Michelle Shocked

$30 adv / $35 at the door (advance sales ONLINE ONLY until 3pm day of show, then available at the door). Doors at 6:30pm, showtime 7:00pm. ALL AGES! General Admission ticket includes a combination of limited seating and standing room. Seating is first come first serve. Tickets are nonrefundable. 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  …continue reading