Dixie Chicks still taking their licks
Did quip kill goose that laid gold records?
07/06/2003
Unlike the name of their current tour, the Dallas-bred Dixie Chicks are hardly on "top of the world."
Ever since March, when lead singer Natalie Maines told a sold-out London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," the fastest-selling group in country music history has endured the wrath of its once-adoring fans as well as a stifling boycott from country and pop radio.
Has country music had enough of the Dixie Chicks? As the trio embarks on one of the summer's hottest concert tours – 50 dates, almost all of them, including Sunday's show at American Airlines Center in Dallas, sold out – it may seem a strange question.
Charles Fox / Philadelphia Inquirer The Dixie Chicks - (from left) Emily Robison, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire - may be at a pivotal career point. |
The answer won't come until the band releases its next album. Until then – or until another supergroup comes along – country radio and record company executives will struggle with how to keep the Chicks from abandoning their roost.
"Nobody likes the prospect of losing this act," says Wade Jessen, director of country charts for Billboard magazine. "I don't hear that being tossed around as a possibility."
Home had already sold a whopping 6 million albums when Ms. Maines slammed the president and the CD was six months old, which meant a steady sales deterioration would be no surprise. But sales have plummeted, and the disc's latest single is foundering. The fallout for the Chicks has been considerable:
• In the three months after the remark, the Grammy-winning Home album went from selling 124,000 copies a week to about 15,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Home had been a Top 10 seller since its August release, so its decline was imminent. But such a precipitous sales drop is a direct result of the controversy over the anti-Bush comment.
"Travelin' Soldier," their No. 1 country single before the fateful remark, fell off the charts two weeks later. The Chicks' cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," first a country hit and then a Top 10 pop staple, also took a fatal dive.
• None of the band's attempts at damage control seems to have had a lasting effect. An in-depth, emotional interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC-TV's Primetime Thursday and a subsequent cover photo on Entertainment Weekly, where the Chicks appeared nude with slurs painted on their bodies, couldn't quell the ire from the naysayers or prompt record sales from the curious. Essentially, they were momentary media events. (The group members declined to be interviewed for this article.)
• Even May's appearance on the Academy of Country Music Awards backfired. They performed the ballad "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)" via satellite from a concert in Austin. But the group lost in the three categories it was nominated in, and the crowd booed when presenter Vince Gill named them as contenders for entertainer of the year.
It didn't help that Ms. Maines wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the letters F.U.T.K., which was widely interpreted as an expletive toward fellow country artist Toby Keith. Ms. Maines and Mr. Keith have traded barbs since August 2002, when she slammed his patriotic song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)."
• The current single, "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)," released after the ACM performance, is inching up Billboard's country singles chart. It sits at No. 48 after five weeks. For a group whose singles usually hit the Top 10 in a couple of months, that's particularly disappointing. Both "Travelin' Soldier" on the country charts and "Landslide" on the pop and adult contemporary lists took about eight weeks to go Top 10. Home still holds at No. 9 on the country albums chart but slips to No. 89 on the pop albums tally.
• Locally, "The Wolf" KPLX-FM (99.5) has not spun one song from Home since March. The station is playing Chicks music again, but only older hits such as "Wide Open Spaces" and "Cowboy Take Me Away." Music surveys conducted by the station determined that listeners are "burned out" with the tunes from Home and not as much with material from Wide Open Spaces and Fly, according to Paul Williams, program director for the station.
The fuss over Ms. Maines' remarks seems to be dying down, he says. "I think people have moved on. It's out of the news and it's not as big a deal right now."
But the excitement about this band – a trailblazing trio that has sold 28 million albums since 1998 – seems to have ebbed too.
"I don't think there's the passion on each side that there was before," Mr. Williams said. "The best thing to happen here is for them to go away for a while."
On KSCS-FM (96.3), not one of the band's songs, old or new, has aired since March because research indicates "the majority of those listeners do not want to hear the Dixie Chicks," says Ted Stecker, who is operations manager both for KSCS and for a new country station, "The Twister" KMEO-FM (96.7).
Too new to tell
That station, which hopes to attract 18- to 30-year-old listeners, is only a week old, so "there's not an audience to tell us not to play them," says Mr. Stecker. The thought is that a younger audience would want to hear the Chicks.
"We could be wrong on that assumption," he says. "And we'll soon find out."
Recently, "The Wolf" gave away about 500 Chicks concert tickets. Some winners weren't ecstatic about the prize.
Toni Austin, a Fort Worth resident, won a pair two weeks ago. She promptly gave them to her niece. Ms. Austin was a fan but isn't anymore. She also gave her copy of Wide Open Spaces and Fly to her niece.
"I wouldn't go see them specifically because of what happened," she says. "It wasn't only the comment about Bush. It was the fact that she didn't support what our country was doing. I don't support war; I don't like it at all. But we need to support our country, and they didn't. I don't think that you have to support President Bush, but when you do say something about him, you do say something about the decisions that the country is making."
But plenty of fans look forward to seeing them onstage.
Landon Smith of Paradise, Texas, would not purchase tickets to the show because he's not a big enough fan of the Chicks, but he's happy he won them. He'll attend with his girlfriend. Neither has been swayed by Ms. Maines' remarks.
