MICHELLE SHOCKED: ToHeavenURide

Michelle Shocked

ToHeavenURide

© 2007 Mighty Sound (820692101423)

CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.

SPECIAL: 10% discount if you buy more than one copy of it today!

Unaware that ToHeavenURide was being recorded, it spotlights her where she’s always shone brightest – live, on stage, in front of an audience as a special invitation to perform a “gospel” set at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival - and what a show it was.

tracks

1 Introductions
2 Strange Things Happening Every Day
3 The Weight
4 Quality of Mercy
5 God Bless the Child
6 Good News
7 Cancer Alley rap
8 Wade in the Water
9 Uncloudy Day
10 Study War No More
11 We're Blessed
12 Psalm
13 Answered Prayer rap
14 Can't Take My Joy

notes

WOMANIFESTO
By Michelle Shocked

Ask me about my religion.

Of course, no one ever does.

I think in this day and age, belief in a supreme being is kind of like a mystical foreign land -- with the difference being that whenever people visit there, they never seem to come back. Western civilization spends 2,000 years under the influence of the Christian church, and then sometime in the last century, modernism, nostalgia and commerce, the entertainment-industrial complex, arose to create a brand new secular religion in its place. Anybody who finds their way back to religion these days is swimming upstream, and must be out of their mind.

Truth be told, that’s part of what I like about it.

I’ve been in this business we call show for a quarter of a century now. If you do the math (and I kind of wish you wouldn’t), that’s most of my adult life. For the first half of that, it kind of snuck up on me – I didn’t even know I had a career until they called and told me I was climbing the charts in England, and I better get my skinny white-girl ass over there but quick. You get on that ride, it moves pretty quick, and so I literally grew up in public. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.

But, as these things have a way of doing, it all circled around again, so that the second half of my career took place out of the public eye. All the things I would have gotten around to there at the beginning – defining myself, setting my boundaries, making my peace with the way the world works, and my place in it – I finally tried to deal with. I recalibrated myself; reset everything to zero. And look where I ended up: Singing in an all-black Pentecostal church choir in the heart of South Central Los Angeles, trying to live by the Good Book and putting out a gospel record.

The Grateful Dead ain’t got nothing on me, man.

Here’s your long strange trip right here.


When people find religion, it’s almost like a physical change comes over them: They’re filled with the holy spirit, they drop their burdens and surrender to a higher power and they can’t wait to tell everyone they meet about it. This can be unsettling. If your friends or loved ones suddenly start behaving differently, spouting all kinds of language you’re not used to, claiming to be born again in the blood of the lamb – I suppose you’ve got a right to be alarmed. I think for the nonbeliever, or the lapsed believer, the problem is that the only time you ever hear from those of faith – outside of what you see on television or see quoted in the newspapers – is when they’re trying to convert you to their way of thinking. We get like that sometimes.

So, for the record, I’m not preaching, or proselytizing, or even praising God, especially. At this moment, I’m neither evangelist nor zealot. I’m just telling you how it worked for me.

I grew up during the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, when America was polarized by the generation gap. Youth culture; “Never trust anyone over 30.” I grew up hearing that, and believing it, except even back then, I said to myself that ain’t right. All the people who knew the stuff I wanted to know were on the wrong side of that divide. Same thing with the division of the races. For the most part, white people wanted to be black people – talk like black people, move like black people, sing like black people. Or the ones I knew, anyway. And yet there were all these forces that kept us apart. I was born in Dallas, lived all over as an army brat, settled in a small town in East Texas, and then as quick as I could, lit out for the big city – Austin, San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, London. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, in a lot of different settings, and around a lot of different kinds of people. They’re all proud of who they are, and they identify themselves by the group they belong to. But they’re all just people, and all of them welcomed a weary stranger at the exact moment I came passing through. To me, at least, people aren’t that different.

So, being a student of life, I began to question my underlying assumptions. If young are turned against old, white against black, hipsters against hicks – and yet people everywhere are basically the same – then there must be a reason. It must be in someone’s interests. I feel the same way about the religious and the secular – the churched and the unchurched.

So I started following these various tributaries back up to their original sources. I was moved by the power of rock-and-roll. And if you follow the roots of rock-and-roll, it always leads you back to the blues, to sweet soul music, race music and finally to the churches and gospel music.

I was fiercely political; I despised and renounced injustice wherever I could find it – the crusader spirit often occurring naturally in the adolescent soul, much like lyric poetry. And the anarchist squats and socialist collectives and hippie communes I would visit could all be traced back to the anti-war movement of the ’60s. Which came out of the civil rights movement of the ’50s and early ’60s. Which all came out of the southern black churches – just like Dr. King – and marched to a soundtrack of gospel music.

