Lilith Fair was an all-female touring festival founded by Sarah McLachlan with Dan Fraser and Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group and the New York talent agent Marty Diamond. It ran three summers — 1997, 1998 and 1999 — and was revived, badly, for one more in 2010. The name comes from the medieval Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who refused to be subservient to him.
It is also the closest thing Cigarette Mom Rock has to an origin story. 16 artists in this canon played it. Several of the decade’s hardest-edged women turned it down, which is a large part of why critics said the bill sounded the way it did.
Why Sarah McLachlan Started It
Radio programmers and concert promoters in the mid-90s would not put two women back to back. McLachlan has told the story many times; this is the sharpest version:
“That was a time of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam dominating the radio waves, and you wouldn’t think twice about hearing two of those bands in a row. But if they added Tori Amos that week, they’d say, ‘We can’t add you too, but you’re in the running.’ That seemed like such a ridiculous attitude. So, because women were being clumped together like that we created a festival with all women clumped together. It was a grand f—k you!”
Sarah McLachlan
Co-founder Dan Fraser put the structural version of it plainly: “A lot of promoters really didn’t like the idea of two female artists playing together, and I’d tell Sarah that, and she’d say, ‘Why?’ In the business then, it was 90 percent run on the live side by men, and radio was 90 percent run by men.” Before the first full tour, McLachlan and Paula Cole proved the point by booking a two-woman tour themselves.
The first full tour opened on July 5, 1997 at The Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Washington: 35 cities, more than 60 artists. A single show billed as Lilith Fair had already happened in Vancouver on September 14, 1996, with McLachlan, Cole, Lisa Loeb and Michelle McAdorey.
Who Played: The Cigarette Mom Rock Canon
16 artists on this site played Lilith Fair. The years below were checked against the festival’s own archived lineup pages and per-artist setlist records rather than against the recycled lineup lists that circulate online, several of which are wrong.
Indigo Girls
1997, 1998, 1999, 2010Lisa Loeb
1996, 1997, 1998, 1999Sarah McLachlan
1997, 1998, 1999, 2010Sheryl Crow
1997, 1998, 1999, 2010Paula Cole
1996, 1997, 1998Liz Phair
1998, 1999Meredith Brooks
1997, 1998Sixpence None the Richer
1998, 1999Tracy Bonham
1997, 1998Fiona Apple
1997Jewel
1997Natalie Merchant
1998Nelly Furtado
1999Sinead O'Connor
1998The Chicks
1999Tracy Chapman
1997McLachlan played every date of every year. Sheryl Crow and the Indigo Girls came closest to matching her, appearing in all three original summers and again in 2010.
Who Else Played
More than 300 performers appeared across the three years, on a main stage, a second stage and a Village Stage. A selection of the names worth knowing:
The only artist besides McLachlan to play every 1997 date
"This is one of a kind and long overdue"
"Lilith Fair expanded my audience greatly"
Her first-ever touring dates
Dropped out of the 2010 revival
Often misdated to 1997
Pre-fame, on the Village Stage by the bathrooms
Billed in 1999 as "Sarah & Teagan"
One correction worth making, because the error is everywhere: Hole did not play Lilith Fair. Courtney Love’s band was booked for two dates in August 1999 and pulled out beforehand. The festival’s own site marked the dates as not playing, and lineup lists that include Hole are reproducing a misreading of that page.
Who Turned It Down
This is the part that usually gets left out, and it matters, because the most common criticism of Lilith Fair — that it was all acoustic guitars and no edge — is partly explained by who said no. McLachlan said as much at the opening press conference in 1997: she had invited harder-edged acts and they had declined.
Tori Amos
Passed in both 1997 and 1998. "I would have a good bottle of wine with Sarah any night of the week. But my shows are theater, and I’ve worked a long time to get them to this point." And: "This isn’t just about eating some chicken and hearing a few of your favorite female singers. You walk into my show, you walk into a world — it’s a film every night. I can’t impose that on Lilith and vice versa."
Garbage
Invited and turned it down. Despite being listed as Lilith alumni on a great many websites, Garbage never played the festival in any year.
PJ Harvey
Invited and turned it down.
Sleater-Kinney
Invited and turned it down.
Patti Smith
Played the September 1996 Vancouver show, then declined the tour. "I’m sure they did a lot of positive things for women performers who find it important to be known as a woman performer. For me, I mean, I’m an artist. I feel like I don’t want to be genderized as an artist."
Joni Mitchell
Declined, though her song was used for the group encores.
