There really is
something relaxed and refreshing about the atmosphere that surrounds the
Lilith Fair. Imagine pulling into a cram-packed rock-festival parking
lot where there's no bad heavy metal blasting, no hasty pre-show binge
drinkers, nobody hacky-sacking at you or winging frisbees at your
head. Imagine a pre-concert tableau with no pit bulls running around
loose, or scalpers scalping, or big, oofy guys with their shirts off,
oofing. But there was something unsettling about the calm as well. You'd
think a concert free of male meatheads and everything they represent
would make young women even more party-happy and careless, and have them
bonking each other with frisbees in a sisters-
The pre-concert crowd at south-central New Jersey's PNC Bank Arts Center just assembled group by little group into an orderly queue, and filed into the school buses that would take them to the festival gates. The buses were quiet, save for a restrained murmur of conversation. The lines at the gates were calm and orderly, with no exuberance or loud talking. It was a vibe -- and the air was so infernally limpid with it by the time the line snaked up to the entrance that I caught myself hoping it would all get horribly ruined somehow. Maybe someone would burp, or make a rude face. Maybe somebody would dash naked out of the bushes -- or maybe there'd be a body-airbrushing tent inside, except this time with boys getting free underpants sprayed on while a crowd of girls snucked and hawed and snapped photos. Maybe Sarah McLachlan's band would lead off the set with "I Put a Spell On You," with Sarah popping out of a coffin with a sulfurous bang, like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and waving a mojo stick at the crowd.
No luck on that account. But as school field-trippy as the Lilith ambiance might've been, it was in one respect the greatest thing I'd ever seen at a mainstream rock concert in my whole life. The Arts Center is a 17,000-capacity shed off the Parkway. Besides the main stage, where the headliners played, there was a fairly large second setup out on the lawn, a smaller third stage, a vestigial fourth one with nothing much happening on it and the canonical festival spread of booths and concessions forming a loop around the perimeter. And for this event, the whole spread was full of real people.
It's easy to lose touch with the fact, but the crowds at public youth-culture events can often give you a grossly unrepresentative sampling of what kids are really like. They tend to be salted with the more popular, attractive, well-subsidized demographic, which shifts the bell curves for all three categories several good clicks to the right. The real upper crust around here, say the top 5 percent from each category, traditionally filters off to help stock the Manhattan nightclubs -- but the majority just goes invisible, staying home to watch concerts on MTV simulcast, or simply to stew in suburban isolation or plot revenge.
But here you had a stunningly normal array of body types and facial features, with a fair Jersey-suburban distribution of height, weight, blondness, coolness-ratings. Most of the women were wearing even less than you usually see at one of these gigs, but it took an effort to notice. Shorts and a tank top were just clothes here: The prettier girls weren't all trying to draw attention to themselves, and the less pretty ones didn't seem overly conscious of their bodies. The cute guys weren't all swaggering around looking at women's boobs, and the less cute ones weren't setting themselves meekly away from the action. There were dykes in profusion, and kids running around. This was cool.
Less cool, however, was second-stage act Samsara, the kind of pro-grade alternative rock band that gets featured in Volkswagen commercials. It was all guys, including an ex-Lisa Loeb sideman, with a girl on vocals who didn't seem to be really playing her guitar. In between not really playing, she unholstered a prepared comment: "The Lilith Fair is a metaphor for life. [Pause for effect.] The girls run the show!" Well, the girls must know what they're doing, since they gave Samsara only a single show on the tour. But if Lilith really were a metaphor for life, the tenor would have to be something like "Women still let men play most of the instruments for them." The female-fronted boy band lineup, it turned out, would dominate the festival all damn day, with nary a female drummer, bassist or DJ to be found anywhere until late in the evening, when Sheryl Crow strapped on a Fender Jazz Bass for a couple of songs. Pop diva Mya had a female lead guitarist -- but otherwise it was frontwomen, dancers and backup singers all the way through. What a rip! It's been established at this point that it's physically and medically possible for women to play the drums, but there must still be some sort of sexist law prohibiting them from playing for large crowds. The courts should repeal that law; it's unseemly.
The next offering on the second stage was Melky Sedeck, a brother-and-sister hip-hop soul act (and siblings to the Fugees' Wyclef Jean) with a DJ at the rear. Melky has a voice that could put entire playlists of soul divas out of work, and she has big-time stage presence -- but if Lauryn Hill did "Killing Me Softly" with Spartan restraint, it took a special sort of chutzpah for Melky to follow the example with "To Sir With Love" (which is about as good as material ever gets), pushing and tugging and overexpressing until it just sounded like it might've been a great song once.
