$30 advance / $35 at the door / 6pm doors / 6:30 start / seated
Surviving a 13 year blacklist, activist & musician Michelle Shocked has emerged with the release of her audio memoir Bootleg This! Forty years after her legendary bootleg debut, the Grammy winner returns with a vengeance.
An act of defiance -- this tour is breaking the blacklist, disturbing the silence. Slinging stories and songs set carefully like stones; a fusillade of human emotion in an air-punching Fuck Yeah. Calm, confident, controlled with a lethal focus. Balanced and battle-bitten, sharing tales of media misadventures fused by a set of select songs.
"You can't take the art out of the artist. Creative labor has value; stolen art has potent power."
"I knew it would work — I just didn't know it would work so well."
Born in Dallas and raised in the soaking humid Piney Woods of east Texas, Michelle Shocked grew up in a large fundamentalist Mormon family before leaving home at sixteen. She put herself through the University of Texas at Austin, earning a degree in Oral Interpretation of Literature while becoming increasingly involved in political activism.
Before she was a celebrated recording artist, Shocked was a fixture of the American punk underground. Flying a mohawk and a safety pin for a nose ring, while busking on the streets with her mandolin and fiddle, she sprang, fully-formed, from the San Francisco hardcore scene. She was arrested in 1984 at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and again at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, and the iconic San Francisco Examiner photo of her arrest, in a police chokehold, subsequently became the cover image of her debut studio album, Short Sharp Shocked.
“You can be poor anywhere,” she figured, making her way to Paris to join the resistance against Reagan’s Cold War provocations: squatting in Amsterdam while working with a pirate radio collective, joining fellow pirate radio activists in Madrid to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Franco’s death, enlisting at a women’s peace camp in Sicily, vagabonding Europe—from Finland to Morocco—on a counterfeit rail pass poached in Brixton, and survived on the remnants of the Old Left’s mutual aid network. Music was never the plan. Activism was.
That unlikely journey would eventually produce one of the most unconventional careers in contemporary American music—one that has continually crossed the boundaries between folk, blues, swing, gospel, politics, faith, and storytelling while remaining defiantly independent at every turn. Activist and musician Michelle Shocked emerges with the release of her audio memoir, Bootleg This! https://michelleshocked.supercast.com/
"Michelle Shocked is a true trailblazer who knows how to play with fire"
~ Rolling Stone
more press:
Roadworks fall tour promo video
recent: profile in the Scotsman