The Chicks Were Never Ready to Make Nice. Neither Were Their Queer Fans.
Opening their 'Taking the Long Way' 20th anniversary tour at Detroit's Fox Theatre, the trio reminded LGBTQ+ fans why we never stopped listening
Some albums you listen to. Others you live inside, especially if you're a gay person who has ever been told, in one way or another, to shut up and sing — or, rather, to stay in the closet. "Taking the Long Way" was the second kind for me. In 2006, I'd been out for just five years and was months into my job at Pride Source when the promo CD landed on my desk. "Not Ready to Make Nice" felt like armor.
Twenty years later, The Chicks opened their unrepentant Taking the Long Way 20th Anniversary Tour at the Fox Theatre on Sept. 30, playing the album front to back. And before they even took the stage, I found my thesis on the back of a T-shirt. A gay man in the front row wore one that read “I could never follow,” a line from "The Long Way Around." I wasn't surprised. (I was, however, a little jealous that I hadn't thought of it first.)
What I understood at the Fox, better than I ever had, is that the album was never only about the songs — though many, like "Easy Silence" and "The Voice Inside My Head," certainly hold up, and played live, you can hear instrumental nuances the record buries. Then there's Maines' voice. Time has been kinder to her voice than to the country that tried to silence it. Their triumphant non-apology bleeds into even the songs that have nothing to do with "the incident," and the feeling those songs bring when a room full of people who needed them sings them together. "Church," one fan wrote on Instagram after the show.
In country music, a genre that for years kept queer fans at arm's length, The Chicks did something bigger than nostalgia: they brought us in once again.
You know the story by now. In 2003, as the Iraq war raged and the country grappled with post-9/11 divisiveness, Natalie Maines told a London crowd the band was ashamed the president was from Texas. Overnight, they went from country's biggest act to its most unwelcome, and bonfires of their albums made the evening news. Three years later, instead of apologizing, they made an album that essentially said: here's who we are, and we're not going back on that. If that doesn't at least sound like coming out, I don't know what does.
"Who would've thought 20 years ago I had the audacity to bash the president?" Maines told the crowd at the Fox, laughing to wild applause. "But yes, 20 years ago we were at a very bizarre point in our careers, and [producer] Rick Rubin reached out and said, 'Hey, you think you ladies might have something to say?'" Before the show, behind-the-scenes footage from the album's making played on screen, including the trio and their band wrestling on a hotel room floor (for the lesbians?) and clips of Linda Perry, queer rock royalty, in the studio with them on "The Voice Inside My Head," which she co-wrote.
Then there was "Not Ready to Make Nice," the album's showpiece. "We wanted to write something about the incident, and he [Rubin] said, 'Do we need to write an apology song?'" Maines recalled, cackling her way to the punch line: "And we said, 'fuck that.'" The other punch line: the album went on to win the Grammys' top prizes, including album of the year.
Queer fans were there before the controversy, of course. When I asked Maines in 2020 what she thought drew gay fans to the band, she said her friends credited the early look, an over-the-top, Spice Girls-era take from a band that never met a trend it wouldn't wear, and yes, she confirmed the drag revues. “‘Chicks with Dicks’ – there were a lot of those kinds of revues,” she told me. She's also described herself to me as "more of a gay guy on the inside," and on Wednesday, the Fox took her at her word. But the controversy turned that fandom into something closer to kinship.
She'd told me as much years earlier. In 2013, when we talked about her solo album "Mother," she said she and her gay fans "both know how it feels to be hated just for who we are." Seven years later, when we spoke again for "Gaslighter," she came back to the same idea, nearly word for word, as if it were a creed.
That creed was the sermon on Wednesday night when "Not Ready to Make Nice" arrived. Flanked by fellow group members Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, Maines stayed seated in front of simple but elegant curtain staging while everyone else stood. She didn't need to rise to the occasion. The room did it for her. Heard among this many queer people, the song plays like a gay anthem, and so does the title track: songs about refusing to bend and choosing your own road, sung by women who were told to apologize and didn't.
Then came "Lubbock or Leave It," Maines' kiss-off to her Texas hometown. When we talked in 2020, she called the Lubbock of her youth "a very suppressive place" and said she couldn't think of a single out classmate from her '90s high school. Live, it played like the kind of church music that might have changed us, had we heard it in the pews back home. Coming from her, it's more than a jab at Texas. It's for every queer kid who had to get out to breathe.
After "Taking the Long Way" and a short intermission, the room got noticeably rowdier as the trio stepped forward for "Goodbye Earl," which kicked off an almost breathless run of their best sing-alongs: "Cowboy Take Me Away," "Landslide," "Wide Open Spaces." Then came a surprise. The jangly banjo of "Long Time Gone" slid into Beyoncé's "Daddy Lessons," the song they famously performed with her at the 2016 CMA Awards, and the two became a mashup. They closed with the rowdy "Sin Wagon," which might be the most gleefully sinful thing a lapsed Catholic like me has ever shouted along to.
In country music, a genre that for years kept queer fans at arm's length, The Chicks did something bigger than nostalgia: they brought us in once again. During "I Hope," a video showed images from civil rights marches, featuring figures like Rosa Parks and Gloria Steinem, and Wednesday felt like an invitation to join that movement. It was loud and proud. Twenty years ago, the backlash was over a war and a president. Sound familiar?
If anything has changed, it's that we're all older now: the album, the band and the newly out kid who found that promo CD on his desk. Back then, I needed these songs to tell me I didn't have to apologize. Twenty years later, "Taking the Long Way" doesn't feel like a time capsule. It feels like a playbook.
What to know at a glance
When and where did The Chicks' 20th anniversary tour start?
The Taking the Long Way 20th Anniversary Tour opened Sept. 30 at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. The trio played the 2006 album front to back, followed by a short intermission and a second set of hits.
What songs did The Chicks play in Detroit?
They performed "Taking the Long Way" in full, including "Not Ready to Make Nice," "Easy Silence," "The Voice Inside My Head" and "Lubbock or Leave It." The second set brought "Goodbye Earl," "Cowboy Take Me Away," "Landslide," "Wide Open Spaces," a "Long Time Gone"/"Daddy Lessons" mashup and "Sin Wagon."
Why do so many LGBTQ+ fans love The Chicks?
Natalie Maines has credited the band's early Spice Girls-era look and the drag revues that spoofed them, and she has described herself as "more of a gay guy on the inside." In a 2020 interview with Pride Source, she echoed an earlier remark that she and gay fans "both know how it feels to be hated just for who we are."
What was the Dixie Chicks controversy about?
In 2003, as the Iraq war began, Maines told a London crowd the band was ashamed the president was from Texas. Country radio and fans turned on them, with album bonfires making the news. Three years later they answered with the unapologetic "Taking the Long Way", which won album of the year at the Grammys.
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