching back to hippies, beatniks and bohemians before them.
In New York, she'd also been a squatter and a part of the Lower East Side "antifolk" scene, a Mohawk-haired fiddler playing from the back of The Fort cooperative, "looking for alternatives to the West Village folk scene, which was desperately James Taylorish, the legacy being Suzanne Vega and so forth." And, Shocked says, "their orientation was to getting a record contract rather than playing to the people in the very room. That was a big shock after coming from Austin where no one had those ambitions, which may be why Austin's such a great nurturing environment for so many songwriters."
Of course, not everyone can be discovered in a Texas field. Still, that dichotomy of approaches between New York and Austin has had little effect on Shocked, who feels "there's no such thing as too laid back when it comes to music. My whole thing is to decentralize it and let people know you don't need a record to make good music. It all started as recording something that was already going on, not what was being created in the studio; now it's a whole art medium, and that's fine for some people. Personally I've never owned a record player in my life."
Growing up in Gilmer, Tex., after years of country-skipping with her military stepfather and mother, Shocked was denied music and television in her home, but when she spent summers with her father, he not only turned her on to roots American music but frequently took her to bluegrass festivals, where she honed her self-taught skills on guitar and fiddle. "That's where a lot of my vision comes from," Shocked says of the festivals. "If you want the best jam, you've got to make your own. It's about getting together and entertaining and amusing yourself ..."
Although she has sometimes trundled into the "folk revival" ghetto with Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega, Shocked prefers the latitude offered by the word "roots" because "it has a lot of the same meanings as 'folk' and it doesn't eliminate things that aren't white and English." She's been a participant and supporter of the WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) festival movement, which brings together the cultures of five continents under one (hopefully blue) sky. At one festival, Shocked shared the stage with the 22-member Burundi Drummers and Dancers, and "even though I'm just a girl with a guitar, I feel a lot of common bond with what's happened with them: They've been taken out of their context, out of their community, out of their natural environment and put into a strange one. Then, with a couple of spotlights and reviews, suddenly you've got a scene."
Or a community. She's recently been reading '60s music activist John Sinclair's "Guitar Army," and "I'm rather inspired right now by the idea that you have to have a culture to correspond with the politics, which is already true in the women's scene, from which I get a lot of support. Many feminists from the '70s have gone into the mainstream and used feminism as a tool for getting more power."
These days, though, Shocked lives on a small houseboat on the Thames in London. She calls herself a "dissident expatriate." "I just felt the political climate of America excluded me from that definition {of being} American," she explains. "Of course my roots are American through and through, and the fact that I left the country wasn't for tax reasons, but for political reasons and to create a poignant sense that I love this country so much that if I can make a point by leaving it ..."
Well, you can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl, apparently. "Short Sharp Shocked" was a virtual catalogue of American music, from old-timey, bluegrass and country to blues, rockabilly, swing and even punk. As committed as she is personally, there is little overt politics in her music. "I feel what I've done by keeping the record fairly subtle is to make people curious enough to come see me live, and that's where I put in my two cents' worth," she says conspiratorially.
Shocked is already putting together her next album, which has a working title of "The Swing Vote."
"I've chosen a strategy which could be called entertaining the troops as opposed to preaching to the converted," she says. "There will be a whole spectrum of swing styles because I want to put forth the argument that swing is a feeling and that everything else is just style. I'm hoping that will give the strength to carry on this argument about a pan-cultural movement based around roots music, because it's the swing feeling in music that attracts us. That's why I can love hard core and rap and blues and folk. It's also what makes music go beyond just lyrics."
THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN SWING
Her first album was recorded on a walkman while sitting around a camp fire at a Texan folk festival while her second was adorned with a photograph of her being arrested by police at a demonstration at the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco. The copyright clause on her soon-to-be-released third album reads: "Unauthorised copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited (but anybody who sings these songs is a friend of mine)." She is Michelle Shocked and it's not just her music which makes a powerful impression.
Michelle's previous lifestyle and recent rise to popularity are colourful tales. Shocked ran away from her fundamentalist family at the age of 16. She went to Dallas in search of her "hippy, atheist" father, who introduced her to the guitar.
Hitch-hiking from New York's East Village to San Francisco to Amsterdam, she became a squatter and took up the causes of homeless youth. "Being a homeless young person is being part of a despised class. That's why I write songs with a political context," says Shocked.
Her politics extend beyond the realm of the homeless into other areas such as feminism, racial equality and environmental issues. "Green culture is what I'm really motivated by at the moment. I want to help put a human element into it so people can relate to green culture more easily," she says
Although Shocked's musical motivation is primarily political, she doesn't force these radical views down her listener's throats. Many of her songs are entirely unpolitical, gentle and plaintive.
Some of these songs can be found on her new album, Captain Swing. Although with a more jazz and swing feel, there are still very strong elements of fundamental Shocked style, and the same essence of meaning.
Shocked believes the different style is a natural yet directed development. "The change in style was an intentional shift in emphasis, it was a logical progression. I wanted to move into something I hadn't done before. Captain Swing is that something." Or, as written on the back of the album cover, "Swing is a feeling... everything else is just style."
So why does Shocked insist on living this contradiction? "I wasn't actually achieving anything when I worked out of the system. I just wasn't the right sort of person. Even now I'm within the system, I don't know that I'm changing much. I really don't believe that you can change the system from within. But I know I'm real committed to my beliefs, and whether in or out of the system, I'm voicing them."
Perhaps Shocked's powerful voice on so many political and social issues has developed from her personal experiences of oppression. Shocked's "Tammy Bakker type" mother caught up with her in Austin and had her committed to a psychiatric hospital in Dallas. But this only lasted until her mother's insurance money ran out. "I guess you're only crazy when you have the insurance," she says.
Shocked then ventured to Amsterdam, and later to Sicily. "Then some guy offered me a ride to Rome, raped me and offered me money for it afterwards. That drove me to a woman's separatist commune." But again Shocked's anarchical behaviour arose and she was "kicked out of there too".
Although Shocked's current lifestyle is a far cry from her previous nomadic existence, there are still elements of unconventionalism in her like. She lives on a houseboat in North London next to Old Fred, who lives in an ambulance with his dog, Trouble.
But, more importantly, her musical motivation and existence are the same. "I have the same political motivation for my writing. It's just that before I was only writing for myself, but now I'm writing for an audience also."
Shocked has also made a concerted effort to remain detached from the glitz that is often associated with popular artists and to maintain her principles and beliefs as the essence of her musical life. "I deliberately sought out the sort of existence I was going to have within the system. I wanted to associate myself with people who were also primarily politically motivated."
Amid all this politics and ethics, Michelle Shocked is a heartfelt musician and singer. "The spirit of the blues is at the heart of my music. You can sing the blues, and you imagine it's only singing about being blue. But you can sing the blues and be singing about goodness. Singing the blues is a feeling." Michelle Shocked certainly has that feeling.
Michelle Shocked's new album, Captain Swing, will be locally released soon. She will be touring Australia in January next year.
CAROLYN MACDONALD
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 15 December 1989
From racism to rape, songs to shock you
by Elisabeth Lopez
Michelle Shocked's publicity blurb lists all the things she's been -- squatter, feminist, anarchist, Texan, pirate radio DJ, rape victim...
Rape victim? Is that the sort of information you want alongside what sort of cereal you eat?
"That whole list of things came out with the release of 'Short Sharp Shocked'," says the soft southern voice. "The album was very personal stories and, at the time, I had a desperate feeling that I had some stories to tell that needed to be told. And I wasn't really sure that I was gunna get that chance again."
