More Chicks

If I get one more e-mail from a bleeding heart liberal who’s never been to Nashville and is afraid of anybody with more than four wheels on his pickup truck I’m gonna PUKE! It’s self-righteous people like you who got George Bush REELECTED, by expressing contempt for your "ignorant" brothers south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I’ve got no problem with Natalie Maines’ comment in the U.K. about being ashamed of George Bush. I LOVED it. What’s got me in a tizzy, what I can’t understand, is THIS:

"’I’d rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it,’ Martie Maguire told Time magazine, ‘who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith. We don’t want those kinds of fans.’"

Chicks’ shift to rock/pop a big risk

Would you buy the CD of an act that said THAT?

Not if you were in the target demo, as opposed to all you northerners who laugh at "crackers" and adore everything Rick Rubin’s ever done. This is not John Lennon saying the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, this is an act DIRECTLY attacking its fans. I don’t hear you same bending over backwards in the name of fairness progressives coming down on the side of the makers of Cristal.

But maybe you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about. Maybe you don’t realize that Jay-Z called for a boycott of the champagne after the company’s head seemed to disdain the rappers who popularized it (he was not accurately quoted, to boot).

And I’m sure all of you people e-mailing me weren’t aware of Martie Maguire’s quote above. And THAT’S the story here. EVERYBODY’S OUT OF THE LOOP!

You think you know what’s going on, but you’ve got no idea. But you weigh in on stories like it was the old days, when there were three TV networks and no blogosphere.

But just because YOU’RE clueless as to Maguire’s faux pas, have no illusion the Chicks’ old fans are. Because the target demo, the people INVOLVED, find out. Just like Jay-Z. Do you think he’s actually following the British press to see what the maker of Cristal has to say? But if something negative IS said, he finds out. And word on the street, amongst their OLD fans, is the Chicks hate them, for who they are.

Hell, how many of those red state people are now WITH the Chicks, are questioning their devotion to George W. Bush, and if they were treated nicely would come back into the fold. I’d bet TONS!

You don’t put gasoline on a fire unless you don’t give a shit about burning up what you once had. The Chicks wouldn’t have booked these large tour venues in southern states if they didn’t care about their old audience.

These guys need Michael Sitrick. Some kind of media expert. To get the REAL story out. To SPIN the press. To THEIR side. How they were crucified for being out front, but now the country is with them. Just check the polls. And that they’re as country as they get.

And they are.

Never run from your roots. You can never leave behind who you are.

And don’t try to live in a world you don’t understand. Like all the rock fans e-mailing me who’ve got NO IDEA what’s going on here.

By: bob | 2006/07/03 | Music Business | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

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Chris Willman

Comment by Chris Willman | 2006/07/08 at 12:04:19

I’ve been trying to hold my tongue on this Dixie Chicks stuff but some of your correspondents have just about done me in. It never fails to baffle me how little interest most rock guys have in really getting country music… though, it’s obvious from your letters, that never stops anyone from weighing in. I just saw "Chinatown" again, and for most in the music business, Nashville is like Chinatown for Jake: Something’s happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Gittes?

Keith England writes: "First of all, I’ve been to Nashville… I fucking hated it… talk about ‘self-righteous’… I’ve never been subjected to a larger group of self-righteous, self-satisified sanctimonious fucks in my entire life and I’ve lived in Los Angeles and Marin County for the past 23 years…

Have YOU been to Nashville??? Instead of bloviating about Martie Maguire, how about trying to conjure up a little of your patented cyber outrage for the bumper crop of flag-waving, chickenshit Chickenhawks who’ve cheerleaded George W. Bush into the worst, most-disatrous strategic blunder in modern history???"

