"1.
Michelle Shocked is a traveling troubadour whose musical talent is so eclectic it is difficult to categorize. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony Walkman.
In a 26-year career that has seen critical acclaim at every juncture, she famously escaped major-label indentured servitude in 1996, subverting the artist-label relationship that helped lead to the current trend toward artistic self-containment. She has made good use of her independence, releasing more critically-acclaimed albums on her Mighty Sound label. Her 2009 album, Soul of My Soul, was the latest of these. Her current work-in-progress, the as-yet-unrecorded Indelible Women is schedule for a 2014 release. In 2010, she launched Roadworks, an ongoing, 5-year touring project which curates audience’s favorite songs while developing Indelible Women. “Michelle Shocked” is the nom de guerre given at her arrest in a political protest called “The War Chest Tour” during the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, California. The demonstration challenged the practice of U.S. corporations receiving lucrative military contracts from the U.S. government while giving generous campaign contributions to both political parties, thus benefiting from political favors regardless of election results. “Michelle Shocked” was intended to invoke the spectre of “shell shock” as a result of Reagan’s Cold War policies.
2.
For over 20 years, acclaimed picker-poet Michelle Shocked has been generating compelling lyrics and mneumonic melodies. In the ’80’s, she was thrust into an inadvertent recording career when a bootleg tape was released in England. In the ensuing bidding war following the phenomena of The Texas Campfire Tapes, Mercury Records signed her and she produced a trilogy of Grammy-nominated albums over the next five years, launched by her signature song, “Anchorage.”
3.
Shocked received her first international exposure in Europe, with her debut album, The Texas Campfire Tapes, a bootleg recorded around a festival campfire on a cassette recorder. Her U.S. debut came with the release of her 1988 album, Short Sharp Shocked on college radio rotations around the country, which was met with strong acclaim from listeners. The songs of Short Sharp Shocked are mostly about what it was like to grow up in rural Texas. Every song on this album is a gem. She signed with Mercury in 1987. Captain Swing, recorded in 1989, is almost perfect; the style is not exactly swing, because it’s also rock and roll. Arkansas Traveler, recorded in 1992, is mainly bluegrass. Michelle recorded and distributed Kind Hearted Woman in 1994 herself after leaving Mercury. In 1995, she contributed an original song to the soundtrack for the film Dead Man Walking called “Quality of Mercy”. In 1996, she released a studio version of an underground release Kind Hearted Woman. Starting in 2002 with the release of Deep Natural; Shocked established her own label, Mighty Sound. A 2005 trilogy called Threesome, and a 2007 bootleg of a gospel set called ToHeavenURide were followed In 2009 by her new album, Soul of My Soul, all released on Mighty Sound. Shocked continues to make music as an independent artist and currently lives in Downtown Los Angeles.
4.
Michelle Shocked – traveller, troubadour, a “picker-poet,” as they say in Texas. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony Walkman. Released in England as ‘The Texas Campfire Tapes’ without Shocked’s authority, its success abroad enticed Mercury Records to offer the newcomer a recording contract. – “The most sophisticated hillbilly you’ll ever meet.”
5.
An awfully authoritative-sounding internet rock guide insists that Michelle Shocked’s life must be fiction. But if it seems like an incredible road movie, a tall tale, a legend, it is no mystery. Michelle Shocked set forth on her adventure ever so young but ever so determined to jump past, jump through, jump beyond any boundary that held her back.
The soaking humid Piney Woods swamplands of east Texas at the edge of the border with Louisiana was where she came from; born in Dallas and schooled in Gilmer. Raised in a large, extremely poor, strict fundamentalist Mormon household, her escape consisted of summers spent with her hippie-atheist father. She left home for good at 16. Putting herself through the University of Texas at Austin , with no financial support from her family, she graduated with a degree in Oral Interpretation of Literature. “It was the careerist ’80s, and that seemed like the least practical thing I could pursue,” recalls Shocked. After graduation, she hit the road, in customary Kerouac fashion. She rambled first to California , playing mandolin and fiddle in street bands, emerging as a staunch political activist first and foremost. Her persona was unadulterated punk rocker with a spiky mohawk and a ring in her nose. She hung out on San Francisco ‘s hardcore scene with MDC and the Dead Kennedys. Arrested at the 1984 Democratic Convention, a front-page news photo of her struggling with the police would ultimately serve as an album cover. Her mother would eventually commit Shocked to a mental institution against her will. “After 30 days, the insurance money ran out, so I was ‘cured’ and they released me.” Back on the street, dazed by the chemical straightjacket drugs given her by the mental health authorities, half-convinced that she was indeed crazy, she headed for New York City . There she explored the music scene at CBGB’s and ate her one big meal of the week at the Cottonwood Café in the West Village.