Shocked says the incident proved the turning point of her political consciousness, making her aware of racism and other issues that had somehow slipped her by, even though her race relations during her Texan childhood were akin to South Africa. "I became suddenly aware of the same sorts of oppression of people who are victims of racism experience... I was a victim of something because I was a woman. It was not 'cos of what I said, not 'cos of the way I looked, not the way I dressed, where I was." The place -- a San Francisco squat, sometime after 1983, when she left Texas to see the ocean.
Galvanised into political activism encompassing squatters' rights, conservation, anti-racism, and to a lesser-extent, feminism, Shocked changed her name by deed poll and recorded her first album, 'The Texas Campfire Tapes' on a small cassette player. Its batteries were running low, and an unexpected soundtrack was provided by chirruping crickets.
Then Polygram Records approached her. Juggling a hatred for the industry's profiteering ethos, and what she saw as a once-only chance to spread her message from on high, she signed. All sorts of provisos in her contract guaranteed her artistic control, but a clause banning South African sales came undone -- a mistake for which Polygram paid US$75,000 to the African National Congress.
But the company has overlooked what she calls her "arrogance", probably because it has fallen in love with the cult of the female folk singer/political activist.
Shocked hates her reputation as a guitar-strumming waif singing odes to idealism. She hates comparisons with Tracy Chapman, Edie Brickell, Suzanne Vega. The record industry, she says, has stolen feminism from its creators and is selling it back to them.
"What I resent the most is that music's become a commodity. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to putt into people's heads the idea that you don't have to be great at it, but that it is so much more rewarding to play your own music badly than any record or album that you'll ever buy."
Shocked was born in 1962 in Dollars, Texas, to a Mormon mother and a "hippy, atheist" father. They separated and Shocked spent most of her time trying to reconcile the twin realities of fundamentalism with an army stepfather, and summer visits to her Dad marked by bluegrass festivals and guitar pickin' on the porch. She ran away at 16, and left Texas at 21.
"There was no middle ground for me in their house, but then my Father didn't really take me in. So I was pretty much alone. In a way he's become something of a role model. He's a mellow cat... but he puts so much value on reason and logic, and in the long run I don't think that's wholly effective.
"I really don't talk to my mother. She told me once that if I wasn't a Mormon it didn't matter what I did with my life."
Shocked's mother probably turned the other cheek when Michelle was arrested at a 1984 Republican convention for cussing about Contragate. Reagan's America also prompted Shocked to live on a London houseboat for a year, because "there was a very strong commitment on my part to have nothing to do with the country while Reagan was in office.
"Now I feel there was a bit of hypocrisy in my position, coz I was most effective in my perspective on American culture and politics, but I was on the outside looking in."
'Captain Swing' has less politics than former releases and the old voice and guitar, with not much else added, has given way to a busier instrumentation.
Shocked is reluctant to talk about her songwriting process, pleading voodoo. Inspiration -- surprise -- was responsible for 'Anchorage', the single lifted off 'Short Sharp Shocked', she says. Craft plays a smaller part, and she says nebulously that the song has "gotta swing".
That fits in neatly with the album's title, primarily a paean to the leader of a South England laborers' revolt who encouraged arson attacks on farms. She found out about Captain Swing, folk hero, through a close friend, Billy Bragg.
Although the two call themselves "the Donny and Marie of the left", Shocked doesn't take to the suggestion that she and Bragg look somewhat alike, even it it is just the way they dress. "Visually?" she says, incredulously. "Oh -- that's an insult."
Next year, Shocked hopes to collaborate with Paul Simon on an as yet undefined project. She puts the likelihood at about 10 per cent, breathing "he's God".
Now, during her UK tour, she's on a heavy publicity trip, and admits she's finding it difficult to answer questions about herself when all she wants to do is talk politics. "I'm quite shy and lacking social skills, but if the subject turns to politics, I'm fascinated by what other people think, and I'm fascinated to express my own ideas and get into debates. I just don't feel that way about my own personal life.
"I don't know why, but I like telling stories. I feel that I have a lot to say, that makes me unique in compaison to people who have nothing to say, but can't seem to shut up."
The Sunday Age, Melbourne, Australia, ~December 1989
Polities gets the Shocked treatment
Michelle Shocked is one of a number of women singers in the 1980s to bring Left politics to the middle of the musical map. But the Texas songwriter has a low regard for style at the expense of the music, says Marcus Breen
Michelle Shocked sits beneath a rich canopy of tradition in American popular music, using it to maximum effect. With her mix of 1930s swing and jazz, folk, country and rhythm and blues, this singer/songwriter plugs away at the heart strings while confronting politics head-on.
But she bridles when asked if her music represents a drift to the left in American popular music. "I don't really think of myself as an American activist," she says, trying to steer clear of the simple categories that can be detrimental to mass appeal, or "crossover", as American music industry people say.
"I have a low regard for style at the expense of the music. The politics or the gender of the singer is not my first concern."
While she does not encourage preoccupations with labels, she is happy to claim one simple fact: "I call myself a Texas songwriter," she says ingenuously. Shocked's publicity brochure claims she is a "squatter, feminist, anarchist, Texan, picker/poet, Mormon fundamentalist... Green Populist... rape victim, story teller", among other things.
She says: "The last album (Captain Swing) and past albums (Short Sharped Shocked and Texas Campfire Tapes recorded on a Walkman in the open air) reflect the diversity of Texas music and when I come to Australia I expect to find music that sounds like a mix of Texas and London, where I lived for some time."
While she may be surprised at what she finds during her first forthcoming tour to Australia, there is no doubt that Shocked has been one of the women who have made a mark in popular music in the late 1980s. Along with Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman -- with whom she does not encourage comparisons, arguing that "the music is sacrificed" -- she has brought Left politics to the middle of the musical map.
It is a politics that praises the benefits of smallness and individual moral fortitude, based on experience.
"I like to think that I have an alternative point of view from other musicians and recording artists. But my role is not to be a spokesperson for my society, although your experience is important in helping people look for ways to speak up for themselves. What I do is to provide an alternatlve for the system of politicians and leaders who say: 'Let us speak for you.' People know what the problems are... the urgency is to put power in people's hands, to create alternatives. That's the best I can come up with for challenging the issues of sexism, racism and the housing crisis as it exists in this country."
Trying to locate Shocked in an American popular music that approximates her mellow confidence takes some time and effort, so I was surprised when I realised I was hearing Tim Buckley's musical sensibility combined with the personal impatience and first-person narrative of The Doors and Jim Morrison. Both major forces of the late 1960s and early 1970s, these Californian musicians had a way of making music that seemed intensely contemporary -- it seemed immediate, yet reflective and that is the appeal of Shocked.
That she admits to the influence of country music guru Guy Clark is best reflected in her songs, which are lyrically crafted gems with that steam train of American hope up ahead. Being raised as a Mormon was also a help, as the values of American fundamentalist religion, not to mention the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, provide almost the ultimate lesson in music passion.
But Shocked is really more interested in politics than explaining her music. "If you ask me about my last album I'll fall short. But ask me about politics and we'll have a very interesting conversation."
She is especially attracted to empowering the public, along the lines of the West German Greens. She is also interested in the "gyrations" America is soon to experience, now the bogey of Eastern European socialism can no longer be held up as some sort of threat.
"It is the blackest comedy I can think of, to watch this country start to have to examine itself," she says. "Growing up in America has been not unlike growing up behind the Berlin Wall and people are going to have to realise how sheltered they have been. America is collapsing from entropy, from trying not to look at itself. I'm looking forward to the 1990s. I'm excited by the demise of America and hope that it will lead to a kinder, gentler America. But in the meantime, it's an empire in decay. Yahoo!"
That's controversial stuff from a woman who just wants to sing Texan music. But she believes the change is inevitable and that "anybody in their right mind would not fight it but go with the flow".
The inevitability of change in America resonates in her music, with its cheeky rhythms, attacks on established institutions (God Is A Real Estate Developer) and seductive, convincing vocals.
