The Dixie Chicks are to road stories what Thelma & Louise is to chick movies.
Road Chicks
It surprises a lot of people to hear this, but the Chicks have been touring for more than ten years. There isn’t much these fearless Texas women haven’t seen or done. But they might never have gone on the road if it hadn’t been for the generosity of one of their female fans.
Among the ranks of hard-core Dixie Chicks boosters in the early 1990s were billionaire H. Ross Perot, Lady Bird Johnson, and the entire family of the late Senator John Tower, especially his married daughter, Penny Cook. All of them hired the Chicks for private parties, and all seemed eager to spread the gospel of the all-girl band. The only dark cloud was the group’s inability to pique the interest of a major record label.
When it finally sank in that there would be no dialogue with a label until they had demo tapes to offer, the Dixie Chicks priced several studios and discovered they could afford none of them. They were lining up bookings one after the other (not only were they the only all-girl bluegrass band in Texas, they were the cheapest band, period), but those paychecks, split four ways, provided no savings to draw upon. (In the early days, there were four Dixie Chicks-Robin Macy, Laura Lynch, and sisters Martie and Emily Erwin. Macy left in 1992, after a dispute over whether drums should be added, and Lynch was replaced by Natalie Maines in 1995. The Erwins now use their married names, Martie Seidel and Emily Robison.)
In the fall of 1990, when it appeared their dreams of becoming recording artists would never be realized, a small miracle occurred. Penny Cook showed up at Laura’s house unannounced and said, “Okay, you’ve got to make a record so we can hear you when we can’t see you. What do you need?” Stunned, Laura replied, “I think it would cost about $10,000.”
Without saying another word, Cook wrote out a personal check for $10,000. “Good luck,” she said. “Just pay it back when you can.”
The product of that generous loan, Thank Heavens for Dale Evans, contained 14 songs that were all recorded live in the studio, the way Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and Elvis Presley did it back in the 1950s, and Patsy Montana and Bill Monroe even earlier.
“We had to be skimpy on studio time, so we gathered around the microphones and played the songs live,” says former lead singer Lynch. “If we all ended the song at the same time, we’d say, ‘That’s a keeper,’ and then move on to the next song. We didn’t do any dubbing or any of that rigmarole. We did it the way that was the most efficient and economical.”
Now that the Chicks had sunk the money into pressing a CD, they had no choice but to go out on the road so they could repay the loan. It was the beginning of one hell of a wild ride.
Emily breezed into the van one day, her eyes wide as saucers. ‘You’ll never believe what happened to me!” she exclaimed. Everyone else had been waiting for Emily, the youngest of the Dixie Chicks until Natalie Maines joined in 1995, and their attitude was pretty much that it had better be a damned good story. Emily didn’t disappoint.
For the past several months she’d been dating someone. The relationship had about run its course, but Emily had never found breaking up easy to do. Since she was out on the road so much with the Chicks, avoiding the guy seemed easier than dumping him. Besides, he had a key to her house and watered her plants when she was out of town. Why mess with a good thing?
The problem was, Emily had met another man. Her new love interest was the lead singer of a band that was packing honky-tonks all across Texas. Unlike Emily’s boyfriend, he was a big fellow who towered over her. Out of respect for his Texas-size girth and his steer-roping passion for privacy, let’s just call him Big Fella.
Big Fella had spent the night at Emily’s house, she explained to her bandmates, though she hurried past that bit of news to get to the good part of the story. In the morning, as she rushed through a shower, she’d heard a sound that sent shivers up her spine-shades of Psycho. Someone was coming in the back door.
In an instant she knew who the intruder was. She had not called her boyfriend when she’d returned home the previous day, for obvious reasons. Thinking she was on the road, he’d stopped by to water her plants. What a guy!
Quickly, Emily jumped out of the shower, threw on a towel, and dashed into the kitchen just in time to greet him at the door. She was dripping wet.
“You should call before you come over,” Emily said, uttering the phrase that sets off alarm bells for any male. The boyfriend looked at Emily, then in the direction of the bedroom. Suddenly his dark eyes flashed, and he bolted for the other room.
“No!” Emily cried, grabbing his belt.
Like a Spanish conquistador, the boyfriend charged ahead, dragging Emily along with him. She told her bandmates she was moving so fast that she felt like a water skier skimming across the surface of a lake. When Emily and the boyfriend came into the bedroom, Big Fella rose to his feet, the loud voices having alerted him to possible trouble. The boyfriend took one look at Big Fella and stopped dead in his tracks.
