Swing Is the Thing : Michelle Shocked Tries to Say as Much Through the Spirit of Her Music as Through the Lyrics

Michelle Shocked has been lucky, up to a point. Where practically every singer with a guitar and anything to say in the last 25 years has been roundly pegged as “the new Bob Dylan,” Shocked somehow has avoided that musty mantle. She certainly could qualify for it, having emerged from a personal odyssey with individualistic, radically politicized “folk” songs, informed by both some hard traveling and rare invention.

It seems, though, that one can only duck Dylan’s corduroy cap for so long, and what Shocked hasn’t garnered in comparisons, she recently has in castigations.

Her first album, “The Texas Campfire Tapes,” was a purist’s dream, with the then-unknown singer captured outdoors on a Sony Walkman, performing to a background of crickets and car noises. Her newly issued third album, “Captain Swing,” finds Shocked amid jumping horn arrangements, singing an apparently far less political creed. And some critics are so vehemently appalled by Shock’s daring to change--”please shut up,” suggested one--that it’s stacking up like the ‘60s’ “Dylan goes electric” controversy all over again.

To Shocked, it’s a matter of the critics not knowing who she was before telling her she shouldn’t change.

Reached by phone last Friday at a tour stop in Eugene, Ore.--she performs tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano--the 27-year-old singer said: “I’m not about trying to be obscure or having a mystique. If they’d been asking me, I’d have been only too willing to say what I’m about.”

Among other things, she said, she tries to say as much through the spirit of her music as through its lyrical content. The back cover of “Captain Swing” declares, “Swing is a feeling. . . . Everything else is just style.” She explained:

“The emphasis is on the swing feeling, or what you could call the interaction of music. I see very clearly how that could have been obscured with (her second LP) ‘Short, Sharp Shocked,’ because at the time I was very intent on putting the emphasis on the lyrics and the stories.

“But I think you’ll see much more over the long term that my loyalty in terms of music is to my earliest influences, having been sitting around playing with my father and my brother and his friends on a Saturday night with a case of beer. I’ve got an agenda, and it’s very much informed musically by having my roots in Texas, so I’m trying to draw as many of those kinds of influences into the music as possible.”

Shocked, born in Dallas, led the transitory life of an Army brat with her mother and stepfather. At 16 she ran away from home and its “fundamentalist environment” (following one runaway attempt, her mother had committed her to a mental hospital), living for a time with her father in Dallas. She says he introduced her to the music of Guy Clark, Doc Watson, Big Bill Broonzy and others.

From there she took to the road and became increasingly radicalized by her experiences living on “the edges of homelessness” in San Francisco, New York and Amsterdam. The cover of her “Short, Sharp, Shocked” album was taken from a news photo of Shocked being choked by police at the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco.

Amid her travels, she was overheard singing her songs by a campfire at the 1986 Kerrville, Tex., Folk Festival by the owner of a small British record label. He released his Walkman recording of her, and it went to No. 1 on the British independent music charts, which was enough to attract PolyGram Records.

The attraction wasn’t entirely mutual. Shocked had great reservations about entering the professional recording business.

She was paired by the label with Dwight Yoakam producer Pete Anderson, and “things were very tentative when we started,” she said. “I came into the whole studio thing very much alienated. I’m not much in the record-buying tradition, and a good reason for that was, having sampled the radio, I had a real strong distaste. And I thought that was a lot to do with the technology and the producers. I didn’t really even know what a producer was. I just figured that whatever they were, they were going to try to make me sound like all the other crap on the radio.”

Shocked had even brought a musician friend over from England whose chief job, she said, was to help her sabotage the recording if it went in a direction she didn’t like.

“But then, early on we were doing some production on ‘Anchorage’ and Pete wanted to bring in a Fairlight (a massively expensive digital synth) to synthesize some of the string parts, and I had a fairly knee-jerk reaction to it--’No computers on my record!’--and I dug my heels in expecting a real pitched ego battle. What I got instead from Pete was, ‘If your intuition tells you that it’s not right for this song, we won’t use it.’

“I did not expect to find somebody like him--knowing I had never been in a studio--to have that much regard for my intuition about it all. But he obviously has an agenda that is very similar to mine, which is to shake up the status quo and question formula production. He’s a strong ally, and what we have is a collaboration in the best sense of the word.”

That collaboration has resulted in the country, rockabilly and other influences melding with her folk-based writing on 1988’s “Short, Sharp, Shocked,” and in the horn-driven R&B; pleasures of “Captain Swing.”

She took the “Captain Swing” title, she said, from a term used by workers in the 19th Century to refer to acts of industrial sabotage. Though Shocked is letting the music do more of the talking, she said her new songs aren’t less political, just less apparent. For example, “(Don’t Mess With) My Little Sister” is outwardly about protecting a sibling from male attentions, but it was fueled by Shocked’s feelings about U.S. incursions into Central America.

She cites “the influence of someone like Louis Jordan, who could sing about racism in a very subversive way--you know like ‘Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.’

“I’ve been subjected to the charge that this album is less political than the previous one, when in fact what people are responding to is a less political image , and they’ve neglected to note the political substance. To me the subversion alone is worth the price of admission.”

There is also a political motive behind the title of her video-played single “On the Greener Side.”

“They’ll tell you the grass is always greener on the other side, but I think we’ve overlooked for much too long now the fact that it’s actually greener on the greener side. I just put some serendipitous lyrics to go along with that, but it does give me a chance to make that point in interviews, to go into my understandings, for example, of Green Party politics in West Germany, and my visions and hopes for something of that nature in this country.

“When I see Green politics being organized in this country, you can pretty much predict that what it’s going to represent is a fairly white middle-class party. But in West Germany, the Greens would never have come to power had they not formed a coalition with a group known as the Alternative List, made up of every single faction of society that somehow manages to fall through the cracks between the basic left-wing/right-wing dichotomy.

“Though they shared environmental concerns, by forming a coalition they had to be very committed to diversity. There’s a principle of unity in diversity. I’ve tried to make a parallel with what I’ve done with ‘Captain Swing.’ I’ve got lots of different styles of swing. But in the end it’s not the style that unifies the material, it’s the swing feeling behind it all that makes it enjoyable.”

Shocked has spread her energies in a number of directions. Playing a number of cause-supporting benefits as well as her own tour dates (she hopes to attain a nine-month-a-year tour schedule), she has been working on a song with Paul Simon--one of her few heroes from “the commercial recording business”--for inclusion on an upcoming Rob Wasserman album to be entitled “Trios.”

And she participated in the Project for Tian An Men Square, joining with 50 artists, chiefly contemporary R&B; stars, on a record and music video to commemorate the year-old massacre of Chinese students.

Currently living in Los Angeles, Shocked is active in WOMAD (the Peter Gabriel-organized World of Music, Arts and Dance, which promotes and spreads the varied cultures of the world), with an eye to forming a Los Angeles chapter.

Once an avowed expatriate--she moved to Europe when Ronald Reagan was reelected--she still has reservations about living in her native country and considers it part of an ongoing experiment in working within the system.

“I take it from the attitude that it is impossible to change the system from the inside,” she said, “but that it is absolutely hypocritical, if you have the opportunity to try, to turn it down.”

Michelle Shocked and John Wesley Harding play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $22.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.