The inevitability of the Greens movement espectally excites Shocked, who says the roots of an American organisation are already in place in Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Alliance.
Whatever happens politically in America, Michelle Shocked is certain to keep exploring its diverse musical culture with a hopeful heart and an active mind.
Gannett News Service, 13 April 1990
SHOCKED MOVES INTO MAINSTREAM, SHOWS INTELLECTUALS CAN SWING
by Robert K. Oermann
Who says intellectuals can't dance?
They don't come much more articulate or politically astute than Michelle Shocked, but the leftist folk singer proves on her new album that she can swing, too.
In fact, "Captain Swing" is the title of her new collection, and it's as far from her early folk work as Count Basie is from Woody Guthrie.
"It's more important to play music that you enjoy, rather than what is political," Shocked said during a phone interview. "And there's no reason you can't do both. "Certain things I do make people think I'm addressing their agenda. I'm not. I'm addressing my agenda. It's my music."
Shocked caused quite a ripple in the music world when she burst upon the scene with "The Texas Campfire Tapes" in 1987. She was not only a gifted troubadour, but was also a self-described "activist-feminist-anarchist." She gave away her money to political causes. She crusaded for environmental issues. She embraced the cause of homelessness. As a protest against the U.S. system, Shocked was an expatriate living on a London houseboat at the time.
Three years and three LPs later, she has eased more into the mainstream. "I'm living in Los Angeles now," Shocked says somewhat sheepishly. "I had to 'swim real fast' to justify the move because I had taken a pretty strong position that I was an expatriate. "But I did say I wouldn't live in America as long as Reagan was president," she adds with a laugh, fully aware that few policies have changed under President Bush.
She credits her musical shift to producer-guitarist Pete Anderson, who she has learned to trust, "in spite of his car phone and satellite dish." The two first worked together on 1988's "Short Sharp Shocked." The first album, as its title suggests, was recorded live at a Texas folk festival while sitting around a campfire. "Short Sharp Shocked" was her first real brush with professionalism. "Pete has really been the architect of my sound. I don't know how much of a bandleader I am, but I don't feel like I'm being treated like the 'chick singer.' "This whole music career thing has never ceased to be an education."
On the strength of her second LP, Shocked became an international celebrity, having top hits in England and performing on the Berlin Wall in Germany.
Neither of the first two collections contained much overtly political material. In fact, she prefers to describe what she does as "entertaining the troops," rather than political haranguing.
Shocked's lilting speaking voice, wry sense of humor, sweet melodic sense and deft image-making ability make her seem nothing like the humorless leftists of yore. At age 27, she's much more a product of the '70s and '80s than of the activist 1960s.
"Captain Swing" has big-band horn arrangements, a jazz feeling and a rhythm-happy mood that shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise. As if to underscore the fact that she's become a swinging, danceable live entertainer, Shocked has just issued "Michelle Shocked Live," a five-song sampler of her new sound. It percolates with even more energy than "Captain Swing."
And, for the first time, Shocked says she's enjoying her music live. On a previous tour, she said, "I felt very much like a commodity. This is a process I'm still in the middle of, and I feel like for the first time it feels natural. I have a life now."
In recent weeks Shocked has been co-writing with Paul Simon, forming a world music organization in culturally-diverse L.A., starring in her "On the Greener Side" video, championing community involvement on college campuses and rehearsing her new, freewheeling sound.
(Robert K. Oermann writes for The Tennessean in Nashville.)
The Seattle Times, 18 May 1990
SHOCKED VALUE: SHE TOOK A TURN FROM THE WORDS, CAME OUT SWINGING
by Patrick Macdonald
Michelle Shocked lived up to her name when her most recent album, "Captain Swing," came out last year.
The crew-cut Texas folkie, who plays Wednesday at the Paramount, shocked and angered many fans by taking a completely new direction. Known for deeply personal, countrified folk tunes such as "If Love Was a Train" and "Anchorage," she abandoned that style for swing and blues. Her country twang was replaced by brassy R&B. Instead of mandolins and fiddles, she was backed by horns, strings and synthesizers. Many who had championed her earlier records cried foul.
"Michelle, please shut up," whined The Houston Post. "The cacophony of contradictions is deafening us." "Wait a minute!" echoed the Oakland Tribune. "This is supposed to be a Michelle Shocked record. Where's the acoustic guitar and songs about East Texas?"
But there was also praise from some quarters for her courage in tackling new styles, and for her songwriting, which was still crafty, funny and politically aware.
Shocked says she has enjoyed the controversy. "It's amusing to me," she said in a phone interview. "I get as much of a kick reading the bad reviews as the good."
She made the change, she said, because she wanted to work with a band and wanted the band to have horns, and that's the kind of songs that came out of it.
Her next project is going to shock her folk fans even more, she predicted. She's collaborating on a song with Paul Simon, for an album being put together by renowned bassist Rob Wasserman. "He's such a hero of mine," she said of Simon. She said she likes him more than Bob Dylan, to whom she used to be often compared. "I don't really have that much respect for Bob Dylan," she confessed. "I wasn't even around when he was influential. I have a lot more respect for Paul Simon because, for what it's worth, he's still around. He's still going through changes. I like the idea that someone can get better with age, rather than this tragic rock myth that as you get older you have to decay."
Shocked also altered her image with the first video from the LP, for the song "On the Greener Side." Abandoning her usual all-black outfits of men's clothes, she wore a snug green mini-dress and appeared with a bunch of dancing male models. She was parodying Robert Palmer's videos featuring sexy, blank-faced female models, but some people didn't get the joke. "Because I wore a dress, that was seen as evidence that I'd sold out," she said, with a soft laugh. "You can't win."
Asked what the audience should expect at her show here, she promised that she would do some of her old folk tunes as well as the new stuff. And she hopes concertgoers will realize that her new songs have important messages, about conservation, tolerance and freedom. "This will probably be the most politically correct opportunity that they've had to dance in a long time," she concluded.
Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1990
A SONG FOR VICTIMS OF TIAN AN MEN SQUARE
By Chuck Philips
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Chinese students were slaughtered at Beijing's Tian An Men Square one year ago on June 4, 1989. Philip Woo does not want anyone to forget it.
In commemoration of the massacre, the 33-year-old New York musician composed a song, "Tian An Men Square," and convinced more than 40 artists and musicians, including Living Colour's Vernon Reid, Michelle Shocked, Richie Havens and Valerie Simpson, to participate in a music video, which will be featured on segments of MTV News tonight.
"This song speaks about the struggle for human freedom in China and the passion for democracy demonstrated in the protest," Woo said in a telephone interview from his New York office. "It's important that the memory of these brave students lives on."
Woo is a third-generation Seattle-born Chinese American with distant relatives in the province of Guandong, China. As a musician he has played keyboards and written music for recording artists such as Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight and Maze.
He founded the nonprofit Project for Tian An Men Square in December and asked his brothers Roger and John (owners of the New York film design and production company Woo Art International), to direct and produce the video for the song. The video fuses broadcast footage of the bloody massacre with studio performances from the artists, as well as material gathered from independent sources.
Unlike the one-night "We Are the World" recording date, the Project for Tian An Men Square took seven sessions and more than a month to complete. The song was recorded and mixed at several New York studios, each of which donated their time and materials. A number of Los Angeles artists and musicians were originally expected to add their voices to the project, but scheduling conflicts and time restrictions prevented their participation.
"We thought by now that we would have a record distribution deal for the song, but we don't," Woo said. "Still, we intend to keep pushing. This project is dear to all of us involved. If we have to put out the record and video ourselves, that's what we're going to do."
Proceeds from the project, Woo says, will be used to underwrite groups dedicated to supporting humanitarian, educational and informational goals in China. The first recipient targeted for aid is the Boston-based Democracy for China Fund, a nonprofit organization run by Shen Tong, a student leader who escaped from China following the massacre.
