In an interview with AARP magazine Linda Ronstadt revealed that she has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and is no longer able to sing.
For those of us who followed and loved her music in the mid seventies, this is shattering news. I get it that everyone gets old and dies, but I somehow thought that Linda would fall in the line of service, going out with a microphone in her hand and band behind her.
Consider this 1972 clip from The Midnight Special. As beautiful as this is, it was not atypical. She always sounded this way.
This clip is from the very early days in which she was just beginning to explode on the national scene as a great vocalist in the pop/country rock tradition. Albums like Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, and Hasten Down the Wind, were the trilogy that defined her dominance as the female vocalist of popular music in the 1970s.
Female vocalist of the current era--even accomplished ones--occasionally get into lip-syncing controversies. It is simply unimaginable that Linda Ronstadt would ever lip sync a performance.
I saw Linda in concert in 1975 at the Southern Illinois University campus just after she had released Hasten Down the Wind. It was the best concert I ever saw. Every song was note perfect. In 2005 I attended a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Baltimore, which may have surpassed it, but it is a close call.
I do not like country music. Then I was introduced to the Dixie Chicks.
In 2002 they recorded a cover of the Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac song Landslide. It changed the original, but in a surprisingly appealing way. Landslide was released on a album by the name of Home. Then the Chicks did something really unusual. They held a televised concert in which they played all of the songs on Home, start-to-finish, live and unedited and released this as a DVD.
I was hooked. An Evening with the Dixie Chicks is the most enjoyable concert film I had seen since Woodstock. The sheer fun they and audience have along with the stunning professionalism of the music is a true joy to watch.
Then, as anyone who followed the news at the time knows, in the early days of the Iraq War, the lead singer Natalie Maines announced at a London concert that they were "ashamed that George Bush was from Texas". All three of the Dixie Chicks, Maines, Martie McGuire, and Emily Robison are Texas natives. Their lives and careers were never the same.
They instantly became caught up in the culture wars, in which they were identified by the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh slice of America as "liberals". This wouldn't have mattered so much if only for the fact that they were a country music act, and the country music fan base is largely composed of rural conservatives. They went on a U.S. tour in the midst of the uproar certain that the fans would boo them off the stage or, worse, simply not show up. But that didn't happen. The concerts were a great success. However, country radio stations all but banned their music from airwaves.
Some time passed and emotions cooled. By this time is was positively mainstream to oppose the Iraq War, and it became increasingly silly for people to disparage the Chicks for simply articulating what most people thought in any case. For a while it seemed as though their careers might continue largely unscathed.
Then, the Chicks--lead by Maines--decided to offer as their first comeback single a song entitled Not Ready to Make Nice. Its lyrics are quite clear that even if country music fans were ready to move on, Natalie was still really pissed at the way she and the band had been treated. It opened all of the old wounds. If there was ever a chance that the Dixie Chicks could ever again have wide appeal with a country audience, then Not Ready to Make Nice closed that door.
Not Ready to Make Nice was included in their 2006 album Taking the Long Way. The album's eponymous first song tells the world that they don't do things the easy way. It's a great song on a great album. The thing is, though, it didn't really sound like a Dixie Chicks album. It was more mainstream pop and light rock than country. The critics approved of the album, and the Dixie Chicks swept the Grammys that year, winning every award they were up for. Taking the Long Way was successful to be sure. It sold 2.5 million copies in the U.S. alone and was a big hit internationally as well. However, Home had gotten an even better critical response, and their 1999 album Fly sold 10 million copies in the U.S. Clearly, it didn't matter what music critics thought. Country music fans had turned their backs on the Dixie Chicks.
The same year Taking the Long Way was winning awards, a documentary came out about the controversy surrounding the Chicks entitled Shut Up and Sing. Among other events, it documents a painful moment when--after having rejected an offer from a corporate sponsor for a 20 million dollar guarantee for their new U.S. tour (Maines is seen remarking that accepting it would be a sign that they lacked faith in themselves)--they sit in front of a computer and watch the Ticketmaster site and are told that sales for the concert series were "sluggish."
For the first time since they hit it big, they were canceling dates and playing to venues that were not sold out. I saw them at the Verizon Center in Washington D.C. during that tour. Maines was not the same. She engaged in very little banter with the audience and generally seemed wary and hesitant. She didn't seem to enjoy herself. However, her voice and the music were exemplary. Sisters McGuire and Robison seemed like their old selves.
That was 2006. Since then the Chicks have appeared in public together only rarely and have not recorded another album. McGuire and Robison released an album on their own under the name Courtyard Hounds. It was not particularly successful, at least by Dixie Chicks standards selling 825,000 copies in the U.S. They released another album just this summer that was almost completely ignored by the public. Maines released a rock-oriented solo album entitled Mother that was also unsuccessful, selling only 60,000 copies in the U.S.
