Music • The Dixie Chicks
Nashville Music, Texas style. These brash, beautiful blondes are the rock stars of country.
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Perhaps the strongest sign of their heritage is that they refuse to be told what to do. Paramount Studios, which made Runaway Bride, offered to pay for the “Ready to Run” video if 20 percent of it would be clips from the movie. But all of the treatments the Chicks proposed got nixed. “They wanted us to do something really tame, like sing on a big wedding cake,” says Emily. So the girls dumped the studio and coughed up the money for their own video, in which they run from a triple wedding, steal bicycles, and have a food fight. They stood their ground even before they had clout—as when Sony told them “Dixie” was too regional and “Chicks” was politically incorrect. If the three had listened to executives, they say, their biggest hit, “Wide Open Spaces,” would never have been put out as a single. The coming-of-age anthem, with its alternative-sounding arrangements, struck the label brass as too left of center for radio.
All three Dixie Chicks are now stars, but one of them always was—at least to everyone who knew her. Visiting her mother, Tina Maines, at the doctor’s office where she worked, four-year-old Natalie sang on a desktop to the adults. In the second grade she announced that she didn’t need to learn math: She was going to be a star. Show business, after all, was in her genes; her grandfather had sung in the Maines Brothers band, a respected country group from Lubbock, and her father and uncles had carried on the tradition, making two regional hit records in the eighties. Trouble was, she didn’t like country music. Broadway musicals captured her imagination, and she could perform every line from West Side Story without crib notes. “She even had the Puerto Rican accent down,” recalls Lloyd. The best thing about junior high was cheerleading, Natalie says, because she could yell and wear short skirts.
Cheerleading was not part of the program at Martie and Emily’s house. Having left Massachusetts for Dallas in 1974, their parents, private-school teachers Paul and Barbara Erwin, preached that instead of being relegated to pep squads, girls should be in the game. They started their three daughters (Julia, who is thirty, lives in California) on Suzuki violin lessons when they were five and took them to the symphony. By the time she was twelve, though, the artistic Martie was growing bored with classical violin, spicing up practice sessions by adding her own riffs to Beethoven and Mozart. What she heard on the radio seemed infinitely more exciting, especially the fiddle on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which crackled with life.
Martie’s interest in fiddling took off, and the family started to pack pup tents in the trunk of their car, camping out at fifteen bluegrass festivals a year. In the evenings folks would gather in a large circle, and even small children were expected to play solos. Martie performed on fiddle, and Emily followed her on banjo (a quick study, she taught herself to play by reading books about chord progressions).
It wasn’t long before Martie joined a children’s bluegrass band, Bluenight Express, earning pocket money from a steady gig at Judge Bean’s restaurant in Dallas. When the banjo player quit, Emily decided to join the group. Later, when they were sixteen and nineteen, to avoid having to get summer jobs, the sisters joined two bluegrass friends, singers Robin Lynn Macy (a guitarist) and Laura Lynch (a bass player), to perform on a downtown Dallas street corner. They knew they were on to something when they made more than $100 in their first hour. (For Lynch, at least, that would turn out to be peanuts compared with the almost $27 million her husband would win in the Texas lottery in 1995.) As they drove back downtown the next week, they heard Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” on the radio and christened themselves the Dixie Chickens, which soon became Dixie Chicks. Dressing in cowgirl getups, the band quickly grew in popularity, playing clubs, livestock shows, and corporate conventions.
In 1990, when she was a sophomore, Martie decided to drop out of college (she had been a music major at Southwestern and Southern Methodist universities) and pursue a full-time career as a Chick. The decision to devote her life to music was more wrenching for Emily, who had dreamed of attending the Air Force Academy and flying jets. That year the foursome recorded Thank Heavens for Dale Evans, a bluegrass-western album, and Little Ol’ Cowgirl followed in 1992; shortly after its release, Macy left the group because of its increasingly contemporary-country direction. A third record, Shouldn’t a Told You That, brought their total sales to 90,000 units. Known as Dallas’ Sweethearts, the Dixie Chicks were voted the best country band by the Dallas Observer for four years running.
One day in 1995, when Lloyd Maines was playing steel guitar for the Chicks at a gig in Lubbock, he gave them a copy of Natalie’s Berklee audition tape. Martie and Emily were mesmerized, and when Lynch left the band that year to spend more time with her daughter, they called Natalie, who was attending Texas Tech. She brought a youthful edge to a band that had never been commercial enough to nab a deal, and two years ago Sony signed them.
After they wrap up their Lilith Fair work on August 31, the threesome will set off for tours in Europe and Australia. Then, in November, they will take a much-needed seven-month break to spend some time enjoying their personal lives. Since 1995 Martie has been happily married to pharmaceuticals representative Ted Seidel and stepmother to his four-year-old son, Carter. They own homes in Nashville and Dallas. Natalie is going through a divorce from Michael Tarabay, a bass player she married at age 22—before, she says, she knew anything about love. Content for now to decorate her Nashville home, she says of future romantic prospects, “I don’t think that I’ll be able to settle for anything less than the fairy tale.” As for Emily, she lights up when she speaks of her new husband, Austin singer-songwriter Charlie Robison, who released Life of the Party on Sony Lucky Dog last year. The two recently bought their first house, in San Antonio.
Emily and Charlie’s May wedding, staged in the rugged beauty of the Cibolo Creek Ranch near Marfa, reflected their profound ties to home. For the event Martie co-wrote “Cowboy Take Me Away” (which appears on Fly), and she and Natalie sang it at the ceremony. The song idealizes the “wild blue,” where there’s no one for miles around and no buildings mar the horizon. One of its lyrics goes, “I want to sleep on the hard ground…on a pillow of bluebonnets.”
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