But the issue of raising money, Woo says, is secondary. His primary concern is to raise awareness in the United States regarding the plight of people struggling for freedom in China and around the world.
"Many people are not allowed access to information. They are denied the most basic human and economic rights," Woo said. "All around the globe, people are willing to die for privileges that we, as Americans, simply take for granted."
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, ~February 1991
STATE OF SHOCK
Outspoken Texan singer Michelle Shocked says she has grown up. Suzy Freeman-Greene reports.
Michelle Shocked is getting married and no one could be more surprised than she. "I swore I would never get married and this is crazy, I tell you," she whispers. "I had planned my life to be very different."
Shocked no longer lives on a houseboat in London next to "Old Fred" and his dog. Today she shares an apartment in Los Angeles with her fiance, a journalist with Conde Nast Publications. These personal changes have softened her political stridency. "I just had to accept what was happening to me," she confesses.
Exactly what has happened to the feisty singer who ran away from home at 16 and revealed so much to us about her strange, wild life? "I have finally decided it's time to grow up."
Here's the story. Five years ago Shocked was singing at a folk festival in Texas, wound up on a British record entrepreneur's Walkman and made an album that sold 50,000 copies. Two more records followed. 'Short Sharp Shocked' was a taut collection of bittersweet Texas memories that played country rock 'n' roll with the intimacy of folk music. Then came 'Captain Swing', a brave venture into a swing sound.
At the same time, Shocked unveiled the minutiae of her life in one frank interview after another. She told how she once squatted in an abandoned six-storey brewery with a group of hardcore bands who ran their own soup kitchen. How her Mormon fundamentalist mother had her committed to a psychiatric hospital and she escaped when the health insurance policy expired.
She revealed that she had been raped while travelling in Italy. And her political activities were immortalised by the photograph on the cover of 'Short Sharp Shocked' showing her arrest outside the Republican National Convention in 1984.
Shocked became famous. She was not going to conform to someone else's standards and when she played here early last year she seemed to tell every woman in the audience that anything was possible if you wanted it badly enough.
But she discovered that fame and frankness sat awkwardly. It seemed every journalist wanted to know if she had spoken to her estranged mother (whom she described in one interview as "a kind of Tammy Bakker character").
Says Shocked: "I have now put myself in a position where it's going to be public if I ever speak to my mother." She pauses and laughs nervously: "That is almost like a motivation to never speak to her."
Shocked has traditionally drawn political conclusions from her experiences. "But I noticed that I could get a lot more upset about some other woman being exploited or abused than I ever could about myself."
Perhaps as a result of this, she has spent the last year getting her personal life in order. "I have started facing my problems and emotions because I think a lot of my urge to travel in the past was that if you move on, the problem wouldn't be there, but sure enough it would always follow me."
"It's a kinda obvious story and I am sure everyone goes through it, but I just never expected it to happen to me."
Shocked sings in a light, clear voice with a cool, ironical tone. She speaks softly, with the same wry touch, and as she marvels at the changes in her life it seems the former squatter still cannot quite believe that, "as part of a commitment to being in a relationship I am now living in an apartment paying RENT..."
In many ways Shocked's experience of fame mirrors that of Irish singer Sinead O'Connor. Both are fiercely confessional singers with outspoken political views and rebellious backgrounds.
0'Connor has been aggressively open about the savage beatings inflicted on her as a child by her mentally ill mother; her time spent in reform school and more recently, her fluctuating state of inner calm. She was embroiled in a public fight with Frank Sinatra after refusing to play the American national anthem at her concert and is now talking of taking "many" years off.
Says Shocked: "She (O'Connor) has also moved to Los Angeles and in reading her interviews my sympathy ends up being on her side because I feel like she's making a lot of what I now consider mistakes -- in talking about her personal life to the degree that she probably feels her only human contact is with journalists."
While no one would deny Shocked's right to grow and many might welcome her newly open mind, it seems a shame that these successful young women eventually feel some pressure to rein in their opinions.
Especially as one of the most appealing things about Michelle Shocked is her intimate, conversational songwriting. "I wanted to put a personal touch to what I did. It wasn't the fame or the fortune that was motivating me but a real desire to communicate and talk about things that concern me."
But she concludes: "The truth is you are selling a product, you are like a name brand and it's not such a problem except ... you are then expected to be the product that you are selling."
In past interviews, Shocked has spoken passionately of her belief that ordinary people can effect change. But we are now involved in a ruthless Gulf war, a decision that was made with barely an appearance of consultation.
Shocked says she does not have sufficient information to express an opinion on the war. "It just feels like I am in a sea of propaganda over here.
"I think I lost faith in an ideology that everyone is supposed to buy into because it's good and the other side is bad. I just stopped seeing things quite so black and white. She laughs: "Which is exactly what I feared would happen -- that I would have an open mind."
The imagery of trains, journeys and vast expanses of land threads through Shocked's songs. In 'Memories of East Texas' she talks of the town 'where they could not find a place for a girl who'd seen the ocean". Her journey has been long, at times torturous, but she retains her musical purity and verve.
Today she wants to empower people through her music. After touring, she will go on the road to make her next album in a travelling recording studio.
She will play "the simplest music that was inspired by my father teaching himself how to play". The message is: "All it takes is three chords and something to say. If I can do it you can do it. I can't tell you what to say but I can show you how to say it."
How does Shocked feel about Texas? Her songs can give conflicting messages: Its rich musical and rural traditions are sometimes dwarfed by the narrow mindedness and religious fundamentalism.
She was laughing even before I had finished the question. "I don't know how you are going to feel about this, but Australia reminds me of Texas in a lot of ways. Physically, culturally, the attitude of the people, the spirit, the rough and rugged."
Is there anything good in all that? "I think best of all is the music. When I go to Australia I'll be touring with (Paul Kelly's band) The Messengers... I feel I can really relate to or appreciate the same musical roots."
Last time she came here Michelle Shocked was almost upstaged by a guest appearance from her unassuming, mandolin-strumming father. Will we see him next week? "Not this time. He's going to stay home and do his job. He's a carpenter."
The Sunday Age, Melbourne, Australia, 10? March 1991
ELECTRIC SHOCKED
Who is this amazing girl from Texas?
Record companies have wooed her, audiences love her. But, as Brian Wise reports, Michelle Shocked is not the kind of girl to get swept away by her success.
The initial impressions of a Michelle Shocked performance can be deceptive. Swaying to and fro like a nervous teenager forced to give a speech at a school assembly, Shocked exudes a kind or nervous charm and insouciant innocence that elicits almost immediate empathy from her audience.
With an almost billbilly, aw-shucks delivery, Shocked chuckles as she narrates a series of anecdotes that not only illustrate the intent of the songs, but amuse with their warm-heartedness. The memories of her childhood, her relationships, her hopes and dreams seem to strike a responsive chord with most observers.
When her father takes the stage, fiddle in hand, to accompany her on some traditional numbers, Michelle wins over the audience completely with her naive, good-natured spirit, her willing banter and obvious rapport.
And unlike her friend Billy Bragg, who has been known to dispense his politics with the seriousness of a pallbearer, Shocked adopts a "gee-whizz, I don't know, but something seems to be wrong here" style. An iron fist in a velvet glove springs to mind.
It is soon apparent that, beneath the folksy facade, we are faced with a performer of considerable talent. After a Michelle Shocked performance you know you have seen someone special. A few may quibble with the down-home image, the golly-gosh veneer; few would disagree that the exterior hides a singer-songwriter of immense substance. It also hides a musician with a more coherent and stubbornly honest musical vision than most who have been in the industry far longer.
