Concert Review: Dixie Chicks, Wachovia Center, Philadelphia, July 25, 2006

It is well known that John Lennon, the most iconoclastic of The Beatles, was deeply concerned about the high price of fame and how such fame ultimately affected him as a human being.  Less well known is the fact that The Beatles began their career, like many other groups, as a covers band.  The Beatles, now understood to be songwriters of rare import and musicians who changed the face of global civilization in so many big and small ways, did not write their own material when they first started out.

Similarly, the Dixie Chicks began their recording career as a group that was to some extent, as they now recount in interviews, manufactured by a Nashville machine that packaged them in a specific manner.  The Chicks were a feel-good group whose positive messages of female self-empowerment and personal (and musical) integrity were more than a bit novel.  In a Country music field that had been taken over by slick and predictable mega-stars like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks were a fresh breath of authenticity with a refreshingly positive and dynamic voice.

John Lennon was the Beatle who wrote songs like “Help” and “In My Life” that spoke to the personal and the spiritual sense of self that was becoming compromised in the topsy-turvy world of pop celebrity.  As the Beatles began to take control of their own destinies - eschewing their “Mop Top” image and the plethora of cover versions that they were famous for in their early years - they developed as a bunch of radicals who sought to examine what life was and how we expressed and lived out our fragile humanity.  In the case of Lennon this public growth spurt was one filled with pain, misunderstanding and a great deal of soul searching.  Through his figure we can see the ways in which the 1960s became a time of social awakening and protest.

Last summer, the musical event of most note was Green Day’s “American Idiot” tour.  The Green Day dynamic had been set out years earlier: Green Day was a frivolous pop-punk group who oozed equal parts apathy and snottiness, all colored by a Gen-X sensibility that refused the gravitas of the older Punk Rock groups they had been emulating.  As we saw last year, Green Day went out and got all mature and adult and produced a recording of rare moment in an age of conformist pablum.  But in essence they did not radically tinker with their patented sound - they just began to grow up and take things more seriously.  The transition to “American Idiot” was not all that painful - not painful as compared to the things The Beatles, and now the Dixie Chicks have been through.

The comments about Bush 43 made by Natalie Maines back on the Chicks’ 2002 tour, prior to the Iraq invasion, turned a group of feel-good girl role models into a combustible and sometimes almost nuclear commodity.  The innocence of the Dixie Chicks was forever altered by the comments and in some way it was the kick in the pants that the group, particularly Maines, the group’s face and lead singer, needed to move from a pop sensibility to a more mature and studious lyrical concern.

So when their new CD “Taking the Long Way” was released, the most immediate thing to strike the long-time listener of the group was the gravitas of the work.  Almost all of the songs addressed the issue of what the group now calls “The Incident” and did so in a very complex way.  The group was always more than competent; in fact the Dixie Chicks were distinguished by the fact that they were all serious musicians who could play Country music and Bluegrass with the best of them.  Their striking good looks and genial amiability masked a very devoted group of players who parlayed their musical skills with a very strong image of female empowerment that drew in girls of all ages to their shows and their CDs sold in droves.  On this evening, Maines remarked that she was happy to see so many men at the show.  She quipped, “It is nice to have so many testicles in the audience - that is not something we usually have at our shows.”

And in fact the emergence of “The Incident” marked a very troubling moment for fans of the group.  Most obviously there was the political fallout in the South - the traditional home of Country music - which was overwhelmingly Republican and in no mood to have one of their groups take on the President.  But beyond that there was also the attempt by the band to distance itself from what it considered to be a pre-fabricated image which was buttressed by the group singing the songs of others and not controlling their own destiny as completely as they now wanted to.

So when details of their tour were announced, the media circus began.  Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough and other Conservative types went out and microscopically took apart the group and great pressure was ratcheted up on them.  Here they had a successful formula that had put them on top and there were murmurings that the formula was to be compromised by a foray into “meaning” rather than continuing the light and airy joyfulness of the by-now standard Dixie Chicks image.

