By G. Brown
Aug. 23 - Lilith Fair, the female-led traveling music festival organized and headlined by Sarah McLachlan, was last summer's most successful tour. It was also the most media-saturated, from capturing the cover of Time to being satirized on Saturday Night Live.
And it's still for what McLachlan is best known.
"I haven't been an overnight sensation - I've been doing this for 10 years, and it's been a wonderful career,'' the 30-year-old Canadian songstress said after she picked up two Grammy Awards for her multiplatinum album Surfacing.
"But perhaps I wouldn't have these two Grammys if Lilith Fair hadn't happened. It put me into a completely new place in the industry and in the public's eye."
McLachlan first hatched the notion of Lilith as a testosterone-free reinterpretation of festivals such as Lollapalooza. She had met resistance to plans for a tour with Paula Cole; one of the music biz's hard-and-fast male-centric rules is that you never put two women on stage back to back.
In response, McLachlan decided to add even more women to the bill. She drew Lilith's name from Hebrew mythology about Adam's first wife, who was tossed out of the Garden of Eden for being too independent. When McLachlan first announced her idea of an all-female caravan tour with a rotating lineup, she referred to it jokingly as Girlapalooza. It seemed like an interesting novelty.
But Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Victoria Williams and Emmylou Harris signed on. In total, more than five dozen women took turns on the 35-date tour, with only McLachlan playing every city.
Fans, most of them female, lined up in droves. By season's end, Lilith had grossed more than $16 million and proved that an all-woman tour could be taken seriously and make a profit.
McLachlan said her tour "doesn't exclude men, it simply celebrates women. Promoters were really scared to put women on the same bill. Now the climate has changed dramatically. We've proved it can be done.
"This tour is a huge step in the right direction for women's rights, but it isn't a soapbox for extreme feminism. It isn't about dissing men. It's about quality in every aspect of life between men and women - so that's part feminism, part humanist. I just think everybody is equal."
But cynics said diversity was a problem - the focus was on earnest, peasant-skirted singer/songwriters over alt-rock and hip-hop's more raucous girls.
The 57-date Lilith Fair 1998 has stretched a little by adopting a more varied lineup. Newcomers like Erykah Badu, Luscious Jackson, Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill have signed on, and so have Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, Liz Phair and Sinead O'Connor.
None of them will be present when Lilith Fair visits Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre today. But de facto co-headliner Natalie Merchant and Cowboy Junkies have been added to the fest's evermorphing lineup, alongside such holdovers as Paula Cole, Joan Osborne and Lisa Loeb.
For Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, Lilith is a measure of how much women's status in rock has improved over the last decade.
"It's a totally different atmosphere than what I'm used to - usually I'm the only girl with 15 men around," Timmins explained recently.
"Around Lilith, there are a lot of women around, and I'm excited - we're backstage talking about shoes instead of hockey!"
It might seem like the men are left to slave labor at McLachlan's second annual all-woman blowout.
"It's hard for me to understand what's so threatening about it. Someone feels slighted or left out, I guess. It's really not that exclusive," Merchant said recently.
"The frontwomen are the signifying characters, but we all have men in our bands and crews. They're having the time of their lives - they think that it's the best tour they've ever been on. Everyone's needs are attended to and everyone is treated with a great amount of respect and politeness, which is pretty rare for a backstage atmosphere of a large rock festival.
"It's a utopian experience for most of the men that I've spoken to. They say it must be because it's organized and predominantly staffed by women."
According to concert-industry trade magazine Performance, Lilith Fair is again one of the summer's hottest tours.
"Somebody must be doing something right," Merchant said.
McLachlan told the Boston Globe that next year's Lilith Fair will scale back to 37 dates. She also said that Lilith won't be an annual event: "I know I want to have kids - and I'm not going to come out on the road when I have kids."
But there will be other young female artists keeping things lively.
"Being around women who tour, I'm picking up a few helpful hints on how to handle it better," Timmins said.
"The hardest thing? The boys can get on a bus and they eat anything in sight - Oreos and Fritos and anything with an 'o' at the end. If I do that, I'd look like Mama Cass."