Either Keith England is outrightly lying about having been to Nashville, or his plane was diverted to Alabama and he got off and didn’t know the difference. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. Nashville is a bastion of liberalism–maybe the bluest white-dominated city in the South outside of Austin. (It’s rapidly supplanting Austin as the capital for left-leaning Americana, by the way.) There was a time when the liberals there were afraid to speak out, but that time is well past. I spent a lot of time there in 2004-05 to research my book on country politics ("Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music"), and I quickly found that of the five major labels, the guys at the head of four of them were proud members of an org called Music Row Democrats (and the chief exec of the fifth was non-committal, not a blatant Bush supporter). I had an easy time rounding up Bush-bashers for my book and the damnedest time trying to find conservative Republicans who’d talk with me. It’s not that the conservatives aren’t there, but that now they’re the ones timid about speaking up, since so many of the ruling class there have come out as Dems. And if you drove around the neighborhoods around the Row, you’d see Kerry signs wildly outpacing Bush placards.

There are other fallacies your readers have repeated, right on cue.

Jerry Jaffe: "Jeez- what else is mainstream country music these days- but soft arena rock circa 1977…"

True enough of Rascal Flatts or Carrie Underwood, but jeez, tell it to Joe Nichols, Dierks Bentley, Blake Shelton, or some of the other young traditionalists who regularly produce cool number one hits.

Tom Lewis: "The ‘old country fans’, as you say, are akin to the good old boys of the South. The same audience that with the exception of Charley Pride has never embraced an artist of another race…"

Actually, Ray Charles had a smash country album back in the day, Cowboy Troy is a mainstay of the scene today, and Freddy Fender and Neil McCoy… wait, do only black people count?

Mark Irvine: "Country radio wouldn’t play it even IF the band begged their listeners… The smartest idea would be for the Dixie Chicks to seek out Alt Rock radio. John Cash did. He’s a country legend and the rednecks south of the mason dixon line never embraced him. They forgot him. From my perspective, country fans look like backward war loving hicks. I somehow doubt THAT will ever change."

The South never embraced Johnny Cash? Huh? Where to begin with this guy?

Country radio owners and programmers–unlike Music Row and the city of Nashville–do skew heavily conservative. A lot of stations never would have played the Chicks again no matter what; they are permanently toxic in military towns, for starters. But a lot would have. I sat in a room with a bunch of them at Country Radio Seminar in February as they listened to the rough tracks, and I saw a good number of them gleeful at the chance to put the Chicks back in the air… "if they don’t say something that blows up in everybody’s faces again." Of course, they did. They acted out, and who can really blame them after what they went through in 2003? It’s like your dad slapped you around in high school, and suddenly you’re off to college and want to hang out with your new friends, and if Mom would kind of like you to come home, too, well, you associate her with the abuse and… too bad. So the Chicks made it impossible even for the stations that wanted to play them to do so. Is that courageously punk-rock, or a clever, forward-thinking marketing strategy? Can we say a little of both?

And I feel torn. I’m a big admirer of the punk-rock gesture, especially as made by someone who actually has something to lose. (One of the most thrilling moments of my life was hearing about the imminent EW "nude" cover shoot back in ’03.) But the Chicks are my favorite band, and I want a record as great as "Taking the Long Way" to be ubiquitous. I loved turning on KZLA here and hearing "Everybody Knows," while it lasted. Despite what Mark Irvine thinks, I don’t think I’m ever gonna hear them on KROQ. And while the Chicks get back at their former tormentors and anyone associated with them, a small tragedy in this is that it reinforces the worst stereotypes everyone out there–including way too many of your readers–has about country fans. They’re ignorant hillbillies who swallow anything Karl Rove throws at ’em and run tractors over Dixie Chicks CDs at any given opportunity. Well, that’s true, of some, but it’s not the whole story. And when the Chicks hit the road in a few weeks, there’ll be a hell of a lot of non-ignorant country fans in the seats.

Some of whom even have Toby Keith CDs in their changers. I know I do; if you can’t recognize, all politics aside, that "I Wanna Talk About Me" (written by the bleeding heart liberal Bobby Braddock) is a great record, or that "Beer for My Horses" (a duet with the bleeding heart liberal Willie Nelson) is, too, you’re not listening. So, yep, he’s nestled in there right between Springsteen, Drive-by Truckers, James McMurtry, and a lot of his other fellow registered Democrats.