I lived in New Orleans for a long time, and every year at the Jazz and Heritage Festival, while the out-of-towners watched the big acts on the main stages, there was a whole other festival going on in the gospel tent – one with its own stars, fan base and rules of engagement. And the sounds coming out of it were otherworldly.

Everywhere I looked, behind the world of simple pleasures, I saw something else, some guiding force or spirit. Not that moved in mysterious ways, but rather that showed through when you least expected it. I’m a big tent kind of gal – Dr. King’s table of brotherhood. Ema Goldman: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Whatever this impulse was, I was looking for its source.

I call it touching the tar baby: Everyone wants to go up to the tar baby and touch it as quickly and lightly as they can, and then walk away. ‘What are you talking about? I ain’t got no tar on me.’ Some may complain that’s a loaded term, but it comes from Uncle Remus, it’s the title of a novel by Toni Morrison and it’s an image I first used in the liner notes to Arkansas Traveler and to explain myself to my collaborators. So hopefully I'm in good company. But I knew that gospel was the tar baby behind rock-and-roll. It was the gospel roots that everyone was afraid of. So if that’s the case, then okay – let’s touch it, let’s embrace it, let’s get all messy.

The songs on this album are a road map to that journey.



(1) “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first gospel superstar, in the ’30s and ’40s. She was so big that she got married in Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. and drew 25,000 (paying) guests. She was also the father – well, mother – of modern rockabilly: she played electric guitar, and all those cats were trying to cop her moves. Both Johnny Cash and Little Richard at one point called her their favorite singer. With the movie Amelie, a little bit of her legacy got out, when the lead character sees her perform on a TV screen.

I first heard of her through a recording of “Kumbaya,” except is wasn’t “Kumbaya,” it was “Come By Here.” That’s when I learned that this chestnut of politically correct folk spirituality was, in fact, a sanitization (intentional or not) of a gospel recording. In the folk canon, it was always said to be a Negro spiritual brought over from Africa. But no, it was a gospel song exported to Africa and later re-imported by Angolan missionaries. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s version was pure holy fire. MC Records in New York did a Sister Rosetta tribute album a couple of years ago, and I recorded a version of this song. I think the title sounds like an episode of The X-Files.



(2) “The Weight” (Robbie Robertson)

I was on tour with a Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman outfit called Ratdog. They would bring us out at the end of the package and we’d do an encore finale number together, which was “The Weight.” And I’d never heard it before. (I grew up a punk rocker. So sue me.) I assumed it was a Grateful Dead song. So I would come out and do my verse, which went, “Go down, Miss Moses, there’s nothing you can say./It’s just old Luke, and Luke is waiting on the Judgment Day./‘Hey, Luke, my friend, what about young Annalee?’/‘Do me a favor, boy, won’t you stay and keep Annalee company?’” I’m like, say what? Robbie Robertson said in an interview once he was thinking about BuÒuel films like Viridiana or Nazarin, “the impossibility of sainthood.” Great. But Nazareth, “Carmen and the Devil, walkin’ side by side,” Crazy Chester, who “caught me in the fog” – it’s as close to a secular gospel song as anybody is comfortable with. It doesn’t annoy anybody. Meanwhile, the tone is almost apocalyptic.



(3) “The Quality of Mercy” (Michelle Shocked)

I wrote this song for the soundtrack of the film Dead Man Walking, directed by Tim Robbins. Of all the times when Hollywood came knocking and wanted me to write a song for a film, this was by far the most decent. It wasn’t on spec; they literally gave you an edit of the movie – at a time when that was taboo. They said, “If this movie inspires you to write a song, we invite you to participate.” It was like you already had the gig. The soundtrack has Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – like that. Not a bad group of folks to hang out with in the commissary afterwards. Steve Earle wrote a song from the prison guard’s point of view; I wrote one from Sister Helen Prejean’s moral POV.

I literally watched the movie, I prayed for five minutes – “Give me a song; I’m ready for my song” – and then I wrote the song. It was that straightforward.

I started with the Shakespeare quote – “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath it.” That’s from The Merchant of Venice, in the courtroom scene when Portia requests lenience from Shylock, the moneylender (pursuing his “pound of flesh”), so that her boyfriend and his benefactors can catch a break. But I was actually more influenced by a Mekons album called The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen, which had a cover photo of a monkey with a typewriter (the idea being that he’ll eventually produce Shakespeare). I suppose we take inspiration where we find it.



(4) “God Bless the Child” (Billie Holiday)

We all know this from the Billie Holiday version, although it’s also part of the folk canon. The lyrics start out: “Them that’s got shall get; them that’s not shall lose, so the Bible says, but it still is news.” People always wonder, “Where does it say that in the Bible?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Once you break it down, it’s quoting Luke 19:26: “He replied, ‘I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away.’” This is the Parable of the Pounds, which Jesus delivers on his way to Jerusalem, where he faces his final showdown, and right after he saved a tax collector (not any more popular then than they are now). The point is: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If you've got a lot of responsibilities, you'll probably get more and if you have few, you'll probably get less.”



