MICHELLE SHOCKED: HELL ON WHEELS

She looks like any Iggy Pop-clone singer for any generic hardcore band.

Not only that, Michelle Shocked sermonizes anarchist politics at the drop of her soot-black hat. But this tough-looking neo-folkie is actually rather tender. She digs deep into her fragile Southern childhood; one riddled with pain—an adolescence she’d just as soon forget. But, as Michelle says herself, one’s past represents geography, and geography is the essence of folk music.

That’s what Michelle Shocked is all about; she’s one of a growing breed of hybrid, post-punk folkies who’ve popped up spawning folk scenes across the nation from L.A. to New York’s Lower East Side. So, despite painful nostalgia, Michelle divulges her Texas past and a fundamentalist Mormon mom who denied her the average American teenage social life—you know, things like T.V, parties and rock ’n’ roll.

Nevertheless, this 25-year-old toughie doesn t flinch when she describes her years of domestic oppression, homelessness, a rape and several arrests. But just peer into her squinty, street-smart eyes.

“You gotta confront it,” she says as she picks at her tofu and kale at a macrobiotics dive in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I find it difficult when people don’t have a sense of the regional aspect of folk music. America isn’t just one homogenous whole. Being a folk singer from Texas is quite different than being a folk singerfrom New York. So, you can’t ask if Phil Ochs or Dylan influenced me. I listened to ’em, but Guy Clark and Leadbelly were my influences— country-blues Texas style.”

Earlier in the day, I’d been frantically clearing my desk of scattered Brit hip-hop and Aerosmith tapes, Styrofoam cups of week-old coffee (my weekly microbiology project) and a mile-high pile of science and rock rags, when someone from the front office tossed me a package marked “PolyGram.” That was only a half an hour before I was to make the hectic journey from East 34th Street in mid-Manhattan to an anonymous office building nearly half an hour away in Chinatown, where I was to catch up with Michelle.) wanted to talk with her not only about herself and her two records (last year’s The Texas Campfire Tapes and the new Short Sharp Shocked), but also about this new post-punk folk scene in general. As time passed, though, she became the focus; the more urgent.topic of conversation. Michelle’s publicist had sent this “background” material so I could “understand” the quirks of PolyGram’s latest “find.” Truth is, I’d done my homework. Michelle’s debut had taken me quite by surprise: here’s this punky looking woman on the cover with an acoustic Ovation guitar, who picks everything from a country-swing ditty ’bout “Steppin’ Out,” to a smooth ballad about sleeping under the stars in the Netherlands (“5 A.M. In Amsterdam”) to a talking-blues tune about barefoot bums and carefree Gypsies (“The Incomplete Image”).

Mark Kemp

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Though she may look like a Stooge descendant, Michelle sings with an East Texas twang, fingerpicks some of the meanest country-blues this side of Norman Blake, and writes cutting-edge folk tunes with the mastery of the late, great Woody Guthrie and the muscle of the late, great Minutemen axeman D. Boon. And although her songs aren’t quite as overtly political as Guthrie’s or Boon’s, she’s passionately political.

I also knew that this wild woman’d run away from home at 16, lived jobless with skateboarding hardcore anarchists from San Francisco to New York to Amsterdam, was busted and jailed several times for political hi-jinks (once for shouting, “one-twothree-four, we don’t want your FUCKING war...”) at demonstrations during the mid-’80s. Finally, I also knew that mother eventually caught up with daughter five years ago, when Michelle was only 20, and had her tossed into a psycho ward for “attitude adjustment.”

So here we are, only a stone’s throw from Washington Square Park, where, at about the time Michelle was conceived, the last real generation of urban folkies, were singing their protest songs to local activists and NYU students. ‘Chelle’s sittin’ across from me wearing black jeans, a faded sleeveless T-shirt, black cap and black Converse “Chucks”—chewing on a strand of roughage between spurts of political commentary.

“It’s not all that weird,” she snarls at the suggestion that her life, looks and music might seem a tad contradictory. “In Austin you have this acoustic folk scene, but then you also have the Butthole Surfer underground scene. We’re all together in this thing we’re fighting against—this Reagan thing.”

The Reagan thing she speaks of is explicitly laid out on “Graffiti Limbo,” from the new LP, in which Michelle moans slow and bluesy about a young black man who was strangled to death in the presence of 11 transit cops simply for spray-painting on the walls of one of New York City’s sordid subway stations. “There’s a subversive agenda in my work,” she avows. “I wanna create a scene, a community; a place where political ideas can foster and grow and scare the shit out of the powers that be.” Maybe a bit naive, but she’s on the right (uh, left? well, correct) track.

