The theater at the Chez Artiste was mostly empty on Tuesday night, but Catherine MacKay and her friends exited with a spring in their steps.
“There’s the poster,” she said, pointing excitedly at the glossy paper featuring the three glossy women. “It’s on the 27th – that’s Monday. We should totally get tickets!”
If you had told MacKay, a fashionable young Democrat, a year ago that she would be buying moderately expensive tickets to a Dixie Chicks concert, she would have squinted in disbelief. Yet there she was thinking of shelling out up to $75 to see the Dixie Chicks’ show at the Pepsi Center on Monday after watching Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s behind-the-scenes documentary, “Shut Up & Sing.”
“I can’t say that I was a fan before this,” MacKay said from the theater’s lobby.
But she – like many others – has been won over by the Chicks’ passion and their willingness to stick their necks out amid the most heated political climate in decades. The Dixie Chicks are the all-time highest-selling female group of any genre, and they have lost thousands of fans over their vocal opposition to the current presidential regime.
Also on Tuesday, Julia Wilson expressed a very different sentiment while standing outside the Paramount Theatre where Vince Gill was performing. “I used to be a fan,” Wilson said of the Chicks. “But not anymore. Not after what they did.”
Even as the Chicks have alienated some traditional country fans, they have galvanized another audience that wasn’t there before. Call it the redemption factor.
“There were those members of their fan base who were so political they were bothered by what (the Chicks) said, and they left,” said Michael McCall, staff writer-editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum and a longtime freelance journalist based in Nashville. “And now new fans have stepped into their places.”
Most would agree the Dixie Chicks-vs.-conservative country music fans battle is old news. It was fascinating when it initially played out in 2003, as tractors rolled over discarded batches of Dixie Chicks CDs and radio stations banned the group. But there has been nothing new to debate until the Chicks released “Taking the Long Way” earlier this year. The record is a potent artistic statement that initially sold well, but then sales dropped. The tour sold brilliantly in Canada, but many American dates were canceled.
Now Kopple and Peck’s film revs up the debate for another timely round. After seeing the documentary, MacKay left the theater bonded not only to the Chicks’ political philosophy but also their crossover country- tinged music.
“I never knew all that much about them, and I didn’t really listen to their music all that much,” MacKay said. “But definitely now – absolutely – I’m totally converted.”
Now the converts and the faithful are banding together as the new generation of Dixie Chicks fans. The audience is more crossover than it is country.
Tradition of speaking out
“Those girls can play, and they have something to say – so they’re a good fit for us, more now than ever,” said Craig Ferguson, who heads Planet Bluegrass and runs the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, where the Chicks played in 1990 and ’91. “I’ve been befuddled by all this stuff. When artists have expressed their personal views from stage, which they often do, it’s not a big deal. It’s kind of what we pay for, what we want.
“With our festivals, we try to create the time and place for self-expression to be somewhat in the moment and not just the repertoire of hits. So when Steve Earle goes off, we like that, whether we agree deeply or disagree.”
The Dixie Chicks’ political progression, documented poetically in “Shut Up & Sing,” has been an interesting one. First came Maines’ London remark, March 10, 2003: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Then came the American public’s backlash, which was immediately followed by the band’s scrambling, apologies to the president, and a massive spin campaign that involved Diane Sawyer and the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
“They don’t shy away from the controversy,” said the Country Music Museum’s McCall. “In some ways, they embrace the idea that they’re this controversial group. I would never say that they’re ‘exploiting’ their situation, but I would say that they’re responding to it as artists. They wrote songs about it, and they’re continuing to express themselves.”
After their initial backpedaling and recognition that their situation was dire, the band revoked its apology to the White House. “I apologized for disrespecting the office of the president, but I don’t feel that way anymore,” Maines told Time magazine. “I don’t feel he is owed any respect whatsoever.”
And so it goes. Ads for the documentary have been turned down by various TV networks, provoking producer/studio head Harvey Weinstein to equate it to the Red scare, saying the group was “blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech” and now is “being blacklisted by corporate America.”
On the current Accidents & Accusations tour, Maines has made a practice of regularly calling out the American government from her bully pulpit. Earlier this month in Vancouver, Maines told a sold-out audience, “Either the beer is free or you’re happy that Donald Rumsfeld resigned today.”
Even about.com, the comprehensive portal website, isn’t covering the Chicks’ new record or current tour in its country section. “I haven’t purchased any new music by them since the incident,” Shelly Fabian, about.com’s country music guide, wrote in an e-mail. “I do like their old stuff, though.”
It turns out about.com’s folk-music extension is where the Chicks are now covered.
“I don’t expect a lot of negative feedback,” said Kim Ruehl, about.com’s folk music guide, of a recent concert review she published. “Folk people are open to protest music.”
Jeff Thormodsgaard is registered politically as unaffiliated but calls himself a “hardcore lefty,” and he, too, saw “Shut Up & Sing” on Wednesday at the Chez Artiste.
He didn’t have to be converted; he was already a fan of the Chicks. “But I’m even more of a fan after her last comment about the president,” he said, referring to the film’s final line, taken from a London concert earlier this year when singer Natalie Maines repeated her slam heard ’round the world: “Just so you know,” she said with a mischievous grin, “we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Ready for exoneration
The crowd responds wildly to the timely repeat performance in the film, bringing it to a stirring ending and making a stale topic relevant again.
Given the current political climate, with Democrats gaining control in the state and national legislatures, it would make sense that the Dixie Chicks are ready to be exonerated.
“They probably have more bipartisan support now after the last in-term election,” Thormodsgaard said. “I think we can now fairly say that maybe the Dixie Chicks were right all along.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