Caught up in the cycle of homelessness that swept across America in the 1980s, Shocked searched for an alternative. She made her way to Paris , and hitchhiked throughout Europe , busking on the streets of Madrid , surviving on her wits, and a daily ration of alfalfa sprouts. The vagabond lifestyle was far from ideal. At an anti-cruise missile peace camp in Sicily , she was raped by a Green Party comrade. Settling on Amsterdam for the interim, she worked for a pirate radio station and shared a squat with a stranded British reggae band from Birmingham . She was still poor, but she was free.
In 1986 Shocked returned to Texas , to the annual songwriters’ gathering at the Kerrville Folk Festival, to volunteer and hang out with her friends, to listen to their new songs and play her own. In those days (and for that matter, still today) Shocked was determined to credit her inspiration from fellow Texas songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. An Englishman who said he was a journalist heard her one night out among the campfires and asked if she would play her songs for his Sony Walkman. H e never got around to mentioning that he was actually a partner in a brand new British independent record label. She played him some songs out there that night, his tape recorder sitting on a log as the crickets sang bucolic background vocals and the trucks downshifted, and she told some stories. She did not know it at the moment, but just like some of her heroes, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, she was being “field recorded.” That tape of her music, made on a Walkman with weak batteries so that it ran far too quickly when played back at normal speed, got played repeatedly on the BBC.
It was a friend who owned a phone that got the call. “Your record is on the charts,” was the information the label, Cooking Vinyl had to report. “What record?” Shocked inquired. It had been named “The Texas Campfire Tapes” and it was to be her “debut” recording. Figuring she had nothing much to lose, Shocked saw it as her chance to offer up her two-cents worth. She had grown up in a tradition of bluegrass and blues, of Texas swing and singer-songwriters, and now Michelle Shocked was an authentic British pop phenomenon.
She played her first show, her first show ever, at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. She had planned on activism, not a music career. Over the next eighteen months, Shocked found herself working for a manager who was also her booking agent and who was also her record label owner. Shocked remembers, “the label was shopping me to major labels, licensing my record around the world, booking gigs, collecting commissions and my royalties, and shipping me and my guitar C.O.D. It was as if I’d fallen into a new job at the circus getting shot out of a cannon.” Despite the disarray, she had a plan.
Shocked risked signing with a major label (Mercury) for the sake of attempting to change the system from within. She turned down the label’s advance for the sake of owning her work. And she had another plan too. She had organized her songs into a trilogy that was meant to show where she had come from — not just show the listener, but to also remind herself as well. After her first taste of circus-cannon celebrity, she was leaving something more substantial than breadcrumbs behind her to mark her way back home, a trail of remarkable songs. The first part of her trilogy was called Short Sharp Shocked (1988). She was introduced to producer Pete Anderson, known for his commercial success with Dwight Yoakum. The album they made together became an instant classic, so much so that when they returned to the studio a year later, most everyone presumed they would automatically set forth on Short Sharp Shocked II .
Captain Swing (1989) was a lot of things, but it was not Short Sharp Shocked II . The album took advantage of her Texas roots to pursue her notion that swing was more than just a style that the mere act of music swinging shot past style. Her use of horn arrangements emphasized Michelle Shocked ‘s diverse songwriting skills. Categories now, did not apply. The final phase of her trilogy, named Arkansas Traveler –before she had even recorded Short Sharp Shocked – had always been meant to be a tribute to the fiddle tunes she had played with her father and brother on mandolins, banjos and such. She pursued the hidden roots of that music and those old familiar tunes. Writing new lyrics, trying out new ways of playing the oldest of tunes, writing new tunes that sounded ancient, she traveled three continents to play with her heroes and her peers and a few rank strangers. Pops Staples, Doc Watson, Gatemouth Brown, Jim mie Driftwood, Taj Mahal, and Allison Krauss were part of the adventure. Recorded on steamboats, in log cabins and even recording studios, Arkansas Traveler (1992) was a triumph, and if even she did not know what was next, she knew she had made her way back home.
