Article Library

Michelle Shocked’s idea was to hang out with guitarist Nina Gerber and play some music. The Grammy Award-nominated singer-guitarist’s regular concerts have become music industry and media events since the success of her Short Sharp Shocked album last year.

They may not have received the coverage of The Who, but Thursday’s two concerts at Gerber’s hangout, the Freight and Salvage club in Berkeley, became the biggest show in the folk-rooted club’s 21-year history.

Shocked used her drawing power to fill the 250-seat room for a showcase of three of the area’s best women songwriters as well as herself, all taking equal time, and each accompanied by Gerber on guitar. Shocked may be famous, but she is also aware that there but for fortune she could be drawing small crowds and going as unrecognized outside the folkie community as Sarah Campbell or Carol McComb.

Even with each musician doing a half hour set accompanied by Gerber – who was the evening’s real star, playing five hours of some of the best guitar extant – it was long after midnight when Shocked, Gerber, Campbell, McComb and Betsy Rose joined voices and instruments to sing a rootsy “Will The Circle Be unbroken.”

When Shocked’s plane from Los Angeles (where she’s finishing her third album, Swing Vote [sic]) was delayed, there was no rehearsal time. But with Gerber it didn’t matter. “I listened to Michelle’s CD,” Gerber quipped between shows. “I tell you,” Shocked said, “Nina, she makes everything easy.”

Gerber usually says little and lets her guitar do her talking. She is a not-so-underground local legend, the youngster who so loved singer Kate Wolf’s music that she taught herself guitar and became Wolf’s accompanist until Wolf’s death in 1986.

Since then, her wide-ranging folk-country-jazz-blues stylings have backed dozens of performers on stage and on record. She has an intuitive sense for what to play.

What she played with Shocked was mostly folk and rural blues, except for the pop-oriented hit, “Anchorage.” McComb joined the duo, playing dobro on Jean Ritchie’s “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” and the rest of the cast sang along on “Strawberry Jam.”

The show was far less political than some of Shocked’s previous appearances. She wasn’t even hawking her self-designed “When it’s radical to be liberal, flags will burn” T-shirt. Instead, she wore a sleeveless MDC T-shirt and jeans, talked little, and sang much. It was likely that few in the crowd knew that MDC was the hardcore punk band Shocked hung out with while she was living with the homeless in San Francisco a few years back. She later used the group to back her, uncredited, on “Fogtown,” the wild (and unlisted) finale to her otherwise mainstream Short Sharp Shocked album.

Shocked, 26, may not have pushed the politics, but her stance as a strong feminist (the audience was predominantly young and female), and songs about life from a woman’s point of view, is as fresh, honest, and easy to understand as hit-record-making musicians get these days.

She was preceded by a crew 10 years and more her senior. Fellow transplanted Texan, Sarah Campbell (who now lives near Sonora), is a wonderful songwriter, a good singer in the Rosalie Sorrels tradition, and the perfect front woman for Gerber’s acoustic guitar embellishments, especially on her song about two inner city homeless women, “Geraldine and Ruthie Mae.”

Berkeley’s Betsy Rose followed with an energetic truncated version of her usual show celebrating self-worth and using it to positive ends, as well as a song she wrote for Gerber, “Your Heart Is In Your Hands.”[sic]

Menlo Park’s, Carol McComb, writes great songs and has a high, strong voice to deliver them. Shocked and Campbell harmonized with her on “Idaho Sky.”

As with the chorus line on “Strawberry Jam” – “Everybody knows if you want the best jam you gotta make your own” – so, these singers have made their own music, and, on Thursday, found impressively fresh ways to say important things with music.

Now, if Shocked could just get a record company interested in issuing a Nina Gerber album.