"I think that Natalie Maines has personal rights, and if she or anybody chooses to voice their opinions, she has that right," he says. "All she is, is a singer or an artist, so what she says doesn't really matter that much to me. I don't think such a big fuss should be given to comments like that because she's not a person of authority, so what does it matter what she says?"
Joe Denomy of Rowlett just likes the band's music, even if he doesn't agree with their politics. He and his wife will attend Sunday's Chicks performance with the tickets he won on "The Wolf."
"My only beef is she mixed entertainment with politics, and that's absurd," he says. "People go there to see and hear music, not a political point of view. If I want to hear a political opinion, I will go to a political rally. If I want to hear music, I will go to a concert. But she's obviously talented, and they are, there's no question about that."
That talent was quickly recognized and rewarded. With 1998's Wide Open Spaces, the Chicks impressed country audiences with a tuneful, unique and marketable blend of bluegrass, pop, rock and country. There was sassiness, individuality in the group's sound and image, an eye-popping blend of rock-star wild and front-porch chic. The songs blast out of car speakers, Ms. Maines' in-your-face voice front and center. Sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire added instrumental prowess with the dobro, banjo, fiddle and mandolin.
The hits came quick, as did the record sales. Commercially, the Dixie Chicks are the most successful country music act of the last five years. The trio's three major-label releases – Wide Open Spaces, 1999's Fly and 2002's Home – have sold 28 million albums. That's more than superstars Faith Hill, Garth Brooks and Shania Twain each amassed during that time.
And they weren't afraid to wield their clout, suing their record label, Sony Music, for $4 million in unpaid royalties in 2002. They won and were given their own imprint, Open Wide Records, as part of the settlement. Suddenly, the Dixie Chicks became role models for a slew of country, pop and rock acts that felt shortchanged by the industry's corporate structure.
Even more important, at a time when album sales across the board are dwindling, the Chicks continued as commercial giants. Country album sales sunk from 72.4 million sold in 1998 to 68.5 million in 2001, according to Nielsen Soundscan. But sales rebounded in 2002 to 76.9 million, thanks to superstar releases from the Chicks, Ms. Twain, Mr. Keith and Ms. Hill.
Young listeners, who had ebbed and flowed to and from country throughout the '90s, came back in full force, attracted by the Chicks' style. Purists, including critics, loved their musicality. And the band belonged to country, giving the genre unprecedented cachet too important to discard.
"They really are the biggest thing to happen to country music since Garth Brooks," says Mr. Jessen of Billboard magazine. "You can't overstate what the Dixie Chicks have done for the format since they arrived on the scene in a big way. If for some reason they were taken from the scene somehow, yes, it would survive, we know that. Garth is not the only person who made country music palatable for those who didn't like country music. Patsy Cline did that in 1957. It was done before the Chicks, and it will be done again.
"But our little family feud will boil down, and everything will be all right again."
If it's not, the Chicks certainly have other options. Sales make it clear that the trio appeals to an audience beyond country. The group got a tantalizing taste of crossover success with Fly's controversial "Goodbye Earl," about an abused wife who poisons her battering husband, which peaked at No. 19 on the pop charts.
Then "Landslide," from Home, was a crossover smash. The Chicks' lovely, mandolin-driven cover of the Fleetwood Mac chestnut hit the top of the adult contemporary charts and the Top 10 of the pop list, spurred on by substantial pop radio airplay.
Months later, the "Top of the World Tour 2003" forges on. It's a mammoth affair – 16 tractor-trailers, 13 tour buses, six shuttle vans, a hair and makeup team, a yoga/Pilates instructor, a video crew, eight caterers, more than 2,000 amps of power.
It covers more than 50 cities, is 95 percent sold out, and ranks in the five top-grossing tours of the summer, according to Pollstar magazine. But tickets for all of the U.S. dates went on sale between March 1 and 3, before Ms. Maines' anti-Bush comment, when the Chicks were riding high with Home.
Fewer catcalls
Given the national fuss over Ms. Maines' anti-Bush remarks, the number of protesters at each performance has dwindled. At the Greenville, S.C., gig, which launched the U.S. leg of the tour May 1, about 15 showed up. In Orlando, Fla., the next stop, there was only one. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the third date, there were none.
Still, security is tight. At each venue are two bomb squad dogs, several security and plainclothes police officers, metal detectors and searchers. At American Airlines Center, purses will not be allowed inside the building. An AAC spokeswoman says that's more a July Fourth weekend mandate than a Chicks concert rule.
So far the shows have gone on without a hitch. And the Chicks are even making light of their recent backlash.
"If you're here to boo, we welcome that, because we love freedom of speech," Ms. Maines told the sold-out crowd of 15,000 at the Bi-Lo Center in Greenville, S.C. "So we're gonna give you 15 seconds to get whatever you have out of your system."
They got a standing ovation. For the band and its fans, that's a good sign. Yet it's too soon to tell whether the storm is over. After the tour runs its course Aug. 4 in Nashville, and after the public gets a longer breather from this band, then we'll see if the Chicks still rule the country.
E-mail mtarradell@dallasnews.com
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