Sarah McLachlan, Natalie Merchant, Suzanne Vega, and other Lilith Fair alums look back on the legacy of the groundbreaking fest
, who played on Lilith’s second stage in 1997 as a solo act and returned with the Bangles for its 2010 revival. “Even in the Eighties, with the Bangles, journalists would tend to say, ‘How do you feel about the Go-Gos?’ There weren’t many female bands, unfortunately, at that time, but still it always struck us.”
“I guess it was a radical idea at the time, but I thought it was a good radical idea,” recalls Merchant, who co-headlined the 1998 tour. “I remember when I started in the early Eighties, I was always the only girl in the room. Not just the musicians, but all of the tech people every time I went in the studio, record companies. As the Nineties progressed, I found that there were more and more women sound engineers and there were more women musicians – in my band, I had a female guitar player.
While the first year skewed heavily toward folk-tinged artists who were also getting lots of pop radio airplay – McLachlan, Cole, Loeb, Jewel, Sheryl Crow – the genre scope expanded over the tour’s second and third years. “We were not a ‘white chick folk fest,’ which was what we were labeled the first year,” says McLachlan. “That was extremely frustrating – we asked all sorts of artists from all sorts of different genres, and we basically got people who said yes.
“There was word that initially an all-women tour wouldn’t sell tickets,” said Emily Saliers of folk duo Indigo Girls, who came up with the idea for the night-closing singalong, which would bring all the evening’s performers onstage. “The legacy of Lilith is kick-ass business, powerful music, a great example for girls to see women onstage, and the marriage of music and activism. The tours were legendary, as they should be.
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