Somedays Yanks Gotta Dance
    There are few places on God's earth that look less like a honky-tonk than New York's Radio City Music Hall.  It's carpeted and there are too many chairs, the over-priced beer is served in plastic cups instead of longnecks, there's no smoking and the joint's crawling with ushers.  But tonight the Dixie Chicks and a few thousand of their loudest friends are calling the shots, and damned if they haven't done a fine job of rowdyin' the place up.  Nobody's sitting in those bothersome seats, and when scores of young fans spill into the aisles to dance, the ushers seem to catch on fast that it's a losing battle to try and check them.  One even finds himself dancing for a moment with a pair of gals in their early twenties.
    "Look at our feet!" says one of them, shaking a bare foot and pointing back to their shoes, abandoned beneath their seats a row or two back.  "This is country music--you gotta kick off your shoes and dance!"
    Between songs, she looks a little mortified when asked if this is her first Chicks show.  "We tour with them," she grins, explaining that this is the third or fourth show they're already caught on the group's current Fly tour.  Odds are, they have tickets for tomorrow night's sold-out show at Radio City, as well.  Call them Chickheads.  They are legion, and by the time this nearly six-month tour wraps up in early December, singer Natalie Maines and sisters Emily Robison (dobro, banjo) and Martie Seidel (fiddle, mandolin) will have played to a couple million of them.
    "Every city has its own energy," says Emily, checking in from a tour stop in Milwaukee.  "The crowds have been screaming and singing along to all the words, which really make you put on so much better of a show than you normally would.  We were just at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington, and it was just this big echo chamber of 20,000 screaming people--that was pretty huge."
    By now, the Chicks are growing used to the crowds.  Not so for Lloyd Maines, formerly "noted Texas steel guitarist and producer" but for the last couple of years more commonly identified as "father of Natalie" (he swears the tag makes him proud).  "The road manager sent me a tape of one of their shows, from Chicago, and it sounded like the crowd was absolutley going nuts," he marvels shortly after sitting in with the Chicks for their taping of Austin City Limits in August.  "The Chicks have taken country to a much broader audience."
    That may well be the understatement of the year.  To date, Wide Open Spaces, the Dixie Chicks' 1998 major-label debut, has sold in excess of 10 million copies.  Fly, their follow-up is at six million and counting.  Try counting their Grammy, CMA, ACM, CMT, TNN and AMA awards, and you're liable to fall asleep.
    "I think we don't know what to expect anymore," admitted Natalie last October, the very week that Fly sold 341,000 copies out of the gate to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart.  "Everything exceeds our expectations."

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    They're getting few and far between, but there are still some folks our there who haven't succumbed to the charm of the Dixie Chicks.  If you're one of them, keep your opinion to yourself should you ever find your way onboard Willie Nelson's tour bus.  When Emily mustered the cajones to call the Red Headed Stranger and personally ask him, Willie-freakin'-Nelson, to open a handful of shows for the Chicks, he said yes.
    "We really wanted to do the personal touch, no have our agent call his agent," she explains a little sheepishly.  "So I saw Ray Benson [of Asleep at the Wheel] one day, and I said, 'You would have his number!'  And he gave me his bus number.  He said, 'He's at home, but even while he's at home, he hangs out on his bus,' which I thought was hysterical.  So I called, really nervous, and left the stupidest, dorkiest message ever.  But he called back and left a message, and we've been saving it ever since."
    "I don't mind opening for them," says Nelson, readily recalling a time he opened for Leon Russell.  "It really doesn't matter to me who's on first and who's on second.  Shoot, I'm proud to be there with them."
    As Chicks fans go, Nelson (like most of their constituency) is a relative newcomer.  "I had heard their names before, but I just never had a chance to hear them until I saw their video one time on the country music channel," he admits.  "I listened to some of their other songs, and I thought, yeah, there's a lot of talent there."