It’s clear that Michelle’s past fostered her own rebellion. “My mother wouldn’t let me go out, she wouldn’t let me do anything against the grain of that repressive religion of hers. But she didn’t censor my reading; that was probably her biggest mistake.” So, a dose of Karl Marx here, a smidgen of On The Road there, and Michelle was off to her hippie father’s home in Dallas where she discovered traditional country-blues, and was encouraged to play and sing. "He’d take me to bluegrass festivals; and he had this incredible record collection,” she says. Michelle eventually split for San Francisco, where she was finally able to live the politics she’d previously only read about.

“The sort of politics I consider effective isn’t just ideology—you can spend your whole life trying to convert people to your ideas. I prefer methods that work; I prefer action,” she says. (The cover of SSS reveals Michelle in the grips of two cops during a rally in Frisco.) “I don’t think it all died in the ’60s, it just went underground. And that’s where bands like the Dead Kennedys came from. Rock is always relevant when it comes to shaking things up; that’s why I’ll rave till midnight over the Circle Jerks or the D.K.s. But you have to weed them out. That scene’s just as fucked up asany ridiculous heavy metal scenesome are committed, some aren’t; some are Nazis, some aren’t.”

And the folk scene’s no different, she admits. “But folk has a longer tradition of political agendas; way before rock ever came along. That’s where Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger came in—and, in his time, even old Bob Dylan.” She cocks her head to one side and rolls her eyes skeptically. "I’m not so sure about him anymore, though, cuz he sure didn’t carry it out as far as I’m concerned.” Presumably, Michelle Shocked will take up the slack.

I finsffly ask about the name. She won’t say why she changed it or why she chose “Shocked.” “There ain’t no underlying meaning to it,” she shrugs (Shell Shocked, perhaps?) “I always wonder, though, why people give a shit about my name. No one ever asks L.L. Cool J; ‘Is Cool J your real name?’ ”

Michelle’s story’s an odd one. She never intended to be the ’’next big thing.” She was content just globe-trotting. She actually made it in England first, after a British independent record exec taped her on a Sony Walkman at a Texas folk festival. He took the recording to Europe with him and turned it into an instant underground hit.

PolyGram picked it up, brought it back across the Atlantic, and the crude recording became The Texas Campfire Tapes. Listening to the album, you can actually hear crickets chirping and cars swishing by on a nearby rural highway. SSS is a fuller, more produced record than the first, though not overproduced. Michelle accepted only a $50,000 advance from PolyGram instead of the $130,000 she was offered. “That way I had artistic freedom,” she says. “Besides, what would I do with all that money?” Well, it would buy quite a few Leadbelly and Circle Jerks records.

Even if she didn’t bank on success, Michelle’s not crying about it. On the new record, she worked with a full-house of musicians including Pete Anderson, who produced the LP and adds to the punchy guitar chops; Domenic Genova on bass; Al Perkins on dobro; Byron Berline on mandolin; Donny Reed on fiddle; Skip Edward on keys; Jeff Donovan on drums and Mike Tempo on percussion; Rod Piazza on harmonica and other supporting vocalists and

instrumentalists. And unlike the first LP, on Short Sharp Shocked she interjects fat jugband sounds, rhythm ’n’ blues and avant-garde jazz.

Michelle isn’t all fireworks and politics; there’s a romantic side to this neo-folkie. As rough and tumble as she appears, Michelle often speaks passively of her past, as though the tyranny never existed. On “Memories Of East Texas,” a ballad on SSS, she sings of rolling hills and of sitting by a country road beneath an October moon. Still, there’s a gnawing, agitated thread running through all her songs. Even on “Memories,” she sings of looking back and asking myself: What the hell’d you let them break your spirit for?

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On “Anchorage”—a sure hit, with Edward’s rolling Hammond organ behind Michelle’s melodic hooks and catchy lyrics—she’s singing honestly of a letter she received from a married friend who has kids, lives a domestic life in the largest, most remote state in the U.S.; a friend who lives a completely different lifestyle than her own. “Hey ’Chelle, I think I’m a housewife ..the song’s protagonist says. Hey girl,

what's it like in New York? New York City, imagine that. Tell me, what’s it like to be a skateboard punk rocker?

The record even has a hardcore song (“Fogtown,” a tune not listed on the cover, but one that was done solo on the first LP). “I know this record’s gonna surprise people who expected another Campfire, but that’s tough. I like doing this stuff.” But would she consider doing another Campfire? “No way. It’d just trivialize the first one. You can’t do something spontaneous twice.”