Michelle Shocked was born and raised in Texas -- a fact that is fairly evident in her music. The oldest of eight children and a product of a broken home, Michelle ran away at the age of 16 in search of her father, whom she was to find in Dallas. Encouraged by her father, a part-time musician, to play guitar, the teenager immersed herself in the music she found around her new home, listening to the bluegrass of Norman Blake, the blues of Big Bill Broonzy and the country of Guy Clark.
After hitching to places as far flung as San Francisco and New York, Shocked travelled to Amsterdam where she became involved in squatter's movements and the rights of the homeless. A cheap rail ticket brought her to Italy, where she suffered an assault and the refuge of a women's separatist commune.
A few years later when Michelle drifted back to Austin, Texas, her mother promptly had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her escape from the hospital was simply a mundane matter of having the medical insurance policy run out. "You're crazy as long as the insurance is there," she later joked in an interview. Three subsequent arrests, including one at the Republican National Convention in 1984, and some time spent in jail account for Michelle's adoption of her stage surname. "Shocked" at the way her life was heading and the state of society as she observed it, the singer decided to pursue a career in music.
It was at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas that Pete Lawrente, an enthusiastic Englishman who, after working for an independent label that went bust, was planning to start his own label, approached Michelle and asked if he could record her with his Sony Walkman.
'The Texas Campfire Tapes' album was born and released on Lawrence's fledgling Cooking Vinyl label, managed to reach the top of the British Independent charts and win legions of fans with its rustic appeal and its creator's emotive voice. So authentic is the recording that if you listen carefully you can hear the crickets chirping away and the trucks hauling along a nearby highway in the background of the recording.
On the tide of the burgeoning roots music movement, Michelle Shocked further established herself with benefit concerts, an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival, an American tour with Billy Bragg and a version of Lennon and McCartney's 'Lovely Rita' on the 'Sergeant Pepper Knew My Father' charity album. Suddenly that Texas campfire was a world away.
In the meantime, Shocked was being wooed by record companies -- an amusing experience for a person of her strong political persuasion, and one that led to a reputation for being a "difficult" artist. At one stage, the story that she had refused an advance of $150,000 from Polygram was greeted in the media with an almost comical treatment. What some of the press failed to add was that Shocked was willing to accept a lesser advance in return for a greater say in the creation of her records. At least, in suggesting Michelle work with Peter Anderson (Dwight Yoakam's producer) the record company proved that it had some appreciation of the potential they had signed.
The first Michelle Shocked studio album, 'Short, Sharp, Shocked', was greeted with almost unanimous acclaim and provided the memorable, if minor, hit single 'Anchorage' -- a beautifully crafted and moving tale of friendship, dashed aspirations and suburban angst.
With its striking cover photograph of the musician being throttled by a policemen while arrested at a demonstration, 'Short, Sharp, Shocked' was a stunning major-label debut that wove country sensibilities with an almost incessantly wistful observation of the world. To top off the record, Michelle threw in the punk-like 'Fogtown' as an uncredited bonus track -- as if to deliberately confuse her audience.
Released at a time when the musical focus appeared to be shifting towards a new wave of female singer-songwriters -- Tracy Chapman, Sinead O'Connor and Toni Childs, to name a few -- 'Short Sharp Shocked' faded as the first single lost its impetus and radio programmers found the rest of the album was just that little too country tinged to fit into a contemporary rock format.
In fact, in a tribute to one of her strongest influences, the back of the record cover was a facsimile of a Guy Clark album cover -- so the country influences are hardly disguised. To Shocked, however, the problem partially boiled down to the marketing strategy of her record company.
"I remember when the album came out," recalls Shocked. "I ended up being marketed as a woman -- as if that was what we had in common, as if that was what was important about what we had to offer. I felt like that was a really patronising marketing approach. I think that I've sort of felt victimised in the past by some of the efforts to market someone like me."
As if to give a strong two-fingered salute to the notion of marketing an artist, the next Michelle Shocked album, 'Captain Swing', was almost a complete musical departure with its bold and often brassy sound, sophisticated approach and wry lyricism ('God Is A Real Estate Developer').
Where the previous record sported a punk track, 'Captain Swing' boasted a Presley-style rocker, '(Don't You Mess Around With) My Little Sister'.
There have been few musicians who have so radically developed their style across such a relatively small body of work. Ry Cooder swapped easily from jazz, to blues to rock 'n' roll. Joni Mitchell grew from folk to rock with a few jazz tinges thrown in during the 70s. But both of those artists had been established before they made any stylistic alterations. Michelle Shocked has entered the scene on her own terms and, while her records may be difficult to market, they are compelling on their own terms.
"I'm sure that I will carry out my own vision no matter what," asserts Shocked. "I appeared to have made such a radical departure from the Michelle Shocked that we all knew and loved that I was kind of asked to pay the price of following my own drummer."
According to Shocked, the whole process of rapid musical growth is not a haphazard development. "I'm in this to grow and change," she asserts. "So I'm taking that really seriously. It was a real effort to establish my roots. At some point I would like to sit down and come up with a real original style rather than just developing on roots of blues or country or fiddle tunes."
Not sutpisirgiy, with the advent of 'Captain Swing', the record company promotions personnel scratched their heads, tried to find a pigeonhole for this "difficult" artist and, having failed to crack commercial radio, gave up.
As Michelle Shocked develops musically, there will no doubt be some more sore heads around trying to beat out a marketing strategy for her. Eventually, she will either make it on her own terms (the most likely) and confound the image-makers, or simply carve out a solid following that will sustain her recordings.
The chameleon-like approach of her first three albums is unlikely to change as the singer-songwriter plans her next project. Fresh from recording in Woodstock with members of the legendary Band, Michelle plans to set off on a musical odyssey across southeast Texas with producer Glenn Rosenstein (Ziggy Marley, Talking Heads) and musical director Bernie Leadon, an ex-Burrito Brother and Eagle.
Along the way they plan to gather respected musicians, such as Norman Blake, Pop Staples, Doc Watson and Taj Mahal, in what should be a celebratory feast of the traditional influences that determine the musical outlook of Shocked.
Given the stature of The Band in the pantheon of modern American music, it is perhaps appropriate that Shocked collaborated with some of the remaining members of the revered group that not only backed Bob Dylan but forged its own unique musical vision -- a vision so broad in scope that it has seldom been bettered.
Australian audiences will get the chance to hear Shocked road-testing much of the other material she has chosen for her forthcoming record. To that end, unlike her last tour that was a solo effort, she is being accompanied by Paul Kelly's Messengers, who would seem to be a perfect choice to flesh out some of Shocked's songs. As far as Shocked is concerned, the collaboration confirms her own admiration for Kelly and his colleagues. That deceptively powerful and affecting stage presence should, this time around, be an even more exceptional experience.
Courier-Post, Camden - Cherry Hill NJ, 12 April 1992
Shocked Waves
And heroes wave back
by Nicole Pensiero
With her hybrid musical styles, singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked is an American original, able to blend pop, country, blues and folk with surprising ease even if she had to travel 50,000 miles for her latest recording to do it.
With the release this month of her fourth album, Arkansas Traveler, the 30-year-old Shocked has proven herself the "triple threat" her fans have long suspected: an incisive songwriter, talented guitarist and mandolin player, and great singer. And, with Arkansas Traveler, Shocked adds "producer" to her credentials.
Shocked's decision to produce Arkansas Traveler herself after two highly-acclaimed releases (Short Sharp Shocked and Captain Swing) with Peter Anderson at the helm, came about practically by default.
"We traveled all around the world to make this record," Shocked said in a telephone interview from New York. "It was tough to find someone who could take the time, and who fully understood the vision I had.
Arkansas Traveler takes its title from a bit of American folklore about an outsider wandering through Arkansas. The vision originated with Shocked's desire to record with some of her musical heroes.
She also figured that, by going to these musicians via a mobile recording unit -- rather than bringing them to her, the result would he more regional in flavor and authentic in sound.