What It Grossed
1997 — $16.4 million
37 stops, 69 acts. The top-grossing festival tour of 1997 and the 16th highest-grossing concert tour of any kind that year, on Pollstar’s numbers. Billboard Boxscore, which counts only the shows promoters reported to it, logged $13.1 million and 489,000 tickets across 29 of them.
1998 — $28.3 million
57 dates, 41 cities, more than 100 acts. The 12th highest-grossing tour of the year, nearly double the previous summer. Boxscore logged $21.2 million and 646,000 tickets across 41 reported shows.
1999 — $18.6 million
40 stops and more than 120 performers, the largest of the three years. This is a Boxscore figure — 482,000 tickets over more than 34 reported shows — and no Pollstar number for 1999 is public, so it cannot be compared directly with the two years above. Lilith Fair finished among the top 20 tours of the year in all three years.
Why you will see different numbers
Pollstar and Billboard Boxscore are separate datasets, and Boxscore only counts shows a promoter chose to report — 29 of roughly 38 dates in 1997, 41 of about 56 in 1998 — so its grosses and ticket counts both run low. Summing across the two bases produces the three-year totals of “$52 million” and “$60 million” that circulate online. Neither is wrong exactly; they are answers to different questions, and no source states the first one at all.
Charity: about $2 million documented
One dollar from every ticket went to a local non-profit in each market, handed over at a press conference before the show — typically a cheque of $15,000 to $20,000. The festival published its per-show ledgers, and they are specific: $806,066.49 in 1998 across 53 shows, roughly $536,000 in 1999 across 39, and over $700,000 in 1997. That is about $2 million for the ticket-dollar program over three years.
You will more often read that Lilith Fair raised $10 million for charity, or $7 million. Both come from the organizers, neither is itemised anywhere, and Terry McBride’s version of the $10 million figure explicitly folds in sponsorship money rather than ticket donations. The ledgers are the only numbers here anyone can check, so they are the ones given above.
Who the money went to
Overwhelmingly domestic-violence shelters and rape-crisis centres, named per show in the ledgers — the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver, House of Ruth in Washington, Red Door and Ernestine’s in Toronto, the Harriet Tubman Center in Minneapolis, Casa de las Madres and the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, WIN House in Edmonton. National beneficiaries included the Breast Cancer Fund, RAINN, LIFEbeat, the National Organization for Women, Global Exchange, Laubach Literacy and Planned Parenthood, which had booths on site.
Attendance
Organizers put total attendance across 1997–99 at more than 1.5 million. Their own donation ledgers quietly imply a higher number: at exactly $1 per ticket, roughly $2 million donated means roughly 2 million paid admissions. Treat the 1.5 million as the organizers’ figure rather than a count.
The Planned Parenthood booths drew anti-abortion protests, a Houston venue tried to exclude the organisation, and the Atlanta date received a bomb threat. McLachlan, on refusing a booth to Feminists for Life: “This is my festival, so I can do what I want.” On the protests: “I’d never seen that kind of self-righteous rage and anger aimed at anything that I was part of.”
The Criticism Was Immediate
Lilith Fair got called “Lily-White Fair,” “Chickapalooza,” the “white chicks folk fest” and “mom music.” The last of those is the label this site exists to reclaim. The others landed on a real target: on the 1997 main stage, Tracy Chapman was the only Black artist.
The sharpest contemporaneous review came from Evelyn McDonnell in SPIN in 1997, and it was not about diversity of race alone but about what the bill implied women’s music was:
“By focusing on a narrow range of musical styles — every artist on the Gorge’s main stage came from an acoustic, folk, singer/songwriter background — Lilith sends out essentialist messages about sexual identity. If Lollapalooza has devolved into a testosterock fest, Lilith responds with estrogen clichés. Lilith’s artists, like their earth mother, tend to be spiritual, nurturing, in touch with their emotions, inwardly directed, and passive. Lollapalooza’s are political, aggressive, tough, externally oriented, and active. Lilith: kitchen; Lollapalooza: garage.”
Evelyn McDonnell, SPIN, 1997
McLachlan’s answer, in 1998: “We asked all sorts of people from all different walks of music and this is who we got this year, who said yes. I think music crosses barriers and boundaries. If it’s good, it’s good. We’re after good music.” Marty Diamond was more concessive: “There was commentary about the festival being too white. It certainly started that way, and our intention wasn’t to be that way. We approached several other artists that passed.”
The 1998 bill was visibly broader — Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, Me’shell Ndegeocello — and Badu’s own verdict on it was positive: “Lilith Fair expanded my audience greatly.” Missy Elliott’s first touring dates in her life were on Lilith.