    But the Chicks were making music--and headlines--long before they ever made their CMT debut.  For the full, unabridged history of the group, swing by ultra-fan Robert Brooks' lovingly compiled "All-Inclusive Dixie Chicks" page at www.dixiechicks.mixedsignal.net.  There you'll find all you could ever want to know about how Pennsylvania-born, Dallas-raised sisters Martie and Emily Erwin established themselves on the blugrass circuit as teens, hooked up with older singers Robin Lynn Macy and Laura Lynch in 1989 and made their public debut on a Dallas street corner.  They subsequently recorded three independent albums chock full of cowgirl anthems and bluegrass rave-ups before recruiting Natalie Maines, a rock 'n' roll-loving former cheerleader studying music on a Berklee scholarship.  With Maines on board, the Chicks revamped their sound from the ground up, dramatically changer their image and hit it big.  (For the curious, Thank Heavens For Dale Evans, Little Ol' Cowgirl and Shouldn't a Told You That can all occasionally be found on eBay, albeit to the tune of $60 to $125 a pop.)
    Brooks, a fan since 1991, began his site in 1998 out of frustration when the national press failed to pick up on the group's grassroots history.  Despite a blow-by-blow account on the site about a run-in he had with Sony Music and the Chicks' lawyers over sound samples that he had posted (a story the Dallas Observer picked up and ran with as evidence of Sony's attempt to erase the group's past), Brooks maintains taht he's a Renaissance fan.  "There are a lot of people who like the old sound and don't care much for the new sound," he says.  "I miss the old sound, but I like the new sound also.  And I hear the old sound in the new sound.  They're returning country music to its roots, and still appealing to its younger fans."
    Emily is well aware of Brooks' site.  "I think that's great," she says.  "I love that kind of stuff--for someone to be that interested to spend that kind of time and energy on something like that.  I'm proud of our history and I'm proud of people to know that we weren't just something that someone put together in Nashville, that we'd been together and we've been changing and growing and figuring our what works and what doesn't work.  That's the nature of music and the nature of bands, to change and morph and figure out what works."
    Robin Lynn Macy, a diehard bluegrass purist who chaffed at the introduction of drums to the band's sound on their second album, was the first to jump ship (later resurfacing in Domestic Science Club with Sara Hickman and Patty Lege before moving to Kansas).  Laura Lynch, who left a career in broadcast journalism after learning 10 chords on her guitar, carried on as the lead singer and bassist for several years as the Dixie Chicks established themselves as one of Texas' most successful independent acts.  They played the bluegrass circuit, corporate gigs by the dozens and political shindigs without  prejudice--playing parties for the likes of the late Senator John Tower (an early patron), Ross Perot, Governoers Ann Richards and George W. Bush and President Clinton.
    "The political shows were some of my favorites, but our corporate shows, those were the bread-and-butter gigs," Laura says today from her home just west of Fort Worth.  "We were making a lot of money.  We sold a lot of stuff, we played a lot of shows and kept our overhead down--we never bought anything unless we could pay cash for it.  We were in good shape."
    "At the time that you do things like that, you think, 'My God, how could it get any better than this?'" reflects Emily when asked about their days at the top of the regional talent heap.  "I think that is the art to surviving the shitty gigs.  But to me that was the pinnacle, like, 'I've made it.'  It was so fun to meet people like Ross Perot and do the halftime show at the Cowboy game.  You hope you go on to bigger and better things, but it's like, this would be fine if we stopped here."
    Nevertheless, Laura notes that scoring a major label deal was always the ultimate goal.  Shortly after they finally landed one with Sony in 1996, however, the sisters decided that a drastic change was in order.  "When we met Natalie, we were re-inspired," Emily says.  "I think we were in a rut where we were.  And I think Laura knew that too, and we remain friends with Laura to this day, because it was the best decision for both of us."
    "We played bluegrass for a lot of years, and we were done with bluegrass," says Martie of the band's need to move on.  "We have to keep inspiring ourselves, or else the audience is not going to see three happy Chicks up there.  So we changed for the audience's sake as well as for our sake."
    Having devoted seven years of her life to the group, Laura was devastated when the sisters asked her to leave.  But with the benefit of hindsight, she readily concurs with Emily's logic.  "I loved that band," she says.  "I still love that band, dearly.  And for about that first year, I could not understand why that whole deal would come down the way it did.  But if you give anything a little time, you get clarity.  And it really was a great thing that happened, as it turned out.  I fell in love, I met the man that I'm married to now, and I really have a great future of happiness with him."
