Lilith Fair rewrote the rules of rock

Within the first 15 minutes of “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – the Untold Story,” a new documentary about the groundbreaking late ’90s touring music festival, viewers will learn that a tour that featured two female artists, headliner and opener, was referred to as a “pussy package.” “You can’t put two women on the same bill, people won’t come,” Sarah McLachlan, Lilith Fair’s co-founder, explains she was told when she wanted to ask Paula Cole to join her on the road to give herself some much-needed respite and sisterhood. She did it anyway. And guess what? The audience showed up.

This was happening at the same time that terrestrial radio programmers held a fervent belief that male listeners would run screaming if they played more than one female artist on the radio; if the station was playing Tracy Chapman, they couldn’t play Sarah McLachlan, or Jewel, or Suzanne Vega, even though none of those artists are musically alike in any way.

Then there was the rampant sexualization of female musicians. You’ll hear Jewel describing being introduced on-air as “A large-breasted woman from Alaska.” (When she describes that she responded with, “You must be that small-penised man I’ve heard so much about from South Carolina,” she was escorted out of the station.) Liz Phair, after releasing “Exile in Guyville” and then “Whip-Smart,” explains the frustration at having a record climbing the charts but having the media only interested in her physical appearance: “I’m devalued. Everything that I was good at, that I was skilled at, that I’d worked my entire life for, boiled down to ‘do her tits look good.’ I was ready to quit that first year.”

This was the atmosphere that compelled Canadian singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan and her management team to create Lilith Fair, and why she had plenty of talented women ready to join her. The festival lasted three years — from 1997-1999 — played 134 dates in 54 cities, and raised $10 million for local women’s shelters and other non-profits. In 1997 alone, Lilith Fair grossed $16 million, making it the top-grossing festival tour that year. The festival took all the financial risk, and everyone told them it wouldn’t work. Cut to: the first day of the festival in 1997, 15,000 attendees, a sold-out show.

Lilith Fair boosted careers and chart positions, and propelled records, songs, and artists towards Grammy nominations and wins. “It was a massive success,” McLachlan states, “and it changed people’s lives. It changed my life! And yet, people don’t like change. There’s a reason Lilith remains mostly unheard of and misunderstood. If you stand up for something, there’s going to be an equal and opposite reaction.”

If you wished you were there — or you were there! — “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – the Untold Story” is for you. The documentary — which saw its red carpet event nixed by ABC News Studios on Sunday — features over 90 minutes of extensive live, offstage and backstage footage from back in the day as well as in-depth current interviews with McLachlan, her team, the crew and many of the women who performed on that stage every night, explaining the impact of the festival on the lives and careers of the musicians who played and for the people who attended it.

(Hulu) Sarah McLachlan in “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – The Untold Story”

But this isn’t just a victory lap; this documentary is also for everyone who disparaged the festival or didn’t feel like it was for them. (Your columnist is guilty as charged of the latter; more on this later.) And it’s definitely for the people who had no idea that it ever happened — one of whom is Olivia Rodrigo, expressing her surprise at discovering that there had been an all-woman music festival that no one seemed to know about or remember.

The very existence of Lilith Fair was controversial when it was operational, and the documentary airs many of the objections McLachlan and her team were up against. But no one ever asked Perry Farrell, Jane’s Addiction front man and founder of Lollapalooza, the alternative festival that was also touring the country at the same time as Lilith Fair, if Lolla was phallocentric, or something similarly ridiculous. (The Los Angeles Times reported that “industry insiders” referred to Lilith as “Lesbopalooza.”)

No one ever told a radio station that they’d lose listeners if they played Soundgarden before Pearl Jam, or that they couldn’t add Alice in Chains to the rotation because they already had another male group. All of this matters not just because it’s all patently ridiculous, but because this is what every artist who appeared at Lilith Fair was fighting against.

As NPR’s Ann Powers points out, “Women are political simply for saying, ‘I deserve space.’” Paging through newspaper stories about the festival while it was running, outlet after outlet felt the need to qualify that Lilith wasn’t a “lesbian gathering.” Look, there are men here! There are male musicians playing in these bands! But also, this was a scenario where a conversation with a water company about sponsorship got the response, “We’re focusing on a male audience.” “It’s water.”

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The documentary explains that there were plenty of women, fans and musicians, who were not interested in Lilith Fair. At the time, my musical tastes ran towards things that were faster and louder, although I know every single word of that first Indigo Girls album by heart. But the female artists I adored were not on Lilith, although they might have been invited to participate and turned it down for a variety of reasons.

PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney and Garbage (among others) were invited and turned it down. Patti Smith appeared at an early, proto-Lilith show in 1996, organized by McLachlan (there’s a brief moment of footage), but declined to join the full festival run. When asked about it a few years later, Smith said, “I’m sure they did a lot of positive things for women performers who find it important to be known as a woman performer. That’s an important thing to people. For me, I mean, I’m an artist. I feel like I don’t want to be genderized (sic) as an artist.”

That was not a position unique to Patti Smith. Lisa Loeb, at the time flying high thanks to her platinum-selling No. 1 hit song “Stay (I Missed You),” admits in the film that she initially wasn’t interested in joining the tour for a similar reason. “My immediate reaction was, ‘I’m not sure that’s a great idea, I don’t want to be grouped with a bunch of women musicians, I’m a musician’ . . . and then I heard who was on the bill.”