(5) “Good News” (Michelle Shocked)

Cancer Alley is an hour north of New Orleans in a little town called Convent, Louisiana. All those small parish towns were organized around the Catholic church, and churches still wind up being the one protection these largely black populations have against the petrochemical conglomerates who basically moved in next door and dumped their toxic trash all over the neighborhood – their trash, of course, being able to kill you and disfigure your offspring. Like I spell out in the intro, I wrote this song in conjunction with an organized political movement against a Japanese company that was dumping PCBs into the air and water. The title seems like it’s a reference to the Gospel – Good News for Modern Man and the like – but actually I had in mind another time-honored tradition: Vaudeville. As in, “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news.” The gospel may be good news, but it’s also the voice of the poor, the weak and the downtrodden. Always been like that; is now and ever shall be. The exploitation of these people didn’t start with Katrina. The powers that be had given up on them a long time ago.



(6) “Wade in the Water” (Traditional)

And speaking of Katrina:

“Wade in the Water” is listed as a traditional Negro spiritual, which basically means the guy who wrote this one even predated copyright law. My last major-label release was Arkansas Traveler in 1992, where I tried to present a reverent tribute to the roots of the bluegrass tradition. Think O Brother, Where Art Thou?a decade earlier, and without the Preston Sturges reference. So when it came time for me to do another record, my labelmates Tony! Toni! Tone! had just released an album called The Revival, which took the exact same premise, only with gospel roots. They took standard hymns like “Wade in the Water” and turned them into R&B shoutouts like “Hey, Little Walter.” They had grown up in the churches, and after the services the instruments were laying around, and they would go up and start jamming as kids, and grew up playing together. So as usual, me being a troublemaker, I thought, How perfect! I’ll collaborate with Tony! Toni! Tone! and we can create this hybrid out of two hybrids.

That same year, I gave the keynote address at South by Southwest, where I noted that music was supposed to be the thing that built bridges between the races, except that with narrowcasting in the marketplace, it was now the thing that divided the races into these artificial niches. This was not received well -- I was branded a heretic. When I made the same pitch to my label, Mercury Records (just then being run by a black president named Ed Eckstine, the son of ’40s soul crooner Billy Eckstine), it turns out that musical segregation worked just fine for all the record executives, radio programmers and the infrastructure that existed to facilitate it. Within a few months, Mercury notified me that not only would they refuse to issue a purchase order to let me record my next album, but they weren’t going to let me out of my contract either. So I was put on ice for almost four years. That lasted from ’92 until a settlement agreement in ’96, which consisted of two points: (1) I did give them a kiss-off album called “Mercury Poise” – they wanted to call it “Anthology,” but my title was me taking the high road to Graham Parker’s 1979 single “Mercury Poisoning,” issued for similar reasons. And (2) I forced them to honor my original contract, in which I retained ownership of all my masters. On the way out the door, their head of business affairs told me, “This label will never promote you properly, because you cut too good a deal for yourself.” At the time, I thought that was the worst thing anybody had ever said to me. But he might have been doing me a favor.



(7) “Uncloudy Day” (The Staples Singers)

There were a couple of interesting byproducts of the Arkansas Traveler album. One was writing my own new lyrics to these traditional melodies, allowing me the chance to comment on historical revision, carry forward common themes and so forth. Another was tracing the bluegrass tradition back to blackface minstrelsy, which is almost completely missing from modern musicology (or at least was before people like my ex-husband, the journalist Bart Bull, started writing about it in the music press). What is traditionally defined as the great white soulfulness of this high lonesome sound is actually much less mysterious: It’s white folks putting on musical blackface and claiming that they’ve now got soul. Toward that end, I collaborated not only with white bluegrass and country innovators like Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Jimmy Driftwood, but also their black counterparts in Taj Mahal, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Pops Staples. The Staples Singers are as much the source of my gospel knowledge as anybody.

Which is why it pains me to tell this story. The song I recorded with Pops Staples, “33 RPM Soul,” was in fact a songwriting exercise to use all the words that were embargoed by the FCC in a song. This was in the era of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Council, and the FCC would fine you for using any of these seven dirty words on the radio. So I snuck them all into this one song, only without anyone knowing it. For instance, the lyrics go, “Cocksuckcrate your soul/Or there’s gonna be hell to pay/You goddamn where they live/Come the judgment day.” And for good measure, I put the words “censorship” and “obscene” in there too. No one ever suspected what I’d done – least of all Pops. And I am mortified to this day that I did this. Of course, he was the world’s oldest 12-year-old – there’s every chance he would have dug it. I only confess it now as an act of contrition. Or maybe as a sign to myself that I’m finally starting to grow up.