    Believe her when she says life is "peachy."  Laura's husband, who is a cattle rancher, quietly won $27 million in the Texas lottery in 1995.  "Being on the road was awful for me," Laura continues.  "I was just absent from these really important things in my life because I was at some club playing a show somewhere in Timbuktu.  And as much as I would love to be a part of this incredible fanfare that's going on with the Chicks right now, its okay that I'm not.  It truly is."
    She proudly notes that her 18-year-old daughter Asia (from a previous marriage), is the biggest Chicks fan alive.  "she loves them," Laura laughs.  "She got glasses just like Natalie wears in one of her publicity photos.  She is the Chickhead of the century . . . now that they're cool."

Cowboy Take Me Away
    While Laura has managed to enjoy her marital bliss in private, the tabloids have called open season on the remaining Chicks' fluctuating states of matrimony ever since Natalie filed for divorce from her first husband, musician Michael Tarabay.  In quick succession thereafter, Emily married singer-songwriter Charlie Robison, Martie divorced her husband and Natalie married a second time, exchanging vows with actor Adrian Pasdar in a quickie Vegas ceremony.  The couple expects their first child in the spring.  (If you're keeping score, Emily reports that Martie has recently fallen in love, but at press time, the fiddle-playing Chick had not gotten married again.)
    Emily and Charlie met at a Dixie Chicks' concert at Gruene Hall in 1998, but they didn't click until later that year, over a game of quarters at Chicks' producer Blake Chancey's house in Nashville.  They were engaged within two months and the romance inspired sister Martie to pen the Chicks' sweeping single, "Cowboy Take Me Away."
    "I didn't actually know it was about us until about two months after Martie had written it," says Emily.  "We decided to do it at our wedding, but we had had too many margaritas and were so out of tune.  It's like, the worst ode to me and Charlie's love was this out of tune version of 'Cowboy Take Me Away.'  I have our wedding video tape of us singing it . . . and it will never get out."
    Both Emily and Charlie admit that balancing two recording careers and a marriage can be tricky, but they've gotten it down to a science of sorts.  "We just spent about two weeks together, and now we're not going to see each other for about two weeks, and then we'll probably see each other for about ten days," explains Charlie from somewhere on the road, apart from his wife.  "It's two weeks on, two weeks off--kind of like working on an oil rig."
    Charlie notes that he did manage to snare Emily for a banjo part on his upcoming album, and both of them hope to do another batch of "Robison Family Christmas" gigs this December with Charlie's brother Bruce and his wife, Kelly Willis.  "After we've all been in different parts of the country all year, it's great to finally get to sit down and play music together," he says.  "It's really low key and loose and a lot of fun--we just gratuitously play the exact songs we want to play--old covers and gospel and stuff like that."
    A word of warning though, for the current man in Martie's life: "For better or worse, they're always there, all the time, always," Charlie says, recalling the night Martie and Emily crashed their honeymoon.  "It's like when you marry one of them, you marry the band."

The Chicks Come Home
    It takes them a couple of months to get there, but when the Dixie Chicks finally manage to swing their Fly tour through Texas, they do it with a vengeance.  The first stop is an August 6 date in Natalie's hometown of Lubbock, where her father joins the band on steel guitar.  This is follwed in short order by a pair of shows at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, where Laura visits with the girls backstage ("It was like old times," she happily recounts.)  After that, the Chicks move on to Austin, then Houston and then back to Austin again for a taping of Austin City Limits.
    "We definitely still feel pressure of proving ourselves when we come home," admits Natalie.  But that helps them keep their "chops up," notes Martie, "and feel proud to be from Texas, too."
