Slavery, rape, arrest. They’re all just the ups and downs of life for Michelle Shocked, one of the music world’s true survivors. By Larry Schwartz.
Fond though Americans are of citing various amendments to their constitution, singer-songwriter and sometime political activist Michelle Shocked had misgivings about calling on the 13th in the midst of a legal wrangle a few years back. The 1865 amendment marked no less a moment
than the abolition of slavery in the US, and here was Shocked invoking it in the midst of a bid to free herself from a contract with her record company, Mercury.
“One of the criticisms I subjected myself to was, ‘Michelle, you’re not black. How dare you invoke this particular legacy for your little career and commercial purposes?’ But the answer is very clearly, ‘I’m sorry, but this is a right all Americans possess thanks to the sacrifice of those brave and
noble African-Americans who gave their lives for the cause’.”
The Texan, who plays two shows in Melbourne this week, says she told herself the amendment issue came about when the record label blocked her plans to record a gospel album as a follow-up to her 1992 CD Arkansas Traveler. The label reportedly rejected her new songs on the ground
that they were “inconsistent” with her style.
“I think Prince kind of put it most succinctly,” Shocked says, citing this time the musician who was, for several years, reduced to a symbol by his own clash with a record company. “If you don’t own your masters – he’s talking literally about your recorded masters, but he’s also talking poetically
about the people who believe they own you as an artist – you’re a slave.”
The amendment says that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”. Mercury settled, and Shocked released a collection called
Mercury Poise – its title alluding to Graham Parker’s 1979 song Mercury Poisoning, which was itself a comment on his troubles with the label.
“They cost me seven years,” Shocked says now. “They cost me a lot and, what’s more, they wilfully did it knowing that I could never get those years back. But I had to find a faith. I had to find a joy that could not be taken away.”
In part, she found that in religion. Some Sundays, you’ll find Shocked, who is now in her early 40s, in the congregation near her Los Angeles home, where she finds she can “easily blend in” with celebrities such as Denzel Washington, Halle Berry or Stevie Wonder in the pews. Other Sundays
she’s in a tiny “storefront” church near her second home, in New Orleans, where on a good day there’ll be 100 people and she’s invariably “the only white girl (and) everyone is glancing out of the side of their eye to see how you’re managing to enter into this world that’s not your own”.
Religion has been a constant presence in her life, though not always an easy one. Shocked divided her childhood years between her mother’s devout Mormon household in smalltown Kelsey and her “hippy atheist” father’s in Dallas.
“That’s the glaring contradiction of my biography,” she says. “That my mom was a fundamentalist Mormon and my father I actually sometimes describe as a fundamentalist atheist. He was so avowedly atheist that he could almost not tolerate the presence of a believer. It’s like kids like to
rebel. But what’s to go against? Where can you go with that? You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.”
In response, Shocked adhered to neither the religion nor the atheism of her upbringing. Instead, she sought her own spiritual path. “I don’t know that I was ever convinced by the Mormon story,” she says. “But what I say is this: I am by nature a spiritual person. I’m an idealist. I’m a romantic.
I’m someone who looks at the big picture. Causes are far more compelling to me than commerce. I think all those are the qualities of someone who has a spiritual nature.”
But even spiritual people need to make a living, and the dispute with Mercury has often made that very difficult for Shocked. She was forced to sell her 1994 album Kind Hearted Woman at live shows. The record was released through a label called Private, which folded just months later (in
the wash-up, she gained control of her catalogue, copyrights and publishing). In 2002 she recorded Deep Natural with guitarist and long-time collaborator Fiachna O’Braonain of the Irish band Hothouse Flowers, and released it with an alternate CD of instrumentals called Dub Natural to
launch her own label, Mighty Sound.
Now she has plans to reissue The Texas Campfire Tapes (1986), an early tape of her music on a Walkman with weak batteries that emerged as a bootleg by a British independent label; Short Sharp Shocked (1988); Captain Swing (1989); and Arkansas Traveler (1992), a CD that featured artists
as diverse as Pops Staples, Doc Watson, Gatemouth Brown and Taj Mahal.
Despite the intermittent output, Shocked retains a strong following in Australia, where fans treasurer memories of live performances including duets with Paul Kelly. “My associations with Australia, even from the earliest days, go back to my love for Paul Kelly’s music,” she says.
“I go by the MCG and I think, ‘There it is’. Or Adelaide. A lot of my impressions of Australia have to do with the body of work that Paul Kelly has made.
“But Australia is a lot like Texas,” she continues. “The attitudes. The people. They’re casual, not really pretentious. They start wars with boring dictators on the flimsiest of pretexts. No, I’m crossing boundaries there.”
Now in her early 40s, Shocked has endured more than her share of setbacks over the years, and not all of them at the hands of record companies. She was committed to a mental institution by her mother when she was in her teens; she left home at 16 and, after literature studies at the
University of Texas, roamed through California playing mandolin and fiddle in street bands; she became a political activist with a mohawk hairdo, was arrested by police at a political convention in the US and was raped by a fellow activist after an anti-nuclear protest in Sicily.
All that, she says with surprising serenity, “is the highs and lows of the human condition. We all have really, really bad things to work through”.
When she was in the psychiatric hospital, she received shock treatment. So who was she before she was Shocked? She gives a roundabout answer, directing the curious to a “hidden track” on an early album in which she is introduced to an audience. “The announcer says, ‘Ladies and
gentlemen, Michelle …’ And then he says my last name, before I was Michelle Shocked.”
She offers another clue. “I’ll give you a simpler answer,” she says, “because my brother is now a professional touring musician as well, originally with Uncle Tupelo, then Wilco, now with The Gourds. And, for what it’s worth, his name is Max Johnston, how’s that?”
The Sunday Age, 20th of April 2003
Larry Schwartz Writer 