On January 20, 1993, the Dixie Chicks performed for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore at the Tennessee Inaugural Ball in the Washington Hilton, along with Jimmy Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band, Kathy Mattea, Rosanne Cash, Lou Reed, and others. Most of the guests were dressed in formal dinner wear, but the Chicks showed up in their glitzy, retro-cowgirl outfits, ready to shine.
The Secret Service wouldn’t allow them into the ballroom until the girls had been screened by a metal detector. Emily volunteered to go first. A blushing Secret Service agent, who looked to be not much older than 20, ran his handheld device up, down, and around Emily’s body, saving her chest for last. To Emily’s horror, as he moved the device over her breasts, the alarm went off.
The agent was as surprised as anyone there. At first he was speechless, his eyes understandably glued to Emily’s fringe-covered chest, which had begun to heave somewhat, now that it had been thrust into the spotlight. The other Chicks froze in their tracks, fighting an urge to run for the door, but thinking, what on earth does that girl have in her bra?
The Secret Service agent pointed to the silver fringe on Emily’s costume. “Is that metallic?” he asked.
“Yessssss!”
The agent grinned and waved her into the room.
When the Gore family arrived, Al and Tipper took one look at the performers assembled backstage and decided they wanted Al Gore 111 to hang out with the Dixie Chicks. They deposited the lucky youngster-and his bodyguards-in the musicians’ care, and they mothered him throughout the evening.
“Ever striving for a cowgirl fashion statement, we had donned our snappy new duds for the occasion,” the Chicks later reported in their newsletter. “Various elegant folks were whispering, ‘They must be from Dallas.’ I think it was the hair, which we poofed up bigger’n trash-can lids!”
Backstage, Martie chatted with singer Paul Simon, Laura struck up a conversation with Jimmy Buffett, and Emily confronted Johnny Cash face-to-face when they both reached for the same deviled-crab puff. (Emily won the puffoff with the Man in Black.)
The Chicks began 1995 by performing at the inauguration of Texas Governor George W. Bush, whom they described in their newsletter as “new, improved, cleaner, whiter, brighter.”
By then, Martie had fallen in love with Ted Ashley Seidel, a pharmaceutical salesman who was raising a young son from a previous marriage. Ted was a regular guy who had proved his dedication to his son, which Martie found endearing-and, equally important, he was not involved in the sleazy business of music. Martie was sure that Ted would stick with her, no matter what. They set a wedding date.
Wearing a low-cut, white cotton dress cinched at the waist with a pink ribbon, sheer white stockings, and a three flower cluster in her hair, Martie looked every bit the bride. With her were her lovely bridesmaids, including her two sisters, Emily and Julia. The women sat together, ordered a bottle of champagne, and the music began. A hard thumping beat rumbled beneath the melody. The Dixie Chicks were not in church, that was for certain.
Sitting in La Bare, Dallas’s premier “ladies only” nightclub, Martie watched as the first of several male dancers boogied out into the spotlight. Martie and her bridesmaids were seated in the “pit,” a sunken area near the stage, a favorite spot for bachelorette parties. Randy Ricks, the current owner of La Bare, was working as a dancer. Having the Dixie Chicks in the club then wasn’t that big of a deal to the dancers, he says, since the Chicks were considered a local band. “But if they came in now, it would be like the biggest day of their lives for some of the guys,” says Ricks. “I really respect those girls for what they have done. People around here really respect them. Forgive me for saying this, but they could shit on stage and people here would go crazy.”
Martie was the guest of honor, so the strippers focused on her, gathering around her, flattering her, treating her like a queen. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she held a fistful of dollars that she tucked, one at a time, into the dancers’ G-strings. “She was just having fun,” says a woman who was there.
Occasionally, Martie ran her hands over the dancers’ well-muscled chests. When one of the strippers, a blond bodybuilder with short hair, pressed Martie’s wrists against the back of her bench while he removed a dollar bill from her mouth with his lips, the bridal party burst out laughing.
As the evening wore on, however, Martie’s bridesmaids seemed to stiffen somewhat in the face of the hormonal fireworks display taking place around them, especially when one of the dancers pressed his legs between the wouldbe bride’s outstretched knees. As the dancers then began to straddle Martie’s lap and gyrate more and more suggestively, the discomfort clearly showed on the faces of some of the other women. At one point, Martie looped her arms around the bullish neck of one of the strippers and, from a distance, appeared to be kissing him.“Emily seemed more nervous than the others,” said one tattoo artist. “Martie actually seemed to like it. I think she enjoyed the pain a little bit.”