    When Natalie, Emily, and Martie arrive at the ACL studio on the afternoon of August 15 for a quick rehearsal, they're all but unrecognizable.  Later that night, after their celebrated "glam squad" has given them a once-over, they'll be transformed back into the spunky, designer-outfitted Dixie Chicks, but this afternoon, they all look normal, refreshingly down-to-earth, and--particularly in Natalie's case, tired as hell.  The word "scrubby" comes to mind fro all but Martie, who looks like she couldn't be scrubby if she tried.  When they fire up the band to run through several songs, however, there's no mistaking the trademark chops, from Martie's almost casually fluid fiddle intro on "Ready to Run" to Emily's stringing dobro lead on "Give It Up or Let Me Go."  One minute, Natalie looks ready to crawl back in bed and sleep for another four hours, and a moment later, she's effortlessly roaring through the chorus of "Goodbye Earl."  If the Chicks left the makeup and pastel fashions at home and took this show on the road just to get their grungy ya-ya's out once in a while, they'd make short work of any skeptics still ignorant enough to brush them off as Nashville fluff.
    All that glam and glitter, then, merely adds to the fun of the Dixie Chicks experience.  The actual taping hours later goes off without a hitch, except for a somewhat subdued "Earl" which is quickly remedied with a do-over ("Okay, let's kill him again," quips Natalie).  This time, rest assured, the bastard stays dead, but the fans--who all received their ACL tickets at the Frank Erwin Center show over the weekend--sound like they wouldn't mind at all if they had to hear the song a third time.  When Natalie mentions that the following day will be Emily's (28th) birthday, the audience stumbles through a sloppy rendition of "Happy Birthday."  "Y'all need practice!" laughs Emily.
    "They wanted to make sure they got the tickets in the hands of their real hard-core, rabid fans," explains ACL producer Terry Lickona.  "Based on the crowd we had here tonight, it worked."  Lickona notes that tonight's taping is "light years apart" from the Dixie Chicks' debut on the program two years ago.  "And yet they haven't changed," he says.  "They're the same as they were two years ago--just a lot richer and a lot more popular.  It says something about them, and at the risk of being immodest, it says something about us, that they are willing to come back and do a show like this.  We're basically paying them the same scale that we paid them before, that we pay everyone--which amounts to about $500 each.  There's a lot of out-of-pocket expenses that they're just absorbing."
    Laura, for one, is not surprised at all that the Chicks would still jump at the chance to play ACL.  "We used to hound Terry mercilessly, we wanted on it so bad," she laughs.  "We would have played with no airtime, no nothing--we'd just be the warm-up band for the cool act that was going to be aired.  Just to go in and have a captive audience and be able to say, 'Yeah, we played Austin City Limits.'"
    These days, of course, the Dixie Chicks rarely have to beg for such opportunities.  The problem now is merely a matter of staying on top of it all and choosing the right ones.  Emily readily mentions plans for a DVD, tour book and live album, all aimed for release in time for Christmas.  Whispers fly about a fall network TV special.  Lloyed Maines says the girls have so many irons in the fire, he has no idea what they're doing, though he's heard mention of a possible IMAX film, and the thought clearly delights him.  "I've seen Natalie 5'2" for so many years, it'll be nice to see her 8' tall," he laughs.  The Chicks' publicists, meanwhile, scurry like mad doing potential damage control, stressing that the details of this or that grand project "are still being worked out, nothing's definite, not yet, etc."  "Natalie's pregnant," one finally offers.  "That's really all we've got at the moment."  Finally cornered on the subject of the live album, the Chicks' manager, a cherubic looking Englishman named Simon Renshaw, grins a little mischievously and says only, "It's a good rumor.  A good rumor."
    On thing seems certain, though.  As long as they keep their heads about themselves--and their head together--the Dixie Chicks' perch at the top of their game looks steady for a long time coming.  And naysayers be damned, both country and Texas music are better for their reign.
    "I will always consider myself a Texas artist," say Emily, dismissing the "sell out" stigma that many Texas artists are stuck with when they record in Nashville.  "With us, I feel like it was the exact opposite--it was one of those things where you're given an opportunity to spread Texas music.  I knew we would stand our ground."
    "Nobody like to be the first," says Natalie of the significant ground they've broken in country music by sticking to their guns and rewriting the rules along the way.  "But we go out there, and because we can point the finger at each other if we fail," she says laughingly.  "And we can hug each other if we're a success."