Following her instincts, she began exploring gospel traditions while attending an African-American church in Los Angeles , where she was living on a houseboat. Shocked began writing a gospel record. On the day her next recording was to begin, she entered the studio to discover that her label was refusing to issue payment before the session even started. Shocked recounts, “I was taken into a closed-door meeting with the head of business affairs, who informed me that the label was no longer going to promote my music because I cut too good a deal for myself!” Her catalog was continuing to sell steadily; the label wanted the masters back. She left the office and she never went back — not until the day she arrived to collect what she had owned all along.
Other labels tried to sign her; Mercury sent a cease-and-desist letter that blanketed the industry. They would not let her record and they were not going to release her. She recorded a solo electric record called Kind Hearted Woman and sold it exclusively at her shows in defiance of her label’s efforts to stop her. She toured relentlessly, reconfirming her consummate talent as a stage performer. Pioneering an artists’ rights paradigm, she sued Mercury using the 13th Amendment, the reform abolishing slavery. They settled the day the trial was to begin and for the first time in years, she was free again. She recorded a new version of Kind H earted Woman (1996) with her band, releasing it on Private Music/BMG, but this time the contract gave her the option on them. Three months later, in a classic corporate shake-up, Private Music was folded into a different entity. She exercised her option and was spared the fate of so many artists in recent years, trapped in the consolidation of the recording industry. Michelle Shocked owns Kind Hearted Woman and her entire catalog of music. It is difficult to think of another major label artist who has ever been in her position.
Shocked now spends time between her homes in Los Angeles and New Orleans . Known at her church as “Sister Shocked,” she continues to work quietly for non-violence in the environmental and global justice movements. Her current efforts also involve support for “Save Africa’s Children,” a pan-African vision that addresses the AIDS pandemic on the African continent. She has written a cycle of songs Inspired by the brass band scene in New Orleans . Shocked spent time wandering through Mexico and Guatemala , creating another body of work, which explores her Latin-American heritage.
Additionally, she has collaborated with Fiachna O’Braonain (of Ireland ‘s Hothouse Flowers) on material that presents their vision for the new millennium. The first result of that collaboration is her latest release Deep Natural . Co-produced by O’Braonain, Deep Natural launched Shocked’s own label Mighty Sound (2002) in typically innovative fashion. The release is book-ended with an alternate version of instrumentals entitled Dub Natural . By stripping away her voice and lyrics, Dub Natural emphasizes the rich musicality that has always been part of Shocked’s work. Mighty Sound (Ryko Distribution) has planned a full schedule of deluxe reissues of the Michelle Shocked catalog. The label will also be a home for her forthcoming projects, as well as new and developing artists. For some, that would be all the story necessary; for Michelle Shocked , plainly it is just one more step on her journey. Or as she states, “I can’t tell you where I’m going . . . but I can tell you where I come from.”
6.
“I’m the most sophisticated hillbilly you’ll ever meet.”
When Michelle Shocked says this about herself, it’s hard not to crack up. ‘Hillbilly,’ after all, is no compliment. And frankly, it’s tough to reconcile that reflex image of a backwoods, overalls-and-a-smile hillbilly with this focused, erudite singer-songwriter. If such a creature exists, however, Shocked is its picture, sans Billy-Bob teeth. Come to think of it, she was born in or at least near the backwoods of East Texas — and get this — to a carny father and a fresh-faced high-school mother after being conceived, if memory serves, “in the backseat of my Uncle Huby’s Chevy at the prom.”
Her upbringing was more well-rounded. In her early childhood, Shocked logged thousands of miles as a military brat, living in Massachusetts, Germany and Maryland, before returning to Texas. She lived there until her early twenties, experiencing the stark contrast — and copious benefits — of having a fundamentalist Mormon mother, Army lifer stepfather, and hippie teacher-slash-“ultimate autodidact” father. Eager to further expand her horizons, Shocked eventually decamped for San Francisco and, ultimately, the peripatetic life of a touring musician.
