Maybe three times in the last eight and half years I have indulged myself to write something just for fun, just to remind myself that getting light is sometimes the best way to respond to a heavy world. The Dixie Chicks may not save the world. The Dixie Chicks may not stop the war. But the Dixie Chicks have certainly saved my spirits and sense of humor. Long before it became fashionable to dislike the Bush Administration, especially for Southerners from Texas, these magnificent ladies stood up and said “Bullshit!” – in so many words.
They took their lumps, they stood their ground, they took the long way around and they’re not ready to make nice. Their new CD “Taking The Long Way” has debuted at No. 1, selling 526,000 copies in its first week.
Whether they know it or not, their success is a success for all of us who have fought this madness for the last five years. We have taken our own lumps; some hard ones, some nasty ones, and although we haven’t found our own drink of affirming water in the long, arid desert yet, The Dixie Chicks are taking a drink for all of us.
I bought the CD myself and, aside from its monumental symbolic value, it just happens to be really good music. I have been privileged to know as friends, meet or interact with great musicians from Benmont Tench (keyboards for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Alanis Morisette, Don Henley and everybody else), to David Lindley (Jackson Browne & more), to David Baerwald (songwriter for Sheryl Crow, composer, singer), to Tom Waits (who bought a case of Truth and Lies of 9/11). Those who know me well, know that two decades ago I had a band and was briefly a working singer in the 1980s.
“Taking the Long Way is just brilliant, beautiful, toe-tapping, happy-thigh-slapping, tear jerking, emotionally satisfying music. That may be a biased opinion on my part but – as opposed to so much else in this day and age – emotions and music connect to an important life reality here. The music (certainly not all political) is easier to trust because the Chicks have earned emotional credibility with me and all music is ultimately about human emotion. Because I trust them, I believe their music.
I hope these ladies break every record in the book. I hope they outsell the Beatles. If that’s the best Americans can do for a “revolution” now then let it scream from the highest hills that we, probably well more than half of the American people, are sick and tired of lies, death, and the empty-soulness of our nation. Let’s reach out to the rest of the frightened and imperiled people on this planet and show them something. Seeing this CD sell 10 million copies in this country in six months could change the harmonics of the nation and maybe the planet itself.
I’m going out to buy five more now.
Dixie Chicks for President!
Mike Ruppert (yeah, it’s me)