Dixie Chicks delight Gaylord crowd

Trio's action-packed performance fulfills just plain fun expectations

By Peter Cooper, The Tennessean

Well then, let's have more of this.

The Dixie Chicks' sold-out Gaylord Entertainment Center performance Saturday night proved this trio easily the most entertaining, magnetic, musically impressive and just plain fun live act in mainstream country music today. Garth Brooks better hustle back quickly from Planet Gaines.

The Chicks are the fare big-ticket Nashville act that could walk unannounced and unidentified (thus, disguised) onto any club stage in town -- without lighting, high-dollar stage design, merchandising tie-ins or any of that stuff -- and tear the house down.

Martie Seidel's fiddle alone is enough to drop listeners' chins, Emily Robison is adequate-to-excellent on several different instruments, the harmonies are spot-on, and lead singer Natalie Maines is a dynamo, with a voice more powerful than is evident on the group's recordings.

In a show that lasted more than 90 minutes, the group played all the hits from its two Sony Monument albums, Wide Open Spaces and Fly, as well as covers of songs by Little Feat (a brief bit of Dixie Chicken), Bonnie Raitt (Maines called her "The Queen of the Blues," a designation Koko Taylor might feel fit to challenge) and Sheryl Crow (Strong Enough).

"We played this arena a couple years ago, opening for Tim Mc-Graw," Maines told the crowd. "And we were thinking, 'I wonder if we'll ever be able to fill up a place this big.' "

Now a major crossover force, they are more than able to pack hockey arenas: scalpers on Lower Broadway were selling tickets for $100. The concert's audience was a mix of longtime country fans, bandwagon-jumpers, established performers (including Alan Jackson) and a multitude of admirers still young enough to be impressed by the pre-show appearance of backward-baseball-capped Nathan from MTVs Seattle cast of The Real World (go figure).

The assembled masses were equally interested in the music and in the cult-of-Chiekdom that Sei-del, Maines and Robison are happy to exploit. One well-received segment of the show found the Chicks standing on stage and commenting on childhood pictures that were displayed on a large video screen.

Musical highlights included the aching Robison- and Maines-penned Don't Waste Your Heart and a stripped-down take on Patty Griffin's sublime Let Him Fly. The faster numbers worked well, too, as Maines thrashed, stomped and shouted her way through Raitt's Give It Up Or Let Me Go (far superior here to the Chicks' tepid recorded version) and led a spirited romp through Sin Wagon.

Ricky Skaggs and his band, Kentucky Thunder, opened the evening with a virtuosic show in what probably was the first majority bluegrass set in the Gaylord Center's young history.

Refusing to water down either his political opinions (remarking at one point that a welfare check "brings dishonor to the family") or his old-school bluegrass, Skaggs began with a hyper-speed version of the Stanley Brothers' Pig In A Pen and went on to deliver the Bill Monroe/Peter Rowan-penned Walls of Time with all the blues-sopped mournfulness Monroe intended. Only a solo acoustic take on Harry Chapin's Cat's In The Cradle, complete with a distracting music video, was less than stellar.

In the end, though, the night belonged to the Dixie Chicks. They triumphed over the curse of heightened expectations and over an instrumental blend that often sounded as if Saturday's show was an electric bass guitar concert with Chicks accompaniment. As the show wound toward its conclusion, the trio delivered Darrell Scott's Heartbreak Town, a plaintive testimony about a hopeful musician's Nashville.

"This ain't nothing but a heartbreak town," Maines sang, after calling the song her favorite from Fly. Heartbreak, though, seems entirely out of the Chicks' Nashville equation.

They're stars now in Music City, and deservedly so.

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