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Steve Jones

Comment by Steve Jones | 2006/07/10 at 10:39:01

Bob,

Mr. Williams’ piece is right on.

I don’t want to talk about the Dixie Chicks anymore. I love the record, have always loved the band (long before they were signed in fact) and think attacking other artists, for whatever reason, is not a classy thing to do, even if they got it coming (as for why Reba had it coming, no clue). Attacking a greedy, stupid, evil monkey like W is generally something I’m always up for however.

I just want to say this about some of your readers’ massive generalizations about "country music fans" (or any other "type" of fan): it’s stupid to generalize.

The music played on Country Music radio these days is made up of 50% crap just like every other genre of music. The other 50% — don’t hold me to the percentage guys, for conversation’s sake — is made up of some of the best rock/pop songwriting in the world. Is it — stylistically — often repackaged 70s arena rock? Yes, thank God! (just a phrase, boys) Is it rock music for baby boomers? Yes! Is it pop music for white people over the age of 16? Yes!
It’s also often made by some of the same arena rock guys who used to have a career in arena rock and it addresses the audience that Springsteen, Mellencamp and Petty used to.

As a former punk rocker and singer for perhaps the heaviest speed metal band there ever was (early 80s SST band Overkill) (yeah, yeah, I know, I’m biased) I can tell you I would be, on paper, an unlikely "country music fan," were there really such a thing. I’m an A&R guy (and technically the guy who discovered Nirvana and Marilyn Manson, but that’s another story which you’d have to ask Paterno about) who would probably be pigeonholed as a "rock guy" personally and professionally. I wrote hit songs for Rhino Bucket and Asia among others and got completely hooked on "new" country in 1990, because it was a magic time in the industry and it reached out and grabbed me, I wasn’t loooking for it. I also wrote a rather famous memo at that time to my bosses Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg ressurecting the John Hammond line and opening with: "I have seen the future of rock n roll and its name is Country Music" (all true, ask Paterno) I didn’t WANT that to be the case, but it just… was. And in some ways, it has proven true.

I’ve always been moved by great songs. Period. I’ve never signed a band nor made a record with someone I didn’t think had great songs. Period. A great song moves you, lifts you and fills you with joy, if only for a moment (or until some piece of shit Toby Keith song follows it and blows it for you).

Listen to Dierks Bentley’s country spin on a U2 track: "Come a Little Closer," or Tim McGraw’s hit-the-fucking-nail-on-the-head: "LIve Like You Were Dyin," or Kenny Chesney’s arena rock smash "I Go Back," and then we’ll talk about great rock songs.

A great song knows no genre. I couldn’t give a fuck about genres. If I can sing a song after the first time I’ve heard it, or rather if I can’t help but sing a song after the first time I’ve heard it, or I wake up singing it (what the Germans call an "earworm"), THAT’S what I pay attention to, and the only thing I care about. In my wheelhouse the best songs of last year were: "Golddigger," "Since You’ve been gone," the aformentioned "Come a Little Closer," and "Sugar We’re Going Down Swinging."

The hell with genres. And to all you geniuses talking about music, stop talking about "Country Music," until you’ve listened to it. Otherwise risk coming off like one of those ignorant, red state, Jesus-said-it-I-believe-it-and-that’s-the-way-it-is types who make bullshit pronouncements about movies they haven’t seen, books they haven’t read, and music they haven’t heard.

Not to generalize.

Steve Jones
Elevation Records

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Chris Willman

Comment by Chris Willman | 2006/07/08 at 12:04:19

I’ve been trying to hold my tongue on this Dixie Chicks stuff but some of your correspondents have just about done me in. It never fails to baffle me how little interest most rock guys have in really getting country music… though, it’s obvious from your letters, that never stops anyone from weighing in. I just saw "Chinatown" again, and for most in the music business, Nashville is like Chinatown for Jake: Something’s happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Gittes?