Unlike any of Nina Gordon's. It's terrible to have to slag the second- and third-stagers one after the next like this, but I didn't program the lineup. I would've had the Donnas or the Raincoats up there or something, but Nina Gordon, ex-Veruca Salt, sucks even worse than Jewel. Two acoustic guitars, an expressionless alto and sappy, hookless songs with lyrics like "I don't know what to do/And it's breakin' my heart in two." "That's the way it goes/From my head to my toes." "What we've found is such a precious thing/And that's what I'm trying to sing." "I still believe in a thing called forever ... " Uck! Bleagh! Heave! She wound up the performance by singsonging, "I'm Nee-na! Remember who I am!" Makes you wonder how Louise Post is doing.
The consumer merchandise segment of the festival comprised hippie clothes and witchy jewelry, a fully functioning Tower Records outlet, more hippie stuff, bumper stickers and light-switch plates (!?), free fake "girls rule" tattoos and displays from the Chrysler Corp. and Luna Bars ("The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women"). I ate one, and I suddenly wanted to buy some witchy jewelry and talk about my feelings in the free-association booth. "I just don't feel affirmed as a person," I said. "I'm unique, special ... But it's like Lilith sees me as a target audience -- like it's playing off my desire to see myself as part of a greater whole, except the greater whole is just a lot of people congratulating ourselves on being born female, which I actually had nothing to do with when you get right down to it. Plus, it all just boils down to watching professional musicians caper around onstage, and buying things. Not that I don't really like this pill necklace, but ..." And then it wore off, and who was playing on the main stage but Suzanne Vega! Cripes -- look at the time! Stupid feelings.
It's amazing how wide-angled and Technicolor Vega's two-piece lineup seemed after Nina Gordon's. She played simple acoustic guitar with only a bassist on the side, but the arrangements seemed spacious rather than sparse -- with each instrument filling its own tonal niche, but always conscious of what the other was doing. They were loose, but always in tandem. Vega's voice is thin on record, but smoky and nuanced up close, and expressive in the way that human voices are when they're really expressing something, instead of just doing little singerly flourishes for effect's sake. "Luka" was the big crowd-pleaser, but she managed to float "Tom's Diner" as an a cappella singalong, which was maybe a bit grade-school, but cool nonetheless.
Splashdown: second stage, trained musicians doing a Gen-X costume act. Wonderful technique, weird clothes (chrome lami on one; moon boots, bondage skirt and kneepads on another; big pants on a third, etc.) -- essentially a jumbled mess of styles. Imagine something trip-hoppy with Spanish guitar and a Pavement riff in the middle, and Fiona Apple singing jazz stylings over the top. Sample lyric: "I need a sugar high/Oh muh-muh-my!" You can see how record execs would go crazy for it, but take the gimmicks away and there doesn't seem to be any personality underneath. Female singer; all-guy band; smells like Berklee grads. No offense, but why is this a Lilith act?
Segue to Sandra Bernhard on the main stage, complaining about all the mild, girly women on the program, "Will somebody please give me a sweaty rock 'n' roll bitch?!"
Not yet -- wee, fey Mya is on. Mega-cool tap-dance routine at the end. Seems she studied with Gregory Hines. Otherwise it's pretty much a Disney soundtrack, except for the groundbreaking addition of a female! lead! guitarist! Mya was a bit chunky too, and wearing comfortable pants. Woowoo! Mya is officially punk-rock for breaking the Lilith barrier.
And then Chrissie Hynde ... But what's to say? Chrissie is punk rock incarnate, and she's approaching the most graceful 50 in the rock biz -- looking about as old as she is, but never really aging, and packing the same killer voice she's always had. The Pretenders appear to be in the doghouse with the Lilith staff, which seems just about right somehow. "Sarah likes us so much, she's invited us back next year," Chrissie quipped -- when Lilith is, of course, folding up for good after this season's run. "You all had better be having a good time," she asided, "or else I'm going to be in big trouble ..." They also threw some musical barbs into the ring, beginning with "Popstar" ("They don't make 'em like they used to"), and following up with "Message of Love," the firmest thesis of gender politics that anyone would whip out during the entire festival. Troublemakers. The crowd was going a restrained sort of nuts throughout the set, although the sound was a bit skronky and the band didn't rock as hard as they might have. And some stray oofy guy in the orchestra section kept yelling, "Joey!!!" as though Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde had to come marching out and explain that she was in a different band entirely. Still, Pretenders is Pretenders, and it's good, good, good -- though not much like Brigitte Bardot.