Fittingly, there’s a phantom Texas taproot and that self-styled wanderlust in her music. Much like the work of her East Texas peers Willie Nelson, Victoria Williams and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Shocked’s songs hold fast to a definite core, but owe no stylistic allegiance — just like their itinerant, mercurial, utilitarian creators. Shocked identifies strongly with her musical compatriots, and not just because they’re from her neck of the woods. “My family was welfare class,” says Shocked, “and that makes you really, really, white trash. [These artists] helped remove class bias because they have all been given honorary middle-class value because of what they’ve achieved in their music.”
Shocked has likewise transcended class bias, while retaining the parts that make sense, in a 23-year career that has seen critical acclaim at every juncture. In the early 1990s, she famously escaped major-label indentured servitude, subverting the artist-label relationship that helped lead to the current trend toward artistic self-containment. She has made good use of her independence, releasing more critically-acclaimed albums on her Mighty Sound label. Her lucky thirteenth album, Soul of My Soul, is the latest of these.
Two intense, seemingly divergent, emotions — love and anger — dovetail on Soul, a passionate album in every sense. “I think the meditation these past several years, ever since I stopped drinking, really, has been to jettison rage,” says Shocked, “without losing the ability to feel strong feelings.” Two “strong currents” in her present life conspired to teach her that lesson. Artist David Willardson, “the Official Love of My Life,” is one such tide, and Shocked raves about his warm and nurturing nature. On the flipside is her “nemesis,” the Bush Administration “and their alleged enlightened self-interest. Between the two of them, my emotions have run quite high in recent years.”
The sentiments on Soul of My Soul are couched mainly in straight-four, no frills, rock ‘n’ roll — just the context for Shocked’s two-pronged passion play. Among the songs about her new love is the acoustic ballad “True Story,” where Shocked sings directly to Willardson. “The producer [Devin Powers] said he wasn’t getting enough emotion from the vocal performance,” says Shocked. “I knew exactly what to do.” Pouring her heart out over the phone, she nailed “one perfect, passionate take” that culminates in a deluge of happy tears. Willardson also inspired the ebullient, Stones-y anthem “Love’s Song,” a spacey Kate Bush-meets-U2 meditation on the couple’s future called “Heart to Heart,” and the lusty “Paperboy,” a snapshot from Willardson’s youth (when he lost his job for neglecting his duties to chase a girl).
Clearly there are no love songs for the Bush Administration, at least in the traditional sense. Shocked does proffer a ballad, “Other People,” that at first blush sounds like a kiss-off to an untrue lover — which it is, except Shocked sings to Bush’s America, the ugly, war-mongering face of the country she loves. “I used to rant, ‘Bush, pull out like your father should have.’ Now I say, ‘I love you America, but I think we should see other people.’” She gets feistier on the Steve Earle-ish folk-rocker “The Ballad of the Battle of the Ballot and the Bullet,” which she sings “because I can.” On “Liquid Prayer” — Soul’s lone soul tune — Shocked meditates on tears cried to a God she counts on to provide the Kleenex. In the ironically tropical “Pompeii,” she frets over the fate of a “broken democratic state” beholden to corporate compromise and “entwined in orgiastic lies, with the top about to blow.”
Shocked says her “vexation” fuels these Soul songs. She’s righteously, morally and intellectually pissed off at the state of the nation over the last eight years — but instead of tossing beer cans, she flings measured words. For example, “Giantkiller” is a snarling punk rock anthem where Shocked artfully and poetically vents her venom, in turn giving her message added philosophical oomph.
. . . that fact in the back of my mind
I meant to meet the world
A pocket full of rock and wood
But I was fearless, I was bold
Taking aim so carefully
I set my stone and let it fly
And when the giant fell to earth
None more surprised than I
If there’s a more eloquent way to say you’re chuckin’ rocks at a big ol’ jackass, well, leave it to a sophisticated hillbilly to find it. And really, that’s the nut and the shell of Soul of My Soul: it’s a reconciliation of our most gentle and base aspects by demonstrating that we are neither by default or circumstance, and both by choice. “It was Zen and the art of the Dunk-Tank,” Shocked smiles. “I had a target, I took aim and I hit, I believe, a bull’s-eye.”
7.
Welcome to draft your own using info from above. Beware Wikipedia. It’s biased and ignorant. All Music Guide? Yep, that too." (офсайт -
http://michelleshocked.com/hat/bio/ )