Thus, "Come A Long Way," Shocked's visual treatise on life in Los Angeles, was recorded in L.A., while "Shaking Hands," which tells of a Missouri Civil War soldier's plight, was recorded on the Spirit of St. Charles riverboat in Missouri.
Other recording locations included Australia, Dublin (with Ireland's Hothouse Flowers), Sun Studio in Memphis, a folk festival in North Carolina and an antique store in Georgia.
"I'm too shy, really, to he able to hang out with my heroes for too long, so it was intense, in a real great way," Shocked said. "It's like having a favorite record and thinking you could be a part of it somehow... and then having that happen."
Shocked, scheduled to be married soon to her writer-boyfriend of three years, said she is more content about her life and her work than ever before.
Still avidly involved in social issues -- she recently performed at Farm Aid -- Shocked's unusual background has almost as much mystique as the characters she sings about.
Raised in Gilmer, Texas, by a strict fundamentalist mother, Shocked gained a love of music through her father, mandolin-player "Dollar" Bill Johnston, who in recent years has performed with her onstage.
Shocked ran away from home at 15, traveling to New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam, and spent time in a mental institution, where her mother had her committed.
In 1986, she was working as a volunteer at the Kerrville, Texas, folk festival when she was taped singing around a campfire by a London producer. The tape, made on a Walkman, was released on vinyl and the aptly-named Texas Campfire Tapes jumped to the top spot on the British independent charts.
While Arkansas Traveler includes two of her early tunes, the wryly philosophical "Secret To A Long Life" and her concert-favorite "Strawberry Jam," Shocked said many of the songs were written to match the talents of her guest artists.
"I wanted to record with Pop Staples, a gospel player, and he wanted to do a gospel song, so I wrote '33 RPM Soul' with him in mind," she explained. "I thought 'Prodigal Daughter' would be great to do with (bluegrass fiddler and singer) Alison Krauss. But some songs weren't planned too much... I wrote two verses to "Shaking Hands" the night before we recorded it."
While many critics tend to categorize Shocked's distinct musical style as folk, she bristles at that label.
"I think of folk as stuff from the 1950s and '60s," she said. "I'm seeking a more traditional style on many of the songs on Arkansas Traveler -- a bridge to the past. I would love it if a song like "Blackberry Blossom" would be, in 20 years or so, considered a great American traditional tune."
"There's a song I hope is beautiful for the sake of being beautiful. I do think there's more confidence in me on this record."
The reason?
"Are you ready for this?," she answers with a laugh. "Love. Honestly, that's it. I'm with someone who sometimes loves me more than I love myself, so I now just accept myself for who I am. I can accept my talent and even my appearance, which was hard for me to do before. That acceptance has given me a lot of inspiration."
With Arkansas Traveler, Shocked says she feels free of the pressure that has haunted her since 1988 -- to, as she puts it, make Short Sharp Shocked II.
"I feel this record stands on its own and can't be compared to the others because it is such a different kind of recording," she explains. "I'm very proud of it."
She is putting together a band and plans to launch a U.S. tour this summer. "I like being on the road... I've certainly gotten used to it recording this record."
Roam If You Want To
Michelle Shocked has just released her third album, Arkansas Traveler, based on a hitch-hiking musical discovery tour she took around the backstreets of background musical America (that is, not Seattle for sure) with her Dad.
What sounds like a nice little story in the Russian roulette world of the hitchhiker almost ended in tragedy before it really began...
"The second ride was quite strange. The first ride got us from Dallas to the foothills of the Ozark Mountains; the second took us a mile back from where we started.
"We were picked up by a guy looking for a car. His wife was having an affair and he saw a car he believed was the one he was looking for. He was getting more agitated and my father was making small talk. The guy was quite insane and I was quite encouraging the guy on. I wanted to give my father an adventure."
And about a mile back from where they started, after a high-speed car chase with a pickup truck and many a close call, the adventure started again.
The hitchhiking Michelle undertook the journey to rediscover her musical roots -- and to complete a trilogy of albums which began with Short Sharped Shock and Captain Swing. A trilogy that is the sum of the parts of the magnetic musical spell cast by her formative Dallas years and subsequent pilgrimage to San Francisco.
"The deepest influence came from my father who taught himself to play mandolin at 35. It came to be something that my brother and I and my father and friends would gather on a Saturday night and play music. We weren't legitimate hillbillies -- we lived in Dallas. It was like a sensibility -- it was my idea of a goodtime."
"And then my father would take me to music festivals and I was introduced to music that was truly underground, in the sense that they sold their own records, they made them pretty cheaply, they weren't available in stores."
"And then when I left home and went to San Francisco and came across the pop music scene there, I understood that it was one and the same. The underground music of hardcore punk had much more in common with the underground music of bluegrass festivals than the differences. It formed my sensibility.
Content that she's found her roots, Michelle has come to the realisation that with this new found insight springs the need to move onto something new.
"Following my own inspiration I almost have to go back to the album and listen to the words myself, and I've noticed a tendency to talk about givng up on rock'n'roll. I've also embraced this understanding of black faced minstrels to a degree that I don't feel like I can ever look at contemporary culture in the same way."
"Rock'n'roll will never look to me like anything but a fraud now. And given that choice, do I participate in the fraud or do I try to find a direction that feels more honest? I think for the most part I'm inclined to go in the direction of searching for more honesty. A spiritual awakening is unfolding which my heart is very much inclined to follow."
Growing up with such a myriad of musical influences has not only shaped Michelle's musical direction but has also forced her to decipher her own polifical attitudes within these musical frameworks.
"I prided myself on being an anarchist with a capital A. I wore black and went to demonstrations, but I realised several years ago that there was not much difference between that and my own fundamentalist tendencies that I had been raised with -- that you end up in a culture where everyone is encouraged to believe the same."
Now I think I follow the philosophy expressed by a character in a movie that I really admire. Her name was Maude and she was asked what she used to fight for and protect for and she said: "Oh, big issues," and then when asked what she fought for or believed in now she sold: "Oh, big issues but in my own small, individual way."
"In this day and age I feel very strongly that there's a lot of room for the opinion of an individual or the actions taken by an individual."
And I think there's a lot of room for Michelle Shocked in this world and probably a few more like her.
Taras Misko
Scotland on Sunday, Edinburgh, Scotland, 22 August 1993
A CHANGE IN LIFESTYLE FOR MICHELLE SHOCKED
She Claims To Be At Some Kind Of Threshhold In Her Life. One Of The Ways Michelle Shocked Has Decided To Ring The Changes Is A Collaboration With The Mark Morris Dance Group. Richard Mowe Found Out More
The woman who once described herself as having been "a big mouth feminist all my life" is undergoing a period of readjustment.
She doesn't look like the footloose female full of radical instincts who has often been damned with faint praise as having more attitude than talent.
She turns up for our encounter looking tanned and rested after a couple of weeks in Malta.
The sun block, she points out, has caused the odd streak and she explodes into a fit of the giggles.
She is wearing a wisp of a plain brown dress which is precisely how audiences will see her for her part in the Mark Morris Dance Group's programme of new works tonight and tomorrow.
The singer songwriter from East Texas whose second album cover depicted her kicking and screaming in the clutches of the police during a demo, readily achieved a certain notoriety.
After all, it was called Short, Sharp, Shocked and followed the folksy The Texas Campfire Tapes .
Recently she married, turned 30 and has admitted to thinking about kids which once she claimed she would never do.
And even more intriguingly, she purports not to be that adventurous in her choice of agenda for Festival Edinburgh.
"I actually like entertainment," she says almost apologetically.
"When I was here last five years one of my favourites was Circus Oz."
She had, of course, seen the infamous Jim Rose freak show elsewhere but declines to pass definitive judgement.
"I am so ready these days to scorn things but we're in uncertain times. I am trying to make sense of them and I have yet to put my finger on it and in the meantime I am not willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt."
