< 25 years on, Lilith Fair is a reminder of how one woman's radical idea changed music

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Twenty-five years ago today, a hundred and fifty miles outside of Seattle, music history was made. It was the opening night of Lilith Fair. The radical all-female touring concert became the top-grossing music festival of the late 1990s. NPR's Lisa Weiner takes us back.

(SOUNDBITE OF SARAH MCLACHLAN SONG, "BUILDING A MYSTERY")

LISA WEINER, BYLINE: July 5, 1997, was a Saturday night. The venue was packed with thousands of people for a sold-out show. Singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan looked out over the sea of people and could not believe her eyes.

SARAH MCLACHLAN: You know, it was definitely a holy [expletive] moment. And I just was focused on, oh, my God, I'm playing in front of 15,000 people.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BUILDING A MYSTERY")

MCLACHLAN: (Singing) You come out at night. That's when the energy comes.

WEINER: In the lead-up to that night, McLachlan battled a concert industry that told her the same audience she was looking at did not exist.

MCLACHLAN: They were like, well, you can't put two women on the same bill. What do you think you're doing? This was in the same climate that told us at radio stations, you can't play two women back-to-back on the radio. We'd love to add this song, but we can't add you this week because we added Tori Amos or because we added Tracy Chapman or because we added Sinead O'Connor.

WEINER: Born out of this frustration, McLachlan spent a year convincing promoters, gathering funds and inviting fellow musicians to join the bill who would, over the years, include Tracy Chapman and Sinead O'Connor. Even in its first year, Lilith Fair's lineup was a who's who of female alternative rock artists.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BEHIND THE MUSIC")

JIM FORBES: Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Fiona Apple, Joan Osborne, the Indigo Girls - they all signed on to the tour that would become the hottest ticket of the summer of '97.

WEINER: That's from VH1's "Behind The Music."

Jessica Hopper, who wrote an oral history of Lilith Fair, says building a music festival from the ground up meant this eclectic group of women musicians could reach a wider fan base.

JESSICA HOPPER: What that meant for people who were going is that they could really be exposed to these women, whether they were legends, like Emmylou Harris or Bonnie Raitt, or artists that they were probably already hearing on the radio, like Natalie Merchant...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CARNIVAL")

NATALIE MERCHANT: (Singing) Have I been wrong? Have I been wise to shut my eyes and play along?

HOPPER: ...Or a young Christina Aguilera or Tegan and Sara, artists that really started their careers on the sort of baby stages of Lilith.

WEINER: Nearly every Lilith show that first summer sold out. It was a hit with fans. But it quickly became fodder for critics and the target of misogynistic jokes that wormed their way into pop culture, like on "Saturday Night Live," which, just a few months after the very first Lilith Fair concert, introduced a humorless feminist character, a parody of a Lilith performer.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE")

ANA GASTEYER: (As Cinder Calhoun) I really consider myself more of a funny wordsmith folkist (ph) who came out of the singer-songwriter tradition.

WEINER: On top of that, Lilith Fair was panned as being white women's mommy music. But it was a proven moneymaker, playing to audiences larger than Lollapalooza and raking in 16 million in its first summer.

(SOUNDBITE OF MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO SONG, "SOUL RECORD")

WEINER: By the very next year, 1998, Lilith was able to harness that power, expanding the tour to 57 dates with over 100 artists across three stages. Many of them reflected organizers' efforts to remedy a lineup that was mostly white in year one.

MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO: My name is Meshell Ndegeocello. I am a bassist and a composer.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOUL RECORD")

NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) Digging on me, digging on you.

WEINER: The experience of playing Lilith, Ndegeocello remembers, was more supportive and affirming than other tours.

NDEGEOCELLO: It was just beautiful to be around mothers, you know? There were - a few artists brought their children. It was amazing to be around healthy food.

WEINER: 1998 was also the year Erykah Badu and Queen Latifah were added to the lineup. Missy Elliott had her first-ever live performance anywhere at Lilith Fair, wearing what looked like a giant vinyl trash bag and singing a song that became an instant classic.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE RAIN (SUPA DUPA FLY)")

MISSY ELLIOTT: (Singing) Me, I'm supa fly, supa dupa (ph) fly. I can't stand the rain.

WEINER: Over its three short but joyous summers, Lilith Fair had its triumphs, including when Prince showed up for a duet with Sheryl Crow.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SHERYL CROW AND PRINCE: (Singing) Every day is a winding road. I get a little bit closer.

WEINER: Author Jessica Hopper on Lilith Fair at its peak.

HOPPER: It launched Dido into megastardom. It helped put Jewel on the cover of Time magazine. And it was also - women who were in their 60s and 70s and really seen as legacy acts were put into conversation.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEARTBREAKER")

PAT BENATAR: (Singing) You're a heartbreaker, dream maker.

HOPPER: Pat Benatar was brought back into the fold. And so really what you see here is something that defies every industry convention and became the biggest concert tour of the '90s, aside from Garth Brooks. Period. End of story.

WEINER: And it was the end of the story, sort of. After an admittedly exhausting three years, Lilith Fair stopped touring. McLachlan's priorities had shifted. Recently married, her own career was skyrocketing. Still, in 2010, she tried to revive the festival with the hope of recreating the magic of the '90s tour. But a lot had changed in 10 years, like the entire music industry, for one. The digital age meant you did not need to go to live shows to discover new artists. Plus, the tour was plagued by financial mismanagement, causing performers to drop out at the last minute. Here's McLachlan talking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MCLACHLAN: I don't think we did enough due diligence in discovering how our audience had changed and how to reflect that in a new show. We kind of threw out the same model.

WEINER: Looking back, did Lilith achieve what it set out to accomplish? NPR Music's Ann Powers says yes. She says it upended longstanding presumptions that audiences would not connect with an all-female music festival. Not just that, Lilith opened new creative possibilities for the women who took to its stages.

ANN POWERS, BYLINE: This is a snapshot of a huge array of what women were doing in music in this era when there was a lot of space and demand for women of all kinds to be taking risks in music. And Lilith Fair is almost like, here's your compilation of every wild idea that women had in music in the '90s. And I think so much of that stuff is just, like, forgotten.

WEINER: Forgotten because the energy and passion of those shows was so long ago or forgotten because the triumph of women's achievements often fades too quickly. Either way, it was a cultural phenomenon that has not been repeated - a celebration of women's artistry that coalesced at just the right time.

Lisa Weiner, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHERE HAVE ALL THE COWBOYS GONE?")

PAULA COLE: (Singing) Where is my John Wayne?

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