Back when Sarah McLachlan launched the Lilith Fair in 1997, the festival landscape was, well, very dude-centric. From the often male-heavy grandaddy of American touring festivals, Lollapalooza, to the jammy H.O.R.D.E. outing, the hip-hop-focused Smokin’ Grooves and testosterone-charged OzzFest, there were often few slots available for female-fronted acts.
McLachlan flipped that script by launching Lilith, whose first iteration featured a rotating roster of incredible acts including Fiona Apple, The Cardigans, Tracy Chapman, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris, Jewel, Dido, Pat Benatar, Beth Orton and many more on three stages.
“This was the first time you’d see anything like it,” Crow can be heard in voiceover at the top of the two-and-a-half minute trailer for Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – The Untold Story, the documentary that will drop on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on Sept. 21. Featuring archival footage and new interviews, the film will chronicle the birth and success of the joyful gathering that made history thanks to an all-female-focused lineup on the initial 35-date outing that raked in $16 million, making it 1997’s top-grossing U.S. festival tour.
“Finding out that all my favorite artists had played at this event I was in disbelief that I’d never heard of it before,” says Olivia Rodrigo, who was born six years after the first Lilith outing and is among the new generation of artists who pay homage to their festival foremothers in the trailer. “Women singer-songwriters of the ’90s, I’m constantly look to them for inspiration,” Rodrigo adds over footage of her jamming with Crow. “They’re my northern stars.”
McLachlan recalls the pushback she got from promoters at the time, who told her “‘you can’t put two women on the same bill, people won’t come,’” a macho stance that she gleefully proved wrong over the course of that summer. “That’s complete bulls–t, and it put a huge fire under my butt to prove them wrong,” she says in the trailer that also details the anger from some religious leaders over the biblically-inspired name and bomb threats that attempted to derail the juggernaut.
Crow adds, “There wasn’t a lot of support for women. We weren’t able to do what it was we knew we could do.” Getting emotional at the memory of it all, former 10,000 Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant says through happy tears, “I’ve waited my whole life for this… is this the camera I look into when I cry?”
Lilith returned in 1998 for another successful run, with McLachlan performing alongside Raitt, Cowboy Junkies, Des’ree, Erykah Badu, Joan Osborne, Lisa Loeb, Liz Phair, Sinead O’Connor, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Neneh Cherry, Lucinda Williams and many more. After a 1999 outing Lilith called it a day until a star-crossed 2010 revival featuring Brandi Carlile, Cat Power, Heart, Janella Monae, Mary J. Blige, Tegan and Sara and others that fizzled out after a dozen or so dates due to poor ticket sales, forcing the cancellation of 13 shows.
The film directed by Ally Pankiw and inspired by a 2019 Vanity Fair oral history of the festival will contain interviews with a number of the acts who performed on Lilith in its heyday, including Raitt, Badu, Cole, Jewel, Phair, Mya, Indigo Girls, Harris and more.