The new CD is selling very well - better than expected, and it continues to remain in the Top 10 since its issuance.  But the tour, which the group has aptly called “Accidents and Accusations” after a lyric in one of the new songs, began to exhibit some signs of vulnerability.  Rumors of show cancellations due to poor ticket sales were rife in the media - especially the Right Wing talk mill. 

There was thus a sense of defensiveness that preceded the group’s coming to the stage in Philadelphia - a place where one could see many empty seats and a crowd that seemed to be split between Chicks’ “girl power” fans - a lot of little girls and their mothers, some staid Country-fan types, a smattering of Lesbians here and there - and those who came out of curiosity to show their moral support for a group who has now become iconic of a Leftist political sensibility.

The Chicks’ pre-show music coming from the loudspeakers spoke to a new sense of militancy: “Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” Kaiser Chiefs’  ” I Predict a Riot,” and Junior Walker’s “Shotgun” among the selections played prior to the concert, all spoke to the combative sense that the group wanted to drill into this evening.  And as the show began with the group, sounding somewhat tentative, lurching into one of the most aggressive songs on the new CD, “Lubbock or Leave It,” there was a sense that this was not the same group that played to adoring sold-out arenas in 2002.  The group was inching towards something else entirely and it was this dynamic of the old and the new that informed the concert.

Doing one of their best known songs “Goodbye Earl” right at the beginning of the concert, Maines seemed tensely frazzled and began to infuse even the old songs with a sense of edginess that turned “Earl” - a song that is a lighthearted romp about an abused wife killing her husband - into something that felt more like Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” than the fun pop country that it once was.  Though the group was not able to sustain this moodiness in all of the songs, it was clear that this was a concert that brought out the shadows and demons of a group of women who were going to say what was on their minds whatever the cost.

The older songs, once a mark of a trend towards excellence in popular American music, had now strikingly and audaciously become comparatively anemic; the product of a group that had not yet figured it all out.  The new material, from the beauty and illumination of “The Long Way Around,” the leadoff track on the new CD, a song that takes “Goodbye Earl” to the next level, a song that raises the bar of maturity, to the expected highlight of the chilling “Not Ready to Make Nice,” the song that most directly treats “The Incident,” the Chicks braced themselves and their audience for something that was more intense and less feel-good than what had been their way of doing things in the past.

I could see a group of three teenage girls a few rows in front of me doing the sort-of hippy dippy high arm waving dance that the kids do at concerts these days when the old songs were played.  There seemed to be less of that during the newer songs which bore a sense of intensity that split off the group from its past.  But to its credit, the group never performed the older material with anything less than a strict professionalism and a panache that was deeply authentic even though hearing songs like “Cowboy Take Me Away” and “White Trash Wedding” juxtaposed to newer tracks like “Easy Silence” and the magnificent composition, written as Maines announced for their children, “Lullabye,” which showed these young women focused on what life really is rather than the rote projection of a pre-packaged image.

I cannot say that Maines was completely detached in the way that John Lennon increasingly became detached as the Beatles moved away from being teenyboppers to being mature adults, but in contrast to their opening act, a young singer named Anna Malick who exuded the slick unworried professionalism of an American Idol-like performer - all talent and little inspiration, the Dixie Chicks had become more of a Rock band with all of the sense of importance and gravitas that such a characterization indicates.

As Maines passionately intones in “Voice Inside My Head,” one of the most stirring of all the new songs, “I need somehow to believe in the choice I made.”  The new Dixie Chicks, like John Lennon and the Beatles in their “Rubber Soul”/“Revolver” period and like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys during “Pet Sounds” and “SMiLE,” have not sought to compromise their musical talents, but have chosen to take their talents and find new and challenging ways of making their music both lyrically and compositionally more mature and audacious.

