Mary J Blige and Sarah McLachlan (INFevents.com)
Natalie Merchant and Sarah Mclachlan (New York Post)
This weekend’s Lilith Fair faced an uphill battle even before ticket sales tanked, talent dropped out and Carly Simon broke her foot.
In a decision that seemed to synch up nicely with ’90s nostalgia, Sarah McLachlan picked 2010 to relaunch the all-female summer concert tour that, 13 years ago, symbolized a big step forward for the power of women in music. But while the era that spawned Lilith is very much in vogue, a primary aspect of the tour still really isn’t: its sweetness.
Many of the notable female rock bands of that decade embraced the tough riot grrrl ethos — Courtney Love’s band Hole, for example, which has been on a tour of its own this summer — but the lineups of Lilith Fairs 1997-1999 were all about folk, feelings and vulnerability. (And mainstream, lily-white vulnerability, at that.)
But crunchy, sincere folk rock isn’t really the thing these days, and the mission of the original tour feels slightly stale. With artists like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift more than holding their own in ticket and record sales, the motivation for an all-woman tour has changed. “Maybe with Lilith, there’s not so much of a need [now]. It’s more of a want,” McLachlan admitted to the LA Times.
The “Sweet Surrender” singer and Lilith co-founder is still headlining all remaining shows (10 have been canceled due to poor ticket sales). But most of the Lilith headlines this month have been about who’s no longer on the bill: Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna, La Roux, the Go-Go’s and Norah Jones all dropped out, taking with them the feisty edge that might have helped Lilith elude the concert plague that seems to have infected everyone but Gaga.
Saturday’s lineup, at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ, “is one of the weakest,” says WNYC “Soundcheck” commentator Maura Johnston, who’s on the fence about whether to check it out. “You’d think they would try to go as all-out as possible for New York. In other cities, the lineup was more diverse.”
Lilith has ended up facing a host of problems, some self-made, some not. The tour organizers made the grave error of thinking the show would thrive on its name alone, rather than those of the actual performers. When the tour kicked off in Portland, it did so with a stronger bill: Erykah Badu and Sheryl Crow headlined alongside McLachlan. “They should have had one lineup and then marketed the crap out of it,” Johnston suggests. But other big names began bowing out once the number of dates was downscaled.
It also happens to be one of the worst summers ever for tours: Simon and Garfunkel and U2 both nixed theirs, and many other acts, including Christina Aguilera, have been forced to cancel dates due to weak sales.
At the prices Lilith is asking — up to $750 for VIP seats, though lawn seats have gone for as little as $25 — people aren’t going to show up for just anyone. But even McLachlan’s hardcore fans, presumably eager to hear her perform songs from her new album “Laws of Illusion,” have failed to buoy sales.
The Lilith Web site seems troubled as well. When The Post searched for tickets, we were told, “Service Unavailable.”
Saturday’s show will feature mostly low-key singer-songwriters, such as Beth Orton, Cat Power and Jill Hennessey. Then there are the stalwarts, like McLachlan and the Indigo Girls. Until last week, Carly Simon had been on the bill, too, but she pulled out after her injury. In all, the show promises to be a somewhat understated affair.
The poor showing of Lilith’s ticket sales is an anomaly at a time when women of the ’90s are beginning to pay attention to — and romanticize — the era that made them who they are. “People don’t really know anything about women who grew up in the ’90s,” says Kara Jesella, co-creator of 90sWoman, the first blog devoted to the subject. “There’s this glut of ’60s nostalgia, and we totally had a thing, too, that nobody talks about. It’s kind of this overlooked generation.”
Much like the ’60s, it was an era when the countercultural became the mainstream. Doc Martens boots weren’t just for scary thugs, they were worn by 13-year-old girls. And radio-friendly pop took a back seat to the harder-edged rock being played on college radio stations by all-girl punk bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney.
And perhaps that’s where Lilith is losing this demographic. McLachlan may have been a hit machine back then, but brazen she was not.
“I think about all the woman in the ’90s that were so important to me, like Liz Phair and Courtney Love,” says Marisa Meltzer, author of “Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music.” “There was this honesty and anger and in-your-faceness about the reality of being a girl in this culture — it was kind of acceptable.”
If it wanted to attract a bigger throng of ’90s-minded women, Lilith might have been better off looking for performers who brought a little of that old-time righteous anger to the stage — MIA, perhaps. Or even smaller-scale, like Pretty Reckless, the ’90s-esque band fronted by a raccoon-eyed Taylor Momsen.
At the very least, they should have tried harder to hang onto Clarkson, whose concerts were recently referred to by LA Times music writer Ann Powers as “the most feminist thing going right now in pop music.”
But one upside of poor ticket sales and low audience interest, adds Johnston, is the possibility of getting in for cheap. “LiveNation has been aggressively discounting tickets at the last minute,” she says. “They’ve been doing these $10 lawn seats. So maybe I’ll go, if I’m not doing anything that day.”