Emily was not particularly disturbed by her sister’s flirtations; she captured every amorous moment on film, as did several other photographers.
The climax of the evening occurred when two of the dancers placed Martie between them. A surviving photo of the “sandwich” shows one male holding Martie’s hands up as he gyrates his pelvis against her head while the other dancer presses his pectoral muscles into her face. In the background is Emily, her camera in front of her face.
Randy Ricks, a former Playgirl centerfold, says that in those days he often stripped at clubs where the Chicks were performing. “The Dixie Chicks are all as sweet as can be,” he says. “They’re all dolls.”
As it turned out, the Chicks were celebrating more than one merger that night. Earlier that day, Martie, Emily, and Laura had signed a recording contract with Sony Records. All their dreams were about to come true.
The following day — June 17, 1995 — Martie walked down the aisle of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Dallas, accompanied by her bridesmaids. “It was a very traditional, straitlaced wedding,” recalls Dallas music-store owner Jay Rury, who attended with his wife. “It was not cowboy-cowgirl oriented. There was music from the choir. It went like any wedding would go. The reception afterward was at a swanky club, the top floor of a high rise.” (Martie and Ted divorced this past February.)
When Wide Open Spaces was released, Natalie, the new singer, told her bandmates they needed to pick something to commemorate any gold records or No. 1 hits that came their way. She suggested they celebrate each occasion by getting a chicken-foot tattoo on their ankle. Yeah, fat chance of going gold, thought Martie and Emily-so they agreed.
By fall 1998, Wide Open Spaces cracked the Top 10 on the album charts, making the Chicks the only new country act that year to do so. They also made the pop charts, becoming the first country group to have a pop hit since 1983, when the band Alabama hit the Top 10. Album sales quickly reached 500,000, which entitled Wide Open Spaces to be certified gold. Three months later, sales surpassed the million mark, allowing the album to be certified platinum.
Amid much gnashing of teeth-and an occasional groan-the three women went to a Nashville tattoo parlor, where each received a tiny chicken-foot tattoo below her ankle.
When the time came for a second round of tattoos, they discovered that the tattoo parlor had gone out of business. After asking around, they learned that one of the tattoo artists, Marty Cade, had moved to Lone Wolf Tattoos, which was owned by Ben Dixon.
One day Martie and her friend Susan Gibson, who wrote the song “Wide Open Spaces” for the Chicks, breezed into Lone Wolf without an appointment. Gibson wanted a tattoo on her hand.
“I don’t tattoo hands,” said Dixon. “It could affect your ability to get a job. What kind do you want?”
Gibson said she wanted a chicken foot. Martie showed Dixon the delicate tattoo on her foot. Dixon asked Gibson what she did for a living.
“I’m a songwriter,” she said.
“Well, there’s lots of songwriters here in Nashville,” Dixon said. “You aren’t telling me much.”
“I’ve written some good songs,” Gibson said. “I don’t think I’ll have a problem with a tattoo on my hand.”
“Well, who have you written songs for? Anyone famous?”
“Yeah, her,” Gibson said, pointing to Martie.
“Who are you?” Dixon asked.
Dixon finally did Gibson’s tattoo and touched up Martie’s. If it was a test run, he passed with flying colors. Martie returned with Emily and Natalie. Accompanying them was an entourage made up of Martie’s then husband Ted, their producer Paul Worley, and various members of the crew. All wanted chicken-foot tattoos.
“We had a lot of fun,” said Dixon. “After I realized who they were, we closed the shop down and everybody kicked back and had a good time. Emily seemed more nervous than the others. Martie actually seemed to like it. I think she enjoyed the pain a little bit.”
In fact, none of the women complained about the pain, said Dixon, although they made “lots of faces” and “little squeaky sounds” during the procedure. Dixon worked on Martie and Emily, and Marty Cade took care of Natalie. They divided up the men.
Throughout the session, Natalie ran back and forth to Dixon’s office, where he was working on Martie and Emily, to make sure they were all getting identical tattoos. Before doing them, Dixon drew them on. If Natalie didn’t think it looked right, she would ask him to erase it and try again. “She was like the coordinator,” Dixon says with a laugh.
Dixon says the location they chose is one of the most painful places to get a tattoo. “Most people get them above the ankle, instead of on the foot,” he says. “I told them, the way you’re going, you’re going to have your whole foot covered. I told them they needed to start thinking about how to do them, maybe coming around their ankles, incorporating them into an anklet. Then we started talking about the future of their careers and how many more tattoos they may end up getting.”
At press time, the Chicks are up to nine tattoos, and they’ve earned two more.
