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Nearing 30 now, Michelle Shocked is still trying to graduate from the School of Hard Knocks. A runaway from home at 16, she spent the better part of a decade virtually homeless in San Francisco, New York City and Amsterdam. Twice, she was committed to a mental hospital against her will. In Italy, she was raped, joined a women’s separatist commune, and then was kicked out. Traumatized and radicalized, she survived.

Then better things began to happen. She was discovered and recorded by a British independent record producer, and her [The] Texas Campfire Tapes reached No. 1 on the British indie charts.

This led to a contract with PolyGram Records and even greater success with a second album, Short Sharp Shocked. The cover was a photograph of her screaming as she’s subdued by police at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

“I can always defuse anger with a song. I’m free and I haven’t been defeated,” Shocked said in a 1988 Newsweek article by Pete Axthelm, who cited her concern about “sexism, racism, and runaways” and saw in her unconventional style “the populism of Woody Guthrie, the literate storytelling of Tom T. Hall and the wit of her friend and mentor, undervalued songwriter Guy Clark.”

Late last year, Shocked shocked those who had her pegged as a protest folkie by touring Britain with the Captain Swing Revue, a big band that sounded like the second coming of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

Her third album, Captain Swing, drew high marks from some critics and put-downs from others for its sassy swing style, even though many of the songs are socially conscious (“God is a Real Estate Developer,” “Streetcorner Ambassador,” “Cement Lament”).

“Her down-home direct approach has been severely compromised,” sniffed one London critic, while Steve Pick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hailed her as “one of the most exciting new voices in pop music.” In Shocked’s home state of Texas, Claudia Perry of the Houston Post rapped Captain Swing in a piece headlined “Big, dull Shocked; ex-squatter seems to have eye on pop’s high rent district.”

Shocked was undaunted. Unlike most musicians, she included both positive and negative review excerpts in her press kit, along with a handprinted note in which she defends her swing to swing and attacks music industry piegeonholers.

“No one who truly loves music wants to see it divided into the segregated cultural demographics of the current commercial wisdom.”

As a performer, Shocked is no more adventurous in this respect than kindred spirits such as k.d. lang and Lyle Lovett (another Texan), but she is more outspoken about it.

In a telephone interview from Minnesota earlier this week, she compared “black” and “white” music formatting on radio to separate drinking fountains and segregated schools.

Now living in Los Angeles, Shocked is involved in efforts there to organize a WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), a portable multicultural music festival along the lines of those organized by Peter Gabriel and others in the mid-1980s.

“The idea’s to bring musicians from all five continents together on the same stage so people are exposed to their music and politics in an appropriate way,” she says. After a decade of “cause rock,” she says, people need consciousness-raising less than they need “resources and tools to do something” about social, economic, and environmental problems.

The WOMAD being organized in Los Angeles may play Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival and some Canadian festivals this fall, Shocked says, but she probably won’t go along because she’s "not commercially strong enough,” to be useful.

As a matter of principle, Shocked says, she is running her current U.S. tour without financial backing from PolyGram. The principles are to avoid overreliance on fickle money men and to protect touring as “the sacred right of the performer.” The practicality of the matter is that she has to work five or six nights a week just to break even.

On the road since early April on a tour that won’t end until June 2 in Los Angeles, Shocked clearly was tired and dispirited during a telephone during a telephone interview Monday. Her view is that albums should sell tours, not vice versa, but she believes that PolyGram has slacked off on promotion of Captain Swing and it’s slipping on the charts, which doesn’t help her tour.

Traveling by bus with “five musicians and a drummer – an old joke,” Shocked is headed for a May 24 performance at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts.

British singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, who just made his Sire/Reprise Records debut with Here Comes the Groom, will open the show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $17.50 at the Hult Center ticket office (687-5000) and its outlets.

If her style switch between Short Sharp Shocked and Captain Swing took some people by surprise, Shocked says, it’s because they mistakenly assumed she was following their agenda instead of her own.

Her agenda has several points, she says.

One is to keep her music simple enough – “three chords and something to say” – so people will realize that they can do it, too. “I call it the strawberry jam revolution,” she says. “You can buy different brands of strawberry jam, but nothing tastes as good as homemade.”

Another goal is to preach what she calls pragmatic feminism, “something you can put in the hands of women who need it just to get through the day because of problems with bosses, children, husbands, economic circumstances.” This runs counter, she says, to more militant feminists who are more interested in “purifying” feminism.

Shocked says she also intends to avoid the “spokesman” role so often thrust on musicians who write socially serious songs. “Whatever I say, it’s just my two cents’ worth,” she says. “I’m not speaking for others, like a preacher or a politician. I want to let people know that I’m aware of the contradictions” inherent in her visibility as a public performer.

Shocked has described herself as “an opportunist but not a careerist” when it comes to the music business. A prickly idealist, she was disheartened when a PolyGram artists and repertoire representative told her that the 10 songs she had recorded for her Captain Swing album didn’t run long enough to meet contract requirements.

As a result, the album has an eleventh song, not listed on the cassette, or included on the lyric sheet, about “a holy roller playing Russian roulette.”