As part of the promotional tour for Mother, Maines came out and said publicly what many already knew, which was that she never really felt comfortable in the country music world, and that the estrangement between the country music establishment and the Dixie Chicks was probably here to stay. She also made it clear that she had no plans to record with her former bandmates. There was never any hint of personal animus between Maines and the other two Chicks, but they are certainly musically estranged.
I would be shocked if the Dixie Chicks--at least any line-up that includes Natalie Maines--ever records again. The problem is that Emily Robison and Martie McGuire are country artists. They always have been and likely always will be so. Maines has made it clear that she has no desire to return to country music, and it is hard to imagine conservative country music fans and radio stations accepting her back even if she did. For fans of the Dixie Chicks, this is incredibly sad.
To get an idea of what the Chicks were like at their peak, see this 2006 MusiCares tribute to James Taylor. Many bands played that night, including Sting, Alison Kraus, Bruce Springsteen, and Carole King. Despite all of the world-class talent on hand, the Dixie Chicks rendition of Shower the People blew them all off the stage.
This all reminds me of a theme that I come back to over and over
about those who experience great success, only to see it fade away.
For
over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed
the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. . . . The
conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in
chains before him. . . . A slave stood behind the
conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning:
that all glory is fleeting.
I was watching This Week with George Stephanopolous today and it occurred to me that the mainstream media is ill-equipped to report on the Tea Party movement. I say this because one of Stephanopolous's guests was Louie Gohmert, GOP Representative from Texas and Tea Party booster. He made a couple of statements that were breathtaking in their scope and racialism, while at the same time revealing a routine, almost mundane, disconnect from reality.
His first statement was a defense of the Tea Party idea--publicly advocated by Ted Cruz* and Marco Rubio--that the Congress should shut down the government unless it withdraws funding for Obamacare. He said:
Even though we're one half of a legislative body--from which no spending occurs unless we agree--that is a position that allows us to force others to adhere to the constitution. We don't have to wait for the Supreme Court, we can force that. And we can say you are going to abide by the constitution whether the Supreme Court gets it wrong or right.
One of the most fundamental tenants of our form of government is legislative review, a principle established in 1803 (1803!) by the Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison. According to this principle, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the constitutionality of laws, including direct acts of Congress. Apparently, the current Tea Party position, as advocated by Rep. Gohmert, is to ignore over two-hundred years of precedent on this matter and assign the role of constitutional guardianship to a faction of the right of the right that seems to currently control one branch of government. This is not only radical in the sense that it would overturn a fundamental aspect of our governing tradition, it is also anti-democratic. The far-right of the right in this country does not get to unilaterally make policy for the entire country.
Gohmert's second claim was about Obamacare. He said:
What about the poor guy out there making $14,000. He is going to pay extra income tax if he can't cannot afford to pay the several thousand dollars for an Obamacare policy?
If the consequences were not so severe, it would be almost amusing that the harshest critics of Obamacare really have very little understanding of the law they despise beyond words or reason. A single person making $14,000 a year would be at 122% of the official poverty level. Obamacare has two ways of dealing with this individual.
First, Medicaid expansion would cover this person's medical bills fully. He wouldn't have to purchase private insurance at all. So in this case it would cost him not "several thousand dollars", but zero.
Second, if he is unfortunate enough to live in a state controlled by the GOP, then he may very well not be able to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion because many GOP-controlled states have refused to implement this provision of Obamacare (this was one of the consequences of the Supreme Court's favorable decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare). In this case, he would be required to purchase health insurance on the state exchanges. However, because of his low income that purchase would be heavily subsidized by the government. His out-of-pocket expense would be minimal. If you were an adult non-smoker making $14,000 a year then the government would subsidize 91% of the cost of your health insurance leaving you with a annual bill of, again, not "several thousand dollars", but $280. Of course, this hypothetical citizen could instead choose to pay the $695 income tax penalty as Gohmert suggests and have no health insurance at all, but that would be, well, insane.
What is interesting about all of this is not so much that there is a faction in American politics that has such views. The country has always been burdened by cranks and extremists. What interests me is how poorly the mainstream media is equipped to deal with this phenomenon. This episode of This Week in which Gohmert made these outrageous claims offers a clear example of the media's ineptitude. No one on the panel challenged Gomert's false claims about Obamacare nor his insurrectionist claims about the limits of Tea Party power. This is despite the fact that the panel included a Democratic Congressman and a Democratic consultant. They were simply incapable of pointing out for the benefit of the viewers how misinformed and radical Gohmert's views were. Perhaps it was out of a desire for comity; or, perhaps it was because they were--at least in the case of Obamacare--themselves poorly informed about the law's provisions. I honestly don't know.
I do know that The Daily Show--to name one good example of nontraditional media-- would have somehow been able to do what the Washington media establishment was in this case incapable of doing, which is to expose Gohmert and his ideological allies for what they are.
* Ted Cruz is a senator from Texas who assumed the seat of Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Add Rick Perry to the mix, and Texas seems to be a current hotbed for extreme right wing activism.