Keith England writes: "First of all, I’ve been to Nashville… I fucking hated it… talk about ‘self-righteous’… I’ve never been subjected to a larger group of self-righteous, self-satisified sanctimonious fucks in my entire life and I’ve lived in Los Angeles and Marin County for the past 23 years…

Have YOU been to Nashville??? Instead of bloviating about Martie Maguire, how about trying to conjure up a little of your patented cyber outrage for the bumper crop of flag-waving, chickenshit Chickenhawks who’ve cheerleaded George W. Bush into the worst, most-disatrous strategic blunder in modern history???"

Either Keith England is outrightly lying about having been to Nashville, or his plane was diverted to Alabama and he got off and didn’t know the difference. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. Nashville is a bastion of liberalism–maybe the bluest white-dominated city in the South outside of Austin. (It’s rapidly supplanting Austin as the capital for left-leaning Americana, by the way.) There was a time when the liberals there were afraid to speak out, but that time is well past. I spent a lot of time there in 2004-05 to research my book on country politics ("Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music"), and I quickly found that of the five major labels, the guys at the head of four of them were proud members of an org called Music Row Democrats (and the chief exec of the fifth was non-committal, not a blatant Bush supporter). I had an easy time rounding up Bush-bashers for my book and the damnedest time trying to find conservative Republicans who’d talk with me. It’s not that the conservatives aren’t there, but that now they’re the ones timid about speaking up, since so many of the ruling class there have come out as Dems. And if you drove around the neighborhoods around the Row, you’d see Kerry signs wildly outpacing Bush placards.

There are other fallacies your readers have repeated, right on cue.

Jerry Jaffe: "Jeez- what else is mainstream country music these days- but soft arena rock circa 1977…"

True enough of Rascal Flatts or Carrie Underwood, but jeez, tell it to Joe Nichols, Dierks Bentley, Blake Shelton, or some of the other young traditionalists who regularly produce cool number one hits.

Tom Lewis: "The ‘old country fans’, as you say, are akin to the good old boys of the South. The same audience that with the exception of Charley Pride has never embraced an artist of another race…"

Actually, Ray Charles had a smash country album back in the day, Cowboy Troy is a mainstay of the scene today, and Freddy Fender and Neil McCoy… wait, do only black people count?

Mark Irvine: "Country radio wouldn’t play it even IF the band begged their listeners… The smartest idea would be for the Dixie Chicks to seek out Alt Rock radio. John Cash did. He’s a country legend and the rednecks south of the mason dixon line never embraced him. They forgot him. From my perspective, country fans look like backward war loving hicks. I somehow doubt THAT will ever change."

The South never embraced Johnny Cash? Huh? Where to begin with this guy?

Country radio owners and programmers–unlike Music Row and the city of Nashville–do skew heavily conservative. A lot of stations never would have played the Chicks again no matter what; they are permanently toxic in military towns, for starters. But a lot would have. I sat in a room with a bunch of them at Country Radio Seminar in February as they listened to the rough tracks, and I saw a good number of them gleeful at the chance to put the Chicks back in the air… "if they don’t say something that blows up in everybody’s faces again." Of course, they did. They acted out, and who can really blame them after what they went through in 2003? It’s like your dad slapped you around in high school, and suddenly you’re off to college and want to hang out with your new friends, and if Mom would kind of like you to come home, too, well, you associate her with the abuse and… too bad. So the Chicks made it impossible even for the stations that wanted to play them to do so. Is that courageously punk-rock, or a clever, forward-thinking marketing strategy? Can we say a little of both?

And I feel torn. I’m a big admirer of the punk-rock gesture, especially as made by someone who actually has something to lose. (One of the most thrilling moments of my life was hearing about the imminent EW "nude" cover shoot back in ’03.) But the Chicks are my favorite band, and I want a record as great as "Taking the Long Way" to be ubiquitous. I loved turning on KZLA here and hearing "Everybody Knows," while it lasted. Despite what Mark Irvine thinks, I don’t think I’m ever gonna hear them on KROQ. And while the Chicks get back at their former tormentors and anyone associated with them, a small tragedy in this is that it reinforces the worst stereotypes everyone out there–including way too many of your readers–has about country fans. They’re ignorant hillbillies who swallow anything Karl Rove throws at ’em and run tractors over Dixie Chicks CDs at any given opportunity. Well, that’s true, of some, but it’s not the whole story. And when the Chicks hit the road in a few weeks, there’ll be a hell of a lot of non-ignorant country fans in the seats.