She was, however, willing to make an exception for Mark Morris despite being "extremely intimidated by a whole new world full of glamour and mystery."
She found him charismatic, highly charged, and totally relaxed all at the same time.
"I have never met anyone in my life who is so comfortable with himself, and the effect rubs off on everyone around."
They were introduced by her regular collaborator bassist/composer Rob Wasserman.
Over a series of forays including dinner, rehearsals and even a seminar in California devoted to Morris's work she became aware of what would work.
She returned with three songs: Stillborn about a midwife who delivers a stillborn infant; Homestead telling of a widow desperately trying to keep farm and body and soul together, and Custom Cutter dealing with one farmer's fight to keep the crops from failing.
She claims to have "drawn heavily on the mythology I have created for myself."
Her songs have always had more than simply surface bite.
Graffiti Limbo depicted a vandal killed by transit police; Prodigal Daughter was about abortion.
Her most recent album Akansas Traveller was the final part of a trilogy which means she can now "take the threads of the past and weave it into a new cloth. I used to have a reputation as an extremely political writer but I've shed some of that old skin. It's all by design, not accident. I can tell you where I came from but even I don't know exactly where I am going."
She has undergone quite a few quantum leaps in her time.
She used to appear with her customary peaked cap and urchin looks but surprised her fans by appearing in a video four years ago to promote the single On the Greener Side wearing a limegreen minidress, lip gloss, and backed by a bevy of dinner suited hunks.
At the time she said: "At one stage I was a nihilistic punk with a mohican and a ring in my nose. I think in the course of time I'll find a middle ground, but I also carry that sense of responsibility. I'm in a position to defeat stereotypes, to work for the greater good for women who don't enjoy the privileges that I have."
Her resilience and self reliance from her spell on the road is apparent.
She still regards travel as "the greatest freedom in the world."
She broke with her family as a teenager after disagreements about being raised as a fundamentalist Mormon.
After college she drifted around from the hard core punk scene in San Francisco through New York's lower east side to squats in Amsterdam and a women's peace camp in Italy.
The religious rift meant she became cut off from the rest of her family her mother, four sisters and seven brothers.
She remains close to her father who became divorced when she was a child and whom she did not see again until she was 16.
She was not entirely clear what Mark Morris would make of all that.
She is used to setting the pace and style of her own gigs which by nature tends to be spontaneous.
Her band's instruction usually is to follow her rather than the arrangement.
She was soon disabused of this philosophy.
"His choreography is sacrosanct and so precise. One of the toughest aspects was the pressure of keeping within the bounds of emotion and following the arrangement. "It is not scored like classical or even modern composition, so the tempo varied from the first time we ran it through to the second.
Mark had the wisdom to choreograph to the slow tempo which means he has retained movements he would not have attempted at the tempo that it's now at.
That's one way of collaborating, albeit inadvertently."
She finds it difficult to judge the outcome because she is too busy focussing on her part to pay any attention.
"But it's very thrilling with a song like Stillborn when people tell me afterwards that they were reduced to tears. Dance enhances the music in a way that the music could never have done by itself."
She has been reinvigorated by the whole experience.
She wants it to be known that should Morris require her again she will be available "anywhere, any time."
You can be assured that whatever metamorphis she adopts she will never harbour the sentiments evoked in one of her most telling songs, Anchored Down in Anchorage, a sort of musical letter from a friend which laments: "I sound like a housewife. I feel like a housewife."
New Works, Mark Morris Dance Group, Meadowbank Stadium, tonight and tomorrow 7.30pm, 031 225 5756.
The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland, 9 April 1994
Shock Tactics
By Kevin Courtney
Michelle Shocked has a new album out but don't bother rushing to your local record shop to snap up a copy, Kind Hearted Woman, the fifth album from the Texan campfire chanteuse, is only available to audiences at her concerts, so if you're heading off to the Olympia tonight to see Ms Shocked in concert, bring an extra few bob and be one of the chosen few to possess a copy of the lady's latest work.
Such a radical approach to record distribution is typical of a woman who has long battled with the system, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but seldom compromising. Some would call it commercial naivete; Michelle Shocked calls it reaffirming the power of the artist.
Since she warmed the world's cockles with The Texas Campfire Tapes in 1986, Michelle Shocked has been nothing if not ambivalent about her own success hardly surprising for someone who went from boarded-up squats to record company boardrooms with just a swing of her strumming arm. Michelle Shocked was a true bohemian, living close to the edge of homelessness, working as an activist in the squatters movement, and writing and singing protest songs. The cover photo of the Short, Sharp Shocked album summed up her life struggle to date: it shows Shocked in a constricting choke-hold, her face wracked with pain and rage, as a policeman drags her away from a demonstration. Six years after that startling photographic image, Michelle Shocked is still fighting away, but in a quieter, more measured way.
"My attitude to corporate marketing has become more mature," she says, speaking from her London hotel, from where she is preparing to move on to the next date in her European tour. "I've become more pragmatic. When I first had to deal with the music industry, I was afraid of what I didn't know. Now, I'm not so afraid, and I understand a lot more about practical considerations. But I do have goals which are not necessarily the same as the record company's goals. Even though I've become less wary of the industry I'm still going to want to control my destiny."
It took a while to warm to the body corporate, and after the Short, Sharp Shocked album made her a household name (and Anchorage, Alaska a household place), Shocked found herself under increasing pressure to dance to the industry tune. She had so far held tightly to the creative reins, but for her third album, Captain Swing, she was asked to work with a top Hollywood producer, anathema for someone whose usual domicile was a few derelict warehouses away from Beverly Hills. To her surprise, there as a great chemistry between the bohemian and the big shot, and Shocked felt able, to loosed the reins just a little.
Now, though, it appears that Shocked has taken reins, bridle, in fact the whole horse, and bolted. Why the refusal to give a general release to what would certainly be a very in demand product, i.e. a new Michelle Shocked album?
"I'm sure you'll understand that there are certain politics underlying my decision not to have the record on sale in the shops, which I don't really want to go into. I've already had albums released on a major label, and I'll be releasing another one soon, so I've no problem with that. But just as songs are metaphors for emotions, this album is a statement of what power an artist can really wield. By not giving this record a major release, I'm using my power as an artist. By making it only available at my shows, I'm reopening that direct line between me and the audience. It's something like what Patti Smith said, people have the power."
Shocked has long been seen as a populist, a singer who puts people first and profits last, so this decision not to make megabucks for the sake of megabucks is admirable, if a little wilful. Compared to her last round of dates on this side of the Atlantic, when she brought her entire Captain Swing ensemble with her, this tour is a low key, almost solo affair. The first half of her set consists entirely of songs from Kind Hearted Woman, and Shocked is so far pleased by the positive reaction she has been getting.
"The audience really has to be patient because in the first half of the show I play 10 new songs they've never heard before. They're sober songs, personal songs, but so far the audiences have been very attentive, and they've even shushed some of the loud talkers during the set. The songs are, um, intense in their own way. One is called Stillborn, and it's the story of a midwife who delivers a stillborn baby. Another is called Homestead it's about a woman attempting to keep the family farm going after her husband dies. And Winter Wheat is about a farmer waiting for the threshers to arrive and save his crops. The stories are all set in the context of the Great Depression, but there is a resonance with modern times, in that the songs speak of frustration bitterness and futility. There are themes of death, and themes of life. I would characterise them as modern songs wearing a traditional mask."
Sounds a bit heavy going for late Saturday night?
"It's not all so intense, though. The show ends on a high note, and I even take requests from the audience for songs they might want to hear. Fiachna O'Braonain and Peter O'Toole from Hothouse Flowers join me for the second half of the show, and when they come on they're so powerful and impressive that I've started using them on some of the songs in the first half."