(8) “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More” (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe again, with a song better known as “Down by the Riverside,” not to mention a sentiment you really can’t argue with. I did finally get around to doing my gospel record, called Deep Natural, and released it on my own label in 2002. I recorded a number of songs that appear here as well – “Good News,” “Psalm,” “Can’t Take My Joy.” If you look on YouTube, you’ll see a clip of me at West Angeles Church of God in Christ on Crenshaw in South Central Los Angeles, where they invite me up with the choir to sing “Yes, God Is Real.” (Trust me, you’ll be able to pick me out of the crowd.) Immediately afterwards, everyone was coming up to me and asking, “Where can I get your CD?” The church has a bookstore/emporium, so being of the entrepreneurial stripe, I took some copies of my Deep Natural CD over there, which I considered my gospel record. And they listened to it. And they called me back and said, “No, we won’t carry it. It’s not gospel. It’s gospel-tinged. But it’s not gospel.” Gospel is a tradition unto itself because it’s a deep vortex of mystery to those standing outside it, but also because its gatekeepers are ever vigilant. And the gospel police make the bluegrass police or the folk police look like pikers. It’s a door that remains locked on both sides.



(9) “We’re Blessed” (Fred Hammond)

This is a contemporary Praise and Worship standard by Fred Hammond, formerly of the Detroit gospel group Commissioned. Now that I’m deep in the choir tradition, I see that people like Hammond will release a new album and suddenly they become part of the canon. So for a couple of years, every choir around was singing “Blessed,” from the big mega-churches to the little churches in geodesic domes in South Central. There isn’t more crossover because the church audience is an exacting one: It demands fealty from its stars, and it discourages them from keeping one foot in the secular standards – just in case. People asked Al Green why he suddenly returned to performing his old hits after 20 years, and he said, “Because God told me I could.” He was Mr. “Love and Happiness,” and then the boiling grits, and then he started preaching and you had to go see him at his church in Memphis. His struggle was, the church people would come to his concerts and scold and scorn him if he even dared go back to the secular material – even though a percentage of the audience was there to hear it.

I say it this way: Yes, a white man can sing the blues. But a white man is never asked to make the same choice as a black man who sings the blues, which is to turn his back on his entire society, culture and tradition -- the church. When a white man sings the blues, he’s embracing a tradition he isn’t a part of. When a black man sings the blues, he has to walk away from everything: His mama brought him up in the church, his pastor, his friends, his family. They excommunicate him -- he has to walk away from all of that. To this day, it still goes on.



(10) “Psalm” (Michelle Shocked)

When I was first confronting this dilemma with Deep Natural – I am not a gospel singer, and I’m really not a gospel songwriter – I went to Dr. Judith McAllister, the minister of music at West Angeles. And she said, “It’s simple, baby – just read the Psalms.” And so, if you go to Psalm 114, you will see that, with just a little nip here and tuck there, I made it rhyme like a real pop song. Which just goes to show you, you should know your Bible. First of all, there is no better way to argue with self-righteous people who hold it up as their moral standard: You lay some Ecclesiastes or Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians on their sorry backsides, and it drives them up a wall. But second: You think the folk tradition is a good place to steal from? Check out the Psalms. These are songs of praise that are the culmination of a several-millennia tradition and are ripe for the picking. Like T.S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” And he was an Anglican.



(11) “Can’t Take My Joy” (Michelle Shocked)

Which brings us to the well one more time. I wrote this with a reggae feel (“reggae-tinged,” I guess the church ladies would say) because to me, reggae is like gospel once removed. Take Bob Marley. He set out to be Curtis Mayfield. He conceived of himself as a soul singer, and yet “Redemption Song” is in every way a spiritual, as well as one of the greatest songs of all time. And yet somehow, Bob Marley isn’t thought of as a religious artist -- maybe because he smoked a lot of pot. Or because his religion is so exotic to us, we don’t think of it as a religion at all.


These songs were recorded in July '03 at the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. It felt like a great gig at the time, performed with a nine-piece band, and the board tape seemed to bear that out. The face of the contract clearly stated that no recording was allowed, so it never occurred to me to ask if a 50+ track ProTools session was lying around somewhere in the vaults. But it did occur to my manager, and voila, you have the byproduct before you. Inadvertent album? Glorified field recording? Wait – this is my legacy! Mixed and mastered, it sounds like the Texas Campfire Tapes on a real good day.

Fifteen years ago, I was moved by a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King: "It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing "In Christ There is No East Nor West." I decided to mix my metaphors and take the mountain to Mohammad. One white girl attending a black church wasn’t going to change the world or anything, right? I was just going to check out a gospel choir, ya know... and what’s not to love about a gospel choir? Ten years later, on top of another mountain, the holy spirit erupted. And now here I am bringing it home to you.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Or at least that’s been my experience.

-Michelle

reviews

Please log in to review this album.

email

Please log in to email this artist.