The film also notes, “The people who criticized, never went.” Comedian Sandra Bernhard was one of those people, but then she got invited to join the tour the following year and revised her opinion. Chrissie Hynde was also not a fan until she too joined the lineup. When the Indigo Girls suggested to McLachlan that the festival have all the artists come onstage at the end of the night for an encore sing-along, one of the favored choices was Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” which happened despite Mitchell also being adverse to the festival for similar reasons as Patti Smith. (Smith’s “Because the Night” was also a favorite group encore choice on Lilith.)

There’s a glorious shot of the musicians working out their harmonies on the Mitchell classic. It’s gorgeous, as is the shot of 20,000 people in the audience singing along at the top of their lungs to the Indigo Girls’ anthemic “Closer to Fine.” Women are in tears, young girls hug their friends, and that moment of joyful communion conveys what was at the heart of why the festival was so successful.

It’s moments like this within the documentary — which is possible because it was the late ’90’s and there were cameras everywhere — that made me deeply sorry I couldn’t get over my reservations and go anyway, but it made me sorrier that the likes of Sleater-Kinney or Björk or Annie Lennox hadn’t participated, because the cross-pollinization could have extended Lilith Fair’s influence even further. As Sheryl Crow comments in the film, “You don’t know who you’re inspiring. You don’t know who’s going to be witness to what you’re doing and think, ‘That’s what I want to be.’”

One of the people impacted by Lilith Fair was a 10-year-old Brandi Carlisle, who was at the front of the line for that first show at the Gorge Amphitheatre in 1997. She explains that she was the only out gay person in her entire high school. “Nothing really could have prepared me for that experience, a sort of coming of age and total freedom . . . I was just this punky little baby dyke running around, and it had the feeling of the beginning of something, because there was so much happening for LGBTQ people. 1997 was the same year that Ellen DeGeneres came out, courting so much controversy but also so much hopefulness. From the audience perspective, Lilith Fair felt like a backyard manifestation of that to me.”

The list of artists who cycled through the Lilith Fair lineup across the three years it was in existence is stellar: Paula Cole. Tracy Chapman. Jewel. Suzanne Vega. Sheryl Crow. Shawn Colvin. Liz Phair. Fiona Apple. Erykah Badu. Missy Elliot. The Indigo Girls. Bonnie Raitt. Natalie Merchant. Emmylou Harris. The Dixie Chicks. Sinéad O’Connor. (This is not a complete list.) A moment everyone remembers is the time a very young Christina Aguilera played a Lilith sidestage, and the crew radios crackled with excitement and encouragement to not miss it.

The name of the festival came from the legend of Adam’s first wife, who left (or was banished, depending on who you ask) from the Garden of Eden because she refused to subjugate herself; the “fair” came from the multiple meanings of the word: beautiful, equal, a celebration. But the name definitely helped get the attention of televangelist Jerry Falwell, as he criticized the festival, insisting that Lilith was a “demon.” There were various flavors of protestors at every date, and the Atlanta show was delayed due to a bomb threat.

One of the Lilith Fair traditions was the daily press conference where McLachlan and other musicians on the bill had to sit there and answer questions from local media about the festival being “exclusionary” with a straight face. At one point, McLachlan found herself saying that the festival would be looking to add male headliners, only for Emmylou Harris to be the voice of reason, telling her to hold the line.

Planned Parenthood was part of the Lilith “Village,” and as the tour went on, the Festival and McLachlan got more and more heat for their presence. Pro-life groups demanded that they, too, be given a table, and McLachlan pointed out that all of the other groups at the festival applied for those spots months ago. The venue in Texas wanted Planned Parenthood to be banned, and the decision was made that they’d pull the festival if that was the case. The venue then relented, but said they couldn’t hand out free condoms and that no artist could mention Planned Parenthood from the stage. Joan Osborne’s response to that was to outfit herself and her band in Planned Parenthood T-shirts. McLachlan explains she had to fight a whole lot of “nice girl” conditioning to finally say, “This is my festival and I’ll do what I want.”

The culmination of this was at the 1997 Grammy Awards, where Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin were nominated for — and won — multiple awards. Colvin won Song of the Year and Record of the Year; McLachlan won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Pop Instrumental Performance; Paula Cole won Best New Artist. All of them had other nominations in other categories as well. But instead of getting to sing their songs individually, the three were grouped into what was billed as a “Lilith Fair Tribute” and had to perform a medley. McLachlan wryly thinks about why they all didn’t just say “nope.” And what most people remember about their performance is that Paula Cole didn’t shave her armpits, resulting in months of fodder for late-night comedians.

There are dozens of other moments, large and small, onstage and off, that are captured here by a team who clearly took judicious care to surface what was important to the story as well as what was joyful and what was exceedingly difficult, the challenges and the highlights — it feels like a much longer film than it actually is because of how much detail the filmmakers manage to include. But at no point does it feel rushed or do you wish for footage you’re not seeing (well, maybe the clip of Prince’s 1999 appearance with Sheryl Crow at the Toronto stop, which, gratefully, is on YouTube). “We had done it. We had changed the frequency of the whole room,” McLachlan says towards the end. “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – the Untold Story” elevates, defends and proves that assertion, and documents it for future generations to build upon.