Shocked Treatment

Michelle Shocked, the East Texas troubadour whose late-’80s music established her as one of the leaders of a wave of independent female artists, probably identifies with the movie “Norma Rae.”

When Shocked talks about her career struggle of recent years, she liberally uses terms, including “revolutionary” and “idealist,” which were applied to the celebrated Southern woman portrayed by Sally Field in the 1979 film about an employee uprising against a textiles manufacturer.

“I went on strike,” Shocked says simply, sitting in a Pasadena coffeehouse, referring to her four-year battle with Mercury Records in a contract dispute over artistic rights.

One big difference, however, is that Shocked’s struggle was a solitary one. There was no union backing her up, no other artists or workers striking and no shutdown of the targeted company.

With the dispute now over, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter is a free agent with a new album, “Kind Hearted Woman,” due Oct. 15 from Private Music Records, a small label distributed by BMG.

Shocked, scheduled to play Oct. 19 at the El Rey Theatre, also has a new batch of songs ready to record for an album to be released next year, also likely from Private Music. Meanwhile, she has already begun talking to major labels about deals for future projects.

But all this comes only after Shocked, who first attracted attention within folk circles for a collection of “campfire tapes” released without her permission in England in 1986, refused for four years to record an album for Mercury .

“Part of it was so hard,” she says now of the lengthy skirmish. “And I could have acquiesced at any time, saved myself the torture.”

In a separate interview, her attorney, Peter Paterno, a veteran industry attorney who has represented such major sellers as Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, says: “She basically sacrificed her career on the altar of principle. She did not make records for four or five years, which is not really done in our business, where you’re only as good as your last hit.”

But Shocked, who early on demonstrated her deeply rooted social activism by choosing for the cover of her first Mercury album a news photo of herself in a police chokehold at a mid-’80s squatters’ rights demonstration, knew what she was getting into.

“The four-year fallow period is no less part of the big picture of my career and artistic development than when a farmer has a bumper crop and then lets the field rest,” she says, using the rural imagery that has fueled much of her music. “And it was just impossible to pass up. They were begging for it.”

Before the dispute with Mercury, Shocked (born Karen Michelle Johnson) seemed well on her way to establishing herself as a vital force in contemporary music, bridging the roots of rural folk styles with the forward-looking personal and social concerns that presaged such recent arrivals as Ani DiFranco. Her three Mercury albums--1988’s “Short Sharp Shocked,” 1990’s “Captain Swing” and 1992’s “Arkansas Traveler”--formed a trilogy exploring, respectively, singer-songwriter, jump-swing and country blues with personalized lyrical twists, painting a panorama of Southern Americana.

Tying it all together was both an intensity and humor forged from her experiences with a strict Mormon upbringing (her mother had her committed to mental institutions twice after she’d run away) and from spending much of the early ‘80s homeless and squatting in San Francisco and Amsterdam.

(As part of the settlement with Mercury, the company will be releasing an anthology drawn from those three albums, but with a title, “Mercury Poise,” selected by Shocked as a reference to Graham Parker’s vituperative song “Mercury Poisoning” about his late-’70s battle with the company.)

In 1993, Shocked was making plans to extend the album series with gospel and funk projects--the latter for which she’d hoped to work with R&B; group Tony Toni Tone, which also records for Mercury. But each was rejected by the company as being out of character for the singer.

Mercury wanted her to do something more in line with “Anchorage,” the pop-folk epistolary tale of a long-lost friend from “Short Sharp Shocked” that was her biggest hit. The album reached No. 73 and the single No. 66 on the pop charts.

Shocked says relations with the company were strained by a unique provision in her contract that gave her the eventual ownership of all her recordings, putting more pressure on Mercury to get immediate results from any of her albums.

So citing another clause in her contract that gave her complete artistic freedom, she announced that she would never record for Mercury again and was going to shop herself to other companies.

When Mercury’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to other companies threatening legal action if a new deal were entered, Shocked initiated a lawsuit citing both California’s law prohibiting long-term personal services contracts, as well as the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. The California law has also been invoked in suits by such high-profile artists as Don Henley and Luther Vandross in recent years, but both were settled out of court.

Mercury officials would not comment about Shocked’s claims, but Paterno says that when he was brought in last year, the artist and the label were at an impasse that was only going to be resolved with legal action from her end.

“It just became entrenched,” he says. “Michelle probably perceived a mean-spiritedness more than there really was, but the bureaucracy and lack of responsiveness she got may seem mean-spirited when you’re on the receiving end. It doesn’t foster great feeling in an artist.”

The suit never made it to court to test her claims, but this summer Shocked finally got what she asked for when new Mercury President Danny Goldberg--himself stinging from a similar bitter battle with Prince during Goldberg’s previous tenure as Warner Bros. Records chairman--agreed to let her go.

Attorney Don Engel, who handled Henley’s and Vandross’ cases among many others of artists trying to void contracts, says there is nothing particularly unique in Shocked’s claim, but he strongly applauds her efforts.

“Do you ever hear of an actor who has to give up his first million dollars of pay from a movie in order to get the film made?” says Engel, who is not connected to the Shocked case. “But [the way record contracts work] all artists pay their recording costs out of their advances. That’s the most unfair, counterproductive business practice I see in any business.

“So it’s great what [Shocked] is doing, but why does she have to do it? Why should she have to make one-off deals, swallow her own costs and be a maverick to accomplish something?”

How did Shocked keep her artistic focus through all this?

“Damn, I’m good,” the singer says, her sly laugh breaking the intense tone of the discussion of her situation. “A lot of that was helped by [choreographer] Mark Morris, who approached me in ’92 about doing something when this [dispute with Mercury] came up. I learned so much from watching him work. He’s got his dance company and they’re the interpreters of his work. Even when they walk and talk, they have his vision. That’s the commitment they have. . . . So I saw that focus.”

And Shocked says that, through the experience, she learned much about her inner strengths that she can apply to her music.

“To me, that’s what [this experience] has been--giving less time to my records and taking time to figure out what my resources are for putting so much guts into what I have to say,” she says.

This sort of fight is nothing new for Shocked. She entered the music world with great mistrust of the business end--largely, she says, learned from the punk-rockers she found herself hanging out with in San Francisco after she left home in the early ‘80s.

Her misgivings only intensified when she had her first official contact with the industry with the release--without her knowledge or authorization--of recordings made of her singing in an informal session at the 1986 Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. The resulting album, “The Texas Campfire Tapes,” was already a hit on the British independent records charts before Shocked even knew about it. (She is currently involved in another lawsuit in England with Cooking Vinyl, the company that originally released that album.)

After her turmoil at Mercury, it may be surprising that Shocked intends to work again with big labels. Why not follow veteran John Prine or young sensation DiFranco and go independent, where the artist has complete control and, not having to split profit with a high-overhead corporate entity, can make much more money per record sold?

Shocked already had a taste of that independence. In 1995, she recorded an earlier version of “Kind Hearted Woman,” which she sold only at concerts during tours of England, the United States and Australia--a trek she mounted without support from a label. Sales of the album were small by normal pop standards--14,939 copies--but she made enough money from the album and concerts to finance the new “Kind Hearted Woman” (see accompanying review) and to buy a house in New Orleans, where she and her husband-manager, journalist Bart Bull, have lived for the past two years.

But she sees herself as being on a crusade that demands that she work within the music power structure to try to change it.

“I want to destroy the myth left over from the ‘60s that you can only work within the system if you sell out,” she says. “There’s a difference between being independent and being empowered. I want to show people that there needs to be redefinition of relationships. A record company is not your parents, it should be your partner.”