Dixie Chicks take flight in pop-tinged show

Trio also offers Opry, bluegrass sounds to fans

By Sean Piccou, South Florida Sun Sentinel

The Dixie Chicks may be running laps around fellow countryman Garth Brooks these days, but they have done so by borrowing some of his pop-rock thunder.

The best-selling band in country ' history, now on their first headlining tour, the Chicks staged a pure arena show on Thursday night at the National Car Rental Center, an evening modeled not a little after the rock-show theatrics that Brooks introduced to live country. They played to a crowd of more than 13,000 that looked as if it had cleaned out the hat supply at Grif s Western on its way to the show.

The tour for the trio's second album, Fly, milked that title for every available pun: A giant, remote-piloted inflatable fly buzzed the crowd before the concert and dropped backstage passes into the seats. The stage was hidden by a curtain painted with the image of jeans, and split down the middle by an almost-unbuttoned fly. The last bit of house music to precede the band? Lenny Kravitz's Fly.

The curtain dropped and Natalie Maines, Martie Seidel and Emily Robison -- singer, fiddle-player and banjoist, respectively -- appeared one spotlight at a time. They and the six guys forming the band opened with Ready to Run, Fly's first single, and a prototypical , Chicks song mixing pop chime, rock noise and country drawl.

The set ranged from made-in-Nashville radio favorites, such as f Can Love You Better, to vintage-sounding ballads with the brokenhearted aura of songs by Tammy Wynette. The only letdown was a 10-minute slide show in which the girls trotted out childhood pictures ("We were all ugly once," joked Maines) and nudged each other as If they were test-piloting a TV variety show.

At their best, though, Maines sang hummable melodies while Seidel and Robison, the group's founding siblings, played off her with festive banjo-and-fiddle lines. The Chicks may be the first band to firing Opry flavor and bluegrass breakdowns to sports stadiums, but they couldn't do that if they weren't so good at country pop.

Hand-picked by the Chicks to open several tour dates, red-haired folk rocker Patty Griffin sang ethereal ballads and played mournful rock with gnashing guitar. Griffin, though a mesmerizing talent, clearly wasn't here to tickle the Dixie-loving crowd. The Austin, Texas, native and her quartet offered a few moments of cowgirl jump, but even these were tempered by Griffin's melancholy streak and an aching, powerful voice that sounds like the very soul of languor.

Griffin wasn't at her strongest. She mentioned "recovering from the flu and singing at half-mast." The recovery was taking its toll on her voice, and her energy level. But half-mast for Griffin is still something to behold. A version of the song Flaming Red began with a slow, almost terrifying guitar-and-voice sermon, a flourish of gospel-ized grunge, before taking off at a frantic gallop. Her introspective music may cut too close to the bone to fit the carnival atmosphere of a stadium show, but Griffin no doubt won a few converts just by playing against audience expectations.

Return To Fly Tour page