Michelle had already worked with Fiachna and Peter on her Arkansas Traveller album, and when she called them up in Dublin and asked them to join her on this tour, they packed their guitars and hit the road. "I'm having a wonderful time on tour with them," she says.
Since she left home at 16, Shocked has been a journey woman, travelling from her home town of Dallas, Texas (or "Dollars, Taxes?, as she calls it) to San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam. Unwittingly, she has painted a romantic picture of herself as the archetypal folk singer, drifting from town to town, guitar slung on shoulder, and politics firmly on her sleeve. But folk is too narrow a category for someone who has also travelled freely from one musical style to anther, yet remained true to her own vision.
"I'm not happy with the popular description of me as a folk musician. I think when you label a woman a folk musician, it suddenly becomes a very narrow category. A man who starts as a folk musician is allowed far greater scope to develop and change, and he is more easily granted the title of great artist, whereas women who start as folk singers are invariably pigeonholed as either Joni Mitchell types or Melanie types. I reject the title 'folk musician'."
"It's a challenge to try and get past popular perceptions, and when I play blues music or country or bluegrass I'm not just deviating from some set path: I'm following the same path."
And what about the "populist" label which is equally, er popular.
"I suppose you could say I'm populist in that I'm not part of the American political tradition do want things to be better for everybody but I think my idealism is tempered by pragmatism. I'm a bit mistrustful of the populist tag, because it implies that you could be easily swayed by demagoguery."
The last time Shocked performed in Dublin, George Bush was leading the Gulf War campaign against Saddam Hussein. Three years later, there's a New World Order, and Bill 'n' Hill are in the White House. Does this give her cause for optimism?
"Well, it's still politics as usual, no matter who's in power. But I suppose this is the best opportunity to embrace the idealism of the Clinton administration, rather than just stand to one side and be cynical about it. Let's be positive about it and see what happens."
Michelle Shocked plays Midnight at the Olympia tonight.
Tour Reviews
Two years ago, the extravagantly gifted and unclassifiable singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked played Carnegie Hall. She had recently released an ambitious album of collaborations called "Arkansas Traveler"-- Pops Staples, Levon Helm, Taj Mahal, and Doc Watson were some of the musicians on it-and it wasn't yet clear that her record company, Mercury Records, had no idea how to sell it. Despite glowing reviews, the album sold fewer than two hundred thousand copies. Late last month, Shocked was back in town (she lives in Los Angeles), playing four sold-out shows at the Bottom Line. The first night, she opened her sets with the ten powerful new songs on her new album, "Kind Hearted Woman," but this time Shocked-her nom de punk dates back to her neo-yippie days as an early-eighties radical-was doing it on her own: selling her self-released CD at the T-shirt stand at the back of the club.
The singer, who is in her early thirties, wore a dark brown ankle-length tank dress and played a white Fender Stratocaster. The new songs were a catalogue of woes, and full of death: a stillborn baby, the death of a four-year-old girl, death by drunk driver, by lightning, by cancer. Shocked prefaced one song during the show with the wrenching story of her grandmother's death, from lymphoma, three months ago -- a story that ended with Shocked's abrupt departure from her grandmother's bedside when her estranged mother, who had once had her daughter committed to a psychiatric ward, made an unexpected and unwelcome appearance. "You think this is easy, singing these depressing songs night after night?" she joked at one point. But they were exhilarating, the way only great depressing songs (like the ones on Springsteen's "Nebraska") can be, and Shocked gave a wild and passionate performance.
The next day, we met Shocked and her husband, the writer Bart Bull, at their SoHo hotel, and then walked over to a bistro on Spring Street, where we had lunch. Bull, who is finishing a novel, is a veteran music journalist and a garrulous talker; he can spin long and colorful tales of record-industry perfidy. A couple of years ago, he wrote a wonderfully cranky and charmingly paranoid essay about the secret influence of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy on twentieth-century pop music; the essay was supposed to accompany "Arkansas Traveler," and Shocked at one time planned to appear on the album's cover in blackface. It was just the kind of approach that seems guaranteed to send your average A"R man running in the opposite direction.
But it was Shocked's conception of a follow-up to "Arkansas Traveler" that led to her final conflict with Mercury Records. (Shocked says that she and the label are close to a divorce.) "About two years ago, I started going to a black gospel church in South Central Los Angeles," Shocked said. "Originally, it was just to check out what contemporary black gospel sounds like." But it led to a conversion experience; Shocked told Mercury that she wanted to make an album with the R."B. group Tony Toni Tone' -- and it was not to be a collection of conventional gospel songs, but, rather, brand-new Shocked compositions performed in a gospel-funk style. "I told the executives at Mercury, 'Hey, you're dealing with an artist who can do gospel in very surprising ways,'" Shocked said. "They asked me, 'Are you sure you don't want to make an acoustic album?' Eventually, they tried to put me in my place. I was supposed to be reminded that prestige artists get only so much leverage. As far as the gospel record goes, I was told that it's stylistically inconsistent."
We must have been looking gloomy at this point, because Shocked tried to cheer us up. "Hey, it's like David and Goliath-it's great to be in the battle," she said with a grin. "I invited myself to the gospel-roots party, and it's like, Get out of my way, you can't stop me."
Hal Espy, The New Yorker, June 13, 1994
The Times, London, 4 November 1994
No Re-Trial For Absent Party
Court of Appeal. Shocked and Another v Goldschmidt and Another
Before Lord Justice Leggatt, Lord Justice Roch and Lord Justice Morritt
(Judgment November 1)
A party who chose not to be present at trial made an election by which she should be bound in the absence of special circumstances, so that she was not entitled to a re-trial.
The Court of Appeal so held allowing an appeal by the first and second defendants, Martin Goldschmidt and Cooking Vinyl Ltd, against an order made on November 12, 1993 by Mr Jules Sher, QC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, on an application under Order 35, rule 2(1) of the Rules of the Supreme Court by the plaintiffs, Michelle Shocked and Five Corners Ltd, to set aside orders of Mr Lyndon Stanford, QC, made on November 19, 1992, following a trial in the absence of the plaintiffs of the defendants' counter-claim in a dispute relating to music contracts.
The third defendant, Seifert Sedley Williams, a firm, was not involved in the appeal.
Mr Kevin Garnett, QC, for the defendants; Mr Robert Englehart, QC and Mr Javan Herberg for the plaintiffs.
LORD JUSTICE LEGGATT said Mr Goldschmidt had been Ms Shocked's agent but she had purported to terminate his contract and issued a writ claiming damages for breach of fiduciary duty and consequent declarations.
Her claim had been dismissed before trial for failure to provide security for costs but the defendants' counter-claim had succeeded at trial before Mr Lyndon Stanford.
The plaintiffs had failed to appear at the trial and had made no attempt to ask for an adjournment.
His Lordship reviewed the authorities on setting aside judgment after trial and from them derived the following propositions:
1 Where a party with notice of proceedings has disregarded the opportunity of appearing at and participating in the trial, he would normally be bound by that decision.
2 Where judgment was given after a trial it was the explanation for the absence of the absent party that was most important: unless the absence was not deliberate but was due to accident or mistake, the court would be unlikely to allow a re-hearing.
3 Where the setting aside of judgment would entail a complete re-trial on matters of fact which had already been investigated by the court, the application would not be granted unless there were very strong reasons for doing so.
4 The court would not consider setting aside judgment regularly obtained unless the party applying enjoyed real prospects of success.
5 Delay in applying to set aside was relevant, particularly if during the period of delay the successful party had acted on the judgment, or third parties had acquired rights by reference to it.
6 In considering justice between parties, the conduct of the person applying to set aide the judgment had to be considered: where he had failed to comply with orders of the court, the court would be less ready to exercise its discretion in his favour.
7 A material consideration was whether the successful party would be prejudiced by the judgment being set aside, especially if he c