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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.

Lilith Fair Aug. 7 1999 PNC Bank Arts Center, Holmdel, N.J.

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.

Next page | Beware the free-association booth; Sheryl Crow is better live than you'd expect