    "I think we're all well adjusted enough to realize that what goes up must come down, so that's the really scary part," admits Emily.  "But I think that, having been on the road and being a traveling band for the ten years before we did this, we have a confidence that radio success doesn't have to be the be-all, end-all.  Touring, however, makes fans for life.  So three or five years down the road, if people become fickle, and the Dixie Chicks have had their day, and it's time to get off the roller coaster, I think we could still continue to tour just because of the kind of fans we've gained."
    And if not?
    "I've accomplished far more than I ever expected to accomplish," she says.  "So if you look at it in those terms, if five years from now I'm sitting at home having babies, well, that's also wonderful."

    It can easily be argued that the Dixie Chicks' initial album, Wide Open Spaces, is one of the 10 most important releases in the history of country music.  While it is true the recording was packed with more than its share of incredible songs, the album represented something far more important than chart-toppers and award winners.  A generation before, Barbara Mandrell proved that females could be more than just "girl singers," but the Chicks were the first female band to really  rock the Music City charts.  In many people's minds, they did the impossible.  The Grammy-winning Wide Open Spaces blazed into virgin territory and claimed a vital spot for all women who dreamed of forming a band and making a mark in country music.  Yet the title song, written by an unknown Susan Gibson, was almost lost before it had even been completed.
    At about the same time the Dixie Chicks were winning Dallas over with their bluegrass sound, Gibson was studying forestry in Montana.  The daughter of a piano teacher and railroad worker, Gibson had lived all over the United States before landing in Amarillo for her high school years.  Besides trees, something not easily found in the Panhandle, her other interest in life had always been music.
    "My love of music came from my mother," Gibson explains.  I really was the daughter of Ward and June Cleaver and I acted like that.  My family was a very musical family.  There were five siblings and we would sing hymns around the piano.  When our relatives would visit, we would even have family talent shows.  Even though I loved to sing, at that time my talent wasn't as appreciated as my cousin's, who played music with his armpit.  Still, all though school, I was in every church choir, school choir and vocal group."
    While Gibson enjoyed singing all kinds of music with her family and friends, and though she was in Bob Wills territory, country music was completely foreign to her.  She couldn't imagine listening to a country radio station, much less following her own success on Nashville's charts.  It was women of the era, such as the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman, who were having the most influence on the teenager.  The passion Gibson felt when she listened to blues and rock music drove her to pick up a guitar and begin writing original songs.
    "I was at West Texas A&M studying forestry for two years," Gibson recalls, "and though I was still working with my music, I wasn't making any money.  Really I just learned to play guitar one song at a time, just focusing on playing enough to carry myself through [each song].  Then I met Gary Thomason and he began to push me.  By the time I moved to Montana for my final two years of college, music had become a very important part of my life."  Little did Gibson know that it would be Thomason who would later set in motion the events that led to landing a Music City hit.
    Back at college, writing about her experiences and her emotions now took precedence over the ambition she had harbored since childhood to work in forestry.  Still, Gibson didn't have much faith that her self-penned tunes would ever have commercial value.  Yet when a bar patron requested an encore of one of her original songs, a suddenly inspired Gibson gave up on a long-held childhood dream--trees--to pursue her adult dream--music.  Soon Gibson was spending more time playing in local honky-tonks for tips than she was going to class.
    A year before Gibson left college, she returned home to Amarillo for Christmas.  Though always close to her family, she suddenly felt stifled in her own home.  There seemed to be too many eyes looking at her every move, too many people giving advice and not enough room to grow and face the world head-on.  One night, seeking some solitude, Gibson sat down at the kitchen table.  Picking up an old notebook she began to scribble down her thoughts.  She had no plans to write a hit song, she just wanted to put her feelings and emotions into perspective.
    "Here I was, thinking I was full of maturity and confidence," she recalls, "thinking I knew it all and I was all grown up.  Because of my attitude at that time, I felt I needed more elbow room and didn't want to be at home with the family.  It took me 20 minutes to write the lyrics that expressed how I really felt at that moment."