The new CD does not negate what the group has done in the past, as the concert at the Wachovia Center did not look to drop their back catalog.  Bluegrass workouts like the hot instrumental “Lil’ Jack Slade” which was as well-played as anything at an Alison Krauss and Union Station concert, and haunting versions of “Traveling Soldier” and “Top of the World” showed that the group was redoubling its commitment to mark internal connections with its older work.  Their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” was now played as a paean not simply to bland pop values, but became a moment that allowed Maines to dig into the lyric and find the voice of a mature woman expressing both her pain and her sense of wonder who was struggling to lift herself up.  So many times in the course of this magnificent concert did we see Maines taking the lyrics that are so well-known and finding ways to intertwine them with the newfound spirit of combativeness and assertiveness that has been laid out in the new visions that are being set out in the wake of controversy and political wrangling.

The group took hold of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” a song that they had begun performing on their last tour, and more than made it their own.  With its admonitions of fear about staying too long in that state, the echoes of their own current problems were all too clear.  But as they performed their classic “Wide Open Spaces,” a song of pure innocence and wistful beauty, and the hard-driving “Sin Wagon” and the partying “Some Days You Gotta Dance” I had the sense that we were seeing a group working out all the complications of their past, present and with a sharp eye on their future.

It is rare for a group to have to grow up in public in such a painful and pressure packed manner.  Some simple comments about their displeasure with the President and his actions turned their world, as they say in “Not Ready to Make Nice,” upside down.  They came to a less-than-sold out arena in the Northeast and gave it their all.  Even as the shadows crept in and when songs like the battle-hardened “So Hard” telling the audience that being tough in the face of the pressure that freedom of expression and the difficulties of being famous while trying to remain human - and here John Lennon’s story comes to mind again - laid out a plan of attack, the Dixie Chicks emerged as a different group whose transitions have not made them more lovable or more placid.  They are now an adult group actively working through the ways that we can be both human and fallible at the same time.

The concert drew from a new complexity in the group’s music that fit in new forms of harmony singing, new ways of configuring their instruments and new lyrical concerns.  It was a massive advance for a group whose innovations in the contemporary music industry was nothing short of magnificent.  As they say in a song on the new CD that they did not perform, “I Hope,” “So let’s learn from our history and do it differently.”  This value, what I have called “Radical Traditionalism” is a means for the artist to absorb and articulate the values and mores of the past in ways that do not ignore the exigencies and political concerns of the present. 

All this wonderful drama was taking place on a summer evening in Philadelphia; a particularly apt location for the expression of the values of freedom of speech and democratic pluralism, a place where a group of Americans sang songs of love, commitment and an embrace of humanistic values to an audience of Americans who reflected the spectrum of our brilliantly diverse culture where people are not rejected for being different but are celebrated as the glorious creatures of God that we all are.  We saw that the Dixie Chicks have become one of the most important music groups in the US at a time when musicians are saying less and less and taking fewer and fewer chances.  Their own tribulations were tonight transformed into a victory that so few - including the great John Lennon - have ever been able to achieve and sustain in the popular culture.  They brought their new mature concerns into an arena where failure for them is not an option and yet their fragile and at times tenuous emergence into the world of adult values is a fact that must strike us as singularly heroic and noble.  Their fight for the right to self-expression and to be who they want to be is one that must be applauded and the way that they so brilliantly they are executing this project is something that is filled with awe and inspiration.

As the lights went up, Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back” filtered through the PA and yet with all the bravado that has been set up all around the Dixie Chicks these days, the feeling that I left the arena with was one of pride and joy in knowing that there are still Americans who deeply care about what it truly means to be a human being and who have found a way to exalt and celebrate that using the simple but sophisticated tools of the American musical tradition - from Stephen Foster to The Carter Family to Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs to Tin Pan Alley and 70s Los Angeles Country-Rock - to set out their vision.  It might be scary and tough sometimes, but the group pulled it off with great skill and dignity.



David Shasha