Slick Chicks Take Flight

At Radio City, Dixie trio shows who runs the country

By Bill Bell, Daily News

The Dixie Chicks are enormously popular, lightweight but likable performers who neatly embody the current medical report on country music: faint heart and serious loss of memory.

Not that anybody at Radio City Music Hall cared when the most successful threesome in country opened a two-night stand Wednesday night. From the cowboy hats to the pierced bellybuttons, this was an audience ready to roar.

It was New York's splashiest country music show of the summer, and a sharp reminder of a transition now under way in the genre -- from the harshly frank and emotional style of Hank and Hag to the blandly smooth and artfully unengaged music of Garth and Shania.

The Chicks know the words and music, and very well, but their hearts are not in not-so-dear-old Dixie.

Their music, performed with slick good humor and solid commercial sentiments, is pseudo-country, dolled up with fiddle, banjo, dobro and steel guitar. And the lyrics are straight from the mall.

All the hits were there, breezy and sing-alongable, in a 19-song set that opened with "Ready to Run" and finished 90 minutes later with "Sin Wagon," a grandly careening country boogie.

Two songs into the night, and lead singer Natalie Maines said she was suffering from a cold and hoped it didn't show on the three large video screens: "Hope you all don't see any snot," she added, in a thanks-for-sharing moment.

After that, things picked up smartly. Martie Seidel played flashy fiddle runs and solos. Her sister, Emily Robison, played banjo, dobro, slide guitar (on the Bonnie Raitt rave-up, "Give It Up or Let Me Go") and accordion. She's a crowd-pleasing winner.

Everything was greeted with squeals and whoops, and get this, it was guys who held up the homemade signs reading, "Chicks rule."

Maines is a spunky blond who looks and sounds like a little toughie. That's not a bad thing, not when she's bawling "I Can Love You Better" or "Hello, Mr. Heartache," which hit some of the two-step notes that Ray Price did before he began wearing tuxedos onstage.

The simple set, designed by Luc Lafortune of Cirque de Soleil fame, featured three video screens and, at one point, a big yellow moon that drifted across stage.

The curtain was a huge pair of trousers with a zipper at the top a play on their new CD, "Fly." Just to make sure everybody got it, the show opened with an amplified buzz of flies.

The Chicks even got away with a self-indulgent slide show interlude showing baby pictures on the video screens, with some corny commentary as stagehands wrestled a sofa onstage. Then, arrayed on it, they went back to singing. That was better, much better.

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