    Gibson evidently didn't place a lot of importance in her ode to independence, because when she returned to school in Montana, she didn't take her notebook with her.  The song she had written at the kitchen table would have been lost forever if Gibson's mother hadn't shipped her a care package that included ponytail holders, guitar picks and that old notebook.  When Gibson read the lyrics again, she put them to music and began to sing them during her modest gigs.
    In 1994, Gibson gave up on finishing her degree and moved back to Amarillo.  Old college friend Gary Thomason, along with Scott Melott, Bobby Schaffer and Todd Hall, had formed a band called the Groobees.  With their rock/folk sound, they had won some fans in the Panhandle.  Wanting to expand their fan base, the band decided to produce a demo tape.  Thomason asked Gibson to provide some of the vocal work.  In that session, she impressed the men so much that the Groobees became a quintet.
    In 1996, the band, which in the past had almost exclusively used Melott's original work, turned to Gibson.  Retrieving that old notebook, Gibson shared her most autobiographical work.  Adapting it to fit their sound, the Groobees went back into the studio and cut the demo.
    "We knew that Lubbock steel guitar player Lloyd Maines was producing a lot of music," Gibson explains.  "We sent him the tape hoping he would get interested in us.  Lloyd liked my song so much he made a copy for everyone in his family.  He even got a demo tape to his daughter Natalie, who had just joined the Dixie Chicks."
    At the time, the Chicks were going through hundreds of demos looking for the right songs to place on their first Monument album.  During the overwhelming process, when one Chick found a song she liked, she shared it with the other two.  If all three liked it, then they tried it out in front of their concert crowds.  Gibson's song not only passed the Chicks' test, but garnered such incredible response from crowds that the band decided it belonged on their initial release.  Unimpressed, the record company executives didn't think the song was country enough and nixed the idea.  With bulldog-like tenacity, Natalie wouldn't give up and pushed the issue until the powers at Monument relented.
    Recalling the struggle to record her song, Gibson admits, "The song reflected where both of us--the Dixie Chicks and myself--were at that moment.  We both needed space to grow, to try our wings."
    The Dixie Chicks debut single was "I Can Love You Better."  It soared and took the band's new CD with it up the charts.  Yet it was Gibson's song, inspired by her need to leave home and try her wings, that allowed the Chicks to follow up their first top 10 tune with a song that became the biggest country hit of 1998.
    "Wide Open Spaces" proved the Dixie Chicks were not a flash in the pan.  It rode the top spot on the charts for four weeks and crossed over onto the pop and rock charts as well.  Now Nashville and the world realized that the Texas trio was the real thing.
    "It is funny now," Gibson explains, "when the Dixie Chicks asked me to let them record 'Wide Open Spaces.'  I was nervous about letting them do it.  There was nothing about the Dixie Chicks that made me hesitate, it was that I was so close to this song.  I was hanging on to it so tight.  I really did come close to saying no.
    "Then when I finally heard it and I listened to it played on the radio, I got to thinking this thing could go gold.  It was then I realized that if I had held onto the song and kept it as only mine, millions of people would have never heard it and identified with it themselves."
    "Wide Open Spaces" opened up countless door for the Dixie Chicks.  Thanks in large part to their monster hit, the Texas trio became the hottest ensemble in country music.  And though the mainstream media missed it, "Wide Open Spaces" also opened doors for the Groobees.  Gibson knows what the song has meant to the band.
    "'Wide Open Spaces' has given us the opportunity to play the gigs we want and have a good time playing the songs we love.  People hear the song and identify with us.  The money we have made has allowed us to get the most out of the moment," Gibson says.
    While the Groobees have benefited, it is the modest Gibson who has earned the most praise.  She was named the American Songwriter Magazine's Country Songwriter of the Year and she has been recognized by noted music historian Robert Oermann as "the white Etta James."  Most importantly she has brought an edge and excitement to country music that few songwriters in recent years have generated.  Just like "Wide Open Spaces," each Gibson cut is unique, not driven by a hook, but inspired by personal experience.  Her music may have a different feel, a different edge, but like legendary country scribes Hank Williams, Sr., Harlan Howard and Roger Miller, it is music penned from the heart that seems to touch hearts when performed.