A characteristic Chrissie Hynde moment came during the later power ballad "I'll Stand By You," when a roadie came out during the middle of the song to hand her a guitar. In the space between the verse and chorus, her attention came off the crowd for a moment and she gave him a nod and thank you as the instrument changed hands. It was nothing, but it also wasn't: With all the carousing and kicking in windows of police cars and causing of public scenes and beating up of Carly Simon that the woman's done, it's obvious that she doesn't have to be reflexively cordial to Sarah McLachlan's road crew in order to keep up her reputation. But nobody else on the main stage even glanced at the roadies when instruments were changing hands. Why bother? Well, why not bother? If you look hard enough, it's possible to see everything essentially good or bad about human nature springing from that one simple dichotomy. Common decency is punk rock to the extreme.
And Sheryl Crow is much better live than you'd ever suspect just from hearing her on record. Also much smaller. The celebrity height index, barring athletes, runs from Jean-Paul Sartre (4-foot-10) to John Kenneth Galbraith (6-foot-8), and one has to wonder ... No, it's immaterial. If this weren't Salon, which scours out double entendres from its pages like a prosodic autoclave, one would say something about how every woman in the audience already knew that size doesn't matter, and that it's the rhythm that counts.
Well, she's damn little, anyway, and the rhythm does count: "Anything But Down" was understated but infernally tight, and "Everyday Is a Winding Road" had an altered, more percussive arrangement with a mile-wide sound. The P.A. was in better, louder trim than for the Pretenders' set -- and Crow's keyboard and string players helped fatten things up -- but much of the set's roaring bigness was pure tone and musicianship. She sounds like a lessoned player, but not an overstudied one, and she has a good balance of feel and precision on both guitar and bass. She also has a corky-haired guitar player with perfect country chops, and another guy with more of a hard-rock feel, and the three of them nudge one another's playing around like they're wired up by the brains. Crow isn't a solo act; she's in the band -- and she gives off the same odd real-person vibe onstage as Hynde does. Their body language is even similar: shoulders, not hips. It's an uncommon thing. Weird to see two people like that on the same bill. Pinnacle of the set: a "Sweet Child o' Mine" that kicked Axl Rose's skinny white butt all the way around the arena.
And then, as the last burst of feedback faded from Sheryl Crow's back line, everyone went home. It was late, and nobody really wanted to see Sarah McLachlan anyway. "She's boring," one concert-goer remarked. Another complained, "She never even comes out in the coffin anymore." Actually -- and I say this as an early fan -- with the whole crowd of 17,000 souls leaping to their feet as Sarah treaded out onstage, and pretty much staying there wailing and carrying on as the set unfolded, it wasn't all that much to listen to. She started with "Possession," and it was grand, and big, and epic, but a bit sterile and elliptical, and the melody didn't seem to want to go anywhere. She tended to inflect each song the same way, with a classy lilt and a bit of oceanic sadness -- and it wasn't until "Building a Mystery" that melodic hooks and arrangements began to overtake the pearly performances. "Sweet Surrender" followed, and had some power and emotional range to it, but glossing over the high spots, every song was a prom song -- a lighter-flicker -- that sounded a little too much like nothing specific. It's the Natalie Merchant syndrome: After a while, it all ... starts to ... zzzzz.
Meanwhile, the crowd was uprooting the arena to carry it up and down the Parkway in triumph. Sarah would blink, and a thousand people would expire from sheer, terrible awe. If this is all it takes to catapult a person into God-popular superheroism -- putting a festival together for young women to go to -- then somebody please start planning the Medea Fair, with all snarly, bad-attitude performers, and sweaty rock chicks who are woman enough to play in the rhythm section. Put Tribe 8 on the second stage, Joan Jett on the first one, slap a huge Hothead Paisan banner over the midway and have a grand, roistering party in the parking lot, with people whipping frisbees all over the place. And if anyone goes into the speak-out booth to free-associate, a boxing glove will come accordioning out and bop them right in the nose -- and only real, needle-type "girls rule" tattoos, thanks. Right next to the free underpants-painting booth -- unisex, on demand.