Why It Ended, Twice
The original run stopped on purpose. “We were the highest-grossing tour of that summer, but I was the loudest proponent of putting the brakes on,” McLachlan said of the decision after 1999. “Everyone else would have loved a fourth or fifth summer, but I saw the fatigue on all of us. It was time to quit on top.” She has also noted the market turned underneath them: “Music shifted then, and boy bands were becoming huge as the pendulum swung back toward male artists.”
The 2010 revival was the failure. Of 36 planned dates, 13 were cancelled, and headliners including Carly Simon, Kelly Clarkson, the Go-Go’s and Queen Latifah withdrew amid concerns about being paid. Terry McBride blamed the economy: “This is not a Lilith phenomenon. This is a summer-recession-finally-being-felt phenomenon.” McLachlan has since called it “a colossal failure, because the intentions were not as pure.”
In March 2011 she ended it for good: “It’s done. And that’s okay. It’s actually a really good thing. Bringing the same thing back last year really didn’t make any sense, in retrospect, without due diligence being done on how women have changed. Because in 12 years, women have changed a lot — which I blame myself for. It lived in a time and place and it probably should have stayed there.”
The Legacy, and Where It Sits Here
Lilith Fair is the infrastructure that let Cigarette Mom Rock exist as something you could go and see rather than just buy. It gave a generation of women a tour to play, Missy Elliott her first dates, Christina Aguilera a stage next to the bathrooms, and your mother a parking lot story she still tells. It also demonstrated, with Pollstar numbers attached, that a female-led bill could out-gross every other festival in America — which was the entire argument.
Keep reading: the 90s female rock guide, the generation that came before, the 2000s second wave, or which of them actually smoked.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Lilith Fair?
Lilith Fair was an all-female touring music festival founded by Sarah McLachlan with Dan Fraser and Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group and talent agent Marty Diamond. It ran for three summers — 1997, 1998 and 1999 — after a one-off Vancouver show billed as Lilith Fair in September 1996, and was revived for one summer in 2010. The name comes from the medieval Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who refused to be subservient to him.
Why did Sarah McLachlan start Lilith Fair?
Because radio programmers and concert promoters would not put two women back to back. McLachlan’s account: "That was a time of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam dominating the radio waves, and you wouldn’t think twice about hearing two of those bands in a row. But if they added Tori Amos that week, they’d say, ‘We can’t add you too, but you’re in the running.’ That seemed like such a ridiculous attitude. So, because women were being clumped together like that we created a festival with all women clumped together. It was a grand f—k you!"
Who played Lilith Fair?
Sarah McLachlan played every date of every year. Sheryl Crow, the Indigo Girls, Suzanne Vega, Lisa Loeb, Paula Cole, Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple, Natalie Merchant, Liz Phair, Meredith Brooks, Tracy Bonham, Sinéad O’Connor, Sixpence None the Richer, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah and The Pretenders all appeared across the three years, alongside more than 300 other performers. The Chicks and Nelly Furtado played 1999 only, and Christina Aguilera played the 1999 Village Stage before she was famous.
Did Tori Amos play Lilith Fair?
No. Tori Amos was invited and declined in both 1997 and 1998, telling the press that her own shows were theatrical productions she could not impose on a festival bill. She is frequently and wrongly listed as a Lilith Fair alum. Garbage, PJ Harvey and Sleater-Kinney were also invited and turned it down, and Hole was booked for two 1999 dates but pulled out before playing.
Was Lilith Fair successful?
Commercially, yes. Lilith Fair grossed $16.4 million in 1997, making it the top-grossing festival tour of that year and the 16th highest-grossing concert tour overall, then grossed $28.3 million in 1998 to finish as the 12th highest-grossing tour of the year. Organizers put total attendance across the three years at more than 1.5 million. On charity, the festival’s own published per-show ledgers total about $2 million for its $1-per-ticket program — $806,066.49 in 1998, roughly $536,000 in 1999 and over $700,000 in 1997. The widely repeated “$10 million for charity” is an organizer figure that is not itemised and that includes sponsorship money.
Why did Lilith Fair end?
The original run was stopped deliberately after three years. "We were the highest-grossing tour of that summer, but I was the loudest proponent of putting the brakes on," McLachlan said. "Everyone else would have loved a fourth or fifth summer, but I saw the fatigue on all of us. It was time to quit on top." A 2010 revival went badly — 13 of 36 dates were cancelled and several headliners withdrew — and McLachlan formally ended the festival in March 2011: "It’s done. It lived in a time and place and it probably should have stayed there."