Batten down the hatches and hide the Waterford crystal. Hard-driving blues chanteuse Candye Kane hasn’t taken one iota of advice from music industry executives to tone down her image and keep quiet about her turbulent and oft-trashy history.

If anything, Kane has gone in the opposite direction on her aptly titled new CD, White Trash Girl. Thankfully she goes ever farther astray in a forthcoming autobiography that is sure to set the publishing industry on fire. And if big bad Candye has been headed in the wrong direction all these years, we ask you, who wants her to be right?

As she explains in the liner notes to her seventh CD (with stunning trailer park illustrations by Belly Up poster artist Scrojo): “Trash is not an insult to me. It is the hard-earned badge of success that has sustained me when no one believed in my talent but myself. It is an honor to be called a trashy broad in the tradition of legends such as Divine and Gypsy Rose Lee. The term ‘white trash girl’ has the tricky implications that there are also brown and black and yellow trash girls too and that we are all united in our consumption and creation of trash.”

The self-described fat activist, ex-welfare momma and former porn star has been characterized as bawdy, benevolent and sensationalistic – at times having her ass kissed by the music industry and at other times being kicked to the curb like rubbish. However, whether belting out a love song for Italian President Carlo Ciampi or performing at an AIDS benefit, the power of Kane’s voice cannot so easily be discarded.

Rather than demure on the subject of her past, Kane uses it as a tool in her live shows. A master storyteller, she has spent a decade spreading the gospel of equal rights and self-acceptance during her shows. On White Trash Girl, Kane delivers a down-and-dirty, guitar-driven collection of semi-autobiographical blues, including numbers about succumbing to the “Masturbation Blues,” on-the-road cravings for “cheese in a can and boxes of wine” and her feminist master plan to unleash the “Estrogen Bomb.”

And lest a listener find Kane lacking in family values, her boys lend a hand as their mom’s musical collaborators. Her 25-year-old son, Evan, backs her up on drums and her 16-year-old son, Tommy, penned the soulful new tune “What Happened to the Girl.”

White Trash Girl has been nominated for best blues album by the San Diego Music Awards. Kane performs at this year’s CityFest Sunday, Aug. 14. The Oceanside resident recently spoke with the Gay and Lesbian Times about her latest release and forthcoming autobiography.

Kane’s story starts as most do, with a 10-year-old girl in East L.A. foraging through a garbage can for food – the stuff heartaches, and, at times, blues legends are made of.

“My mom and dad had had a huge fight, and my mom hurled the Easter ham into the trash can,” Kane recalled. “I’m outside in my Easter dress picking glass out of the Easter ham and eating it by the fistfuls, because I’m hungry and I’ve waited all day for this ham and I’m not going to let anything spoil it.”

Though Kane had ham in her hands, in her heart was music dying to get out.

“I wanted to sing, and I did [at] every opportunity I had, which were few and far between,” she said. “I did ‘The Gong Show,’ but there weren’t a lot of opportunities, and they started drying up as I got a little bit older and became a teenager in East L.A. There weren’t many people coming back and saying, ‘Hey you, chubby kid with the glasses, you can be a star.’ “

In an effort to support her musical aspirations and newborn son, Kane turned to phone sex.

“Once I had a child, the rules of the game changed completely,” Kane said. “I had to really focus on making money. Phone sex was something that you could do from your home and I could still be there for my son. Sex work really facilitated my musical career because that money made it possible for me to pay for demos and hire good musicians or go in the studio.”

In the early ’80s, Kane tried to make her mark as an alternative country singer alongside bands like Los Lobos. At the time, punk luminaries like Black Flag, the Germs and the Dead Kennedys ruled Los Angeles. Kane recalls reluctantly taking in as-of-yet unknown street urchin Courtney Love as a roommate.

“It was right before Courtney got her part in [the film] Sid and Nancy. She was a big junkie then and she used to sleep with my ex-boyfriend, Marty, behind my back…. She left her bloody tampons on my floor and was not a very nice house guest.”

Like Kane, though, Love also was a survivor.

“She was one of the most unlikely people, but once you met Courtney, she had a lot of tenacity,” Kane recalled. “She used to say to us, ‘I’m going to be a big star and fuck all of you,’ and we’d be just like, ‘Yeah, go take a bath first.’ Nobody really believed that she would be as famous as she became. She had a steely determination when other people didn’t believe in her – and I think in a way we’re alike.”

Kane said at times she wishes she hadn’t appeared in films such as Bouncing in the USA or Boobsville Cabaret, but she keeps it all in perspective. Fans have been known to bring one of her old cinematic classics to a show for her to sign.

“It depends on where we are whether I’ll sign them right then,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of what I did, but you know, the world could have lived without the cultural contributions of Fuck My Fat Pussy Part 2 or Two Tons of Fun. In a way I look at it like I gave pleasure to a lot of people – and this is just a different kind of pleasure. It’s aural rather than oral.”

Though her memoirs are sure to titillate, Kane said she hopes she conveys the same message of personal empowerment through that written word that she expresses from the stage.

“The story has a lot of elements. Obviously, it’s a survival story just because of the weird, wacky way that I grew up and the things that I went through, but it also has elements of a tell-all, because along the way I’ve had lots of heavy encounters with different stars,” she said, adding Warren Beatty and Gene Simmons to the list.

“I’ve always said that if a fat, former teenage welfare mom, plus-sized porn star from East L.A. can be a blues diva, then anybody can live their dream and transcend where they come from to achieve what they want to be – and that’s something I really believe in.”

Kane has taken her message and music to some unlikely places. Last year, Kane played a gig in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a country located on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

She said she was surprised to find an erotic allure watching Muslim women remove their prayer outfits in the ladies room.

“They take off their chadors and burkas when they go in and they’re wearing Armani and these beautiful clothes underneath; they look like a make-up artist just did their make-up. I thought it was really kind of sexy that these women get so dressed up for their husbands at home and then they go out in public and no one sees them.”

Wherever her path leads, Kane said she will always feel an unwavering bond with the gay and lesbian community.

“It’s not only because I’m bisexual but also because I had to live closeted for many years as a sex worker,” she said. “I try to explain it to people who don’t understand about the whole gay rights thing. It’s not like people want extra rights, they just want to live in peace without people fucking with them, without being singled out for hostile treatment. I say that out from the bandstand every night, in straight blues bars, because I feel that those are the people who need to hear that message.”