Some of whom even have Toby Keith CDs in their changers. I know I do; if you can’t recognize, all politics aside, that "I Wanna Talk About Me" (written by the bleeding heart liberal Bobby Braddock) is a great record, or that "Beer for My Horses" (a duet with the bleeding heart liberal Willie Nelson) is, too, you’re not listening. So, yep, he’s nestled in there right between Springsteen, Drive-by Truckers, James McMurtry, and a lot of his other fellow registered Democrats.

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Steve Jones

Comment by Steve Jones | 2006/07/10 at 10:39:01

Bob,

Mr. Williams’ piece is right on.

I don’t want to talk about the Dixie Chicks anymore. I love the record, have always loved the band (long before they were signed in fact) and think attacking other artists, for whatever reason, is not a classy thing to do, even if they got it coming (as for why Reba had it coming, no clue). Attacking a greedy, stupid, evil monkey like W is generally something I’m always up for however.

I just want to say this about some of your readers’ massive generalizations about "country music fans" (or any other "type" of fan): it’s stupid to generalize.

The music played on Country Music radio these days is made up of 50% crap just like every other genre of music. The other 50% — don’t hold me to the percentage guys, for conversation’s sake — is made up of some of the best rock/pop songwriting in the world. Is it — stylistically — often repackaged 70s arena rock? Yes, thank God! (just a phrase, boys) Is it rock music for baby boomers? Yes! Is it pop music for white people over the age of 16? Yes!
It’s also often made by some of the same arena rock guys who used to have a career in arena rock and it addresses the audience that Springsteen, Mellencamp and Petty used to.

As a former punk rocker and singer for perhaps the heaviest speed metal band there ever was (early 80s SST band Overkill) (yeah, yeah, I know, I’m biased) I can tell you I would be, on paper, an unlikely "country music fan," were there really such a thing. I’m an A&R guy (and technically the guy who discovered Nirvana and Marilyn Manson, but that’s another story which you’d have to ask Paterno about) who would probably be pigeonholed as a "rock guy" personally and professionally. I wrote hit songs for Rhino Bucket and Asia among others and got completely hooked on "new" country in 1990, because it was a magic time in the industry and it reached out and grabbed me, I wasn’t loooking for it. I also wrote a rather famous memo at that time to my bosses Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg ressurecting the John Hammond line and opening with: "I have seen the future of rock n roll and its name is Country Music" (all true, ask Paterno) I didn’t WANT that to be the case, but it just… was. And in some ways, it has proven true.

I’ve always been moved by great songs. Period. I’ve never signed a band nor made a record with someone I didn’t think had great songs. Period. A great song moves you, lifts you and fills you with joy, if only for a moment (or until some piece of shit Toby Keith song follows it and blows it for you).

Listen to Dierks Bentley’s country spin on a U2 track: "Come a Little Closer," or Tim McGraw’s hit-the-fucking-nail-on-the-head: "LIve Like You Were Dyin," or Kenny Chesney’s arena rock smash "I Go Back," and then we’ll talk about great rock songs.

A great song knows no genre. I couldn’t give a fuck about genres. If I can sing a song after the first time I’ve heard it, or rather if I can’t help but sing a song after the first time I’ve heard it, or I wake up singing it (what the Germans call an "earworm"), THAT’S what I pay attention to, and the only thing I care about. In my wheelhouse the best songs of last year were: "Golddigger," "Since You’ve been gone," the aformentioned "Come a Little Closer," and "Sugar We’re Going Down Swinging."

The hell with genres. And to all you geniuses talking about music, stop talking about "Country Music," until you’ve listened to it. Otherwise risk coming off like one of those ignorant, red state, Jesus-said-it-I-believe-it-and-that’s-the-way-it-is types who make bullshit pronouncements about movies they haven’t seen, books they haven’t read, and music they haven’t heard.

Not to generalize.

Steve Jones
Elevation Records

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