A radio station has suspended two disc jockeys for locking themselves in the studio and continuously playing Dixie Chicks songs, violating the station’s two-month-old ban on the group’s music.
Station manager Jerry Grant said he barred the music from country KKCS in Colorado Springs, Colo., after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience on March 10: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Since then, sales of their No. 1 album “Home” have dropped, and many radio stations across the country have yanked the group from playlists.
Grant told WorldNetDaily the station already had decided to start playing the trio’s songs again, but DJs Dave Moore and Jeff Singer – “passionate fans” of the group – could not wait.
“Our two guys in the morning kind of jumped the gun, and yesterday, locked the door in the studios and went six hours of back-to-back-to-back Dixie Chicks,” he said.
Grant insisted the station was not trying to pull off a publicity stunt.
“I wish I was that smart,” he said. “It was their publicity stunt, but it was something they did on their own.”
Grant said the incident has provoked a lot of tension.
“We’ve been getting hundreds of phone calls, both pro and con,” he said. “It has not been a fun couple of days.”
The manager noted a barrage of hate mail since the suspensions in which he’s been called everything from “Saddam Hussein” to “Joe McCarthy.”
The decision two months ago to pull the Dixie Chicks from the station’s lineup was difficult, he said, because it’s hard to ignore the hottest group in country music.
Nevertheless, the attitude of Colorado Springs residents was clear.
“We are in a military town,” he said. “There are five military bases here. We had a huge outcry from our listeners: Do not play the Dixie Chicks.”
However, that sentiment has changed in the last week or so, he said, with about 75 percent of calls from listeners favoring the group’s return to the station’s airwaves.
“Most stations are starting to play them again anyhow a song here, a song there,” Grant said, according to the Associated Press. “I just have a problem with the way this was done. We would have put them in anyhow. But we’d like to do it on our terms.”
As WorldNetDaily reported, a radio station in North Carolina says Dixie Chicks fans who hold tickets for their May 17 Greensboro, N.C., concert are welcome to use those tickets at an alternative “patriotic event” the station is sponsoring the same night – just in case Chicks fans want to send a message to the group in response to its comments about Bush.
Last week, Syndicated talk-radio host Mike Gallagher organized an alternative concert that went head-to-head with the Chicks’ opening concert of their “Top of the World” tour in Greenville, S.C.
Rock legend Bruce Springsteen has defended the Dixie Chicks, saying the country trio is getting a “raw deal” for exercising their basic right to express themselves.
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