Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here on today's show, Singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan has released her first album of new music in 11 years. She'll join us in studio for for a listening party. Big Picture host Sean Fennessey has curated a collection of Robert Altman films for The Criterion Channel to mark the director's 100th birthday. He'll join us to discuss. We'll continue our full bio conversation about James Baldwin. You know him as a titan of American literature. Today, we'll learn about his role as a civil rights activist. That's the plan. Let's get this started with the Lilith Fair.

[music]

Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb, Paula Cole, Suzanne Vega, all artists who had giant fan bases but could not be played back to back on the radio in the 1990s because, well, they were women or they couldn't be on the same concert bill as another female act because that, as conventional industry wisdom said, was box office poison.

Sarah McLachlan said enough of this nonsense and launched the Lilith Fair. Started in 1997. Over its three-year run, the tour became one of the most successful of its time. It played 134 dates in more than 54 cities and raised over $10 million for women's shelters and other nonprofits. It also built community, inspired audiences, and impacted the music industry for years to come. A new documentary tells this story, called Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story. It will be released on Hulu and on Hulu on Disney this Sunday. I'm joined now by its director, Ally Pankiw. Ally, it's nice to meet you.

Ally Pankiw: Oh, hi. It's so nice to be here with you this morning.

Alison Stewart: What was your exposure to the Lilith Fair?

Ally Pankiw: I was 10 the first year of Lilith Fair, so I didn't know much about the festival other than it existed as a young child, but those artists of Lilith were a massive part of my adolescence. I was a dancer, so I did very earnest ballet, contemporary lyrical solos to Jewel and Sarah McLachlan for my whole youth and teenage years. They were the soundtrack to my life and my dance upbringing. I was disappointed as a young adult, then hearing about Lilith Fair retroactively in pop culture, that it definitely wasn't given its due or its flowers for how massive it was and how cool it was.

Alison Stewart: How cool it was in the. In the name of the documentary, The Untold Story, what was the Untold Story?

Ally Pankiw: I think again that it wasn't this small, little shift or this small contribution. It was massive. It was a massive financial success. It had the coolest, most mainstream artists playing at it over these three summers. It gave a massive amount of money to charity. Over $10 million over those three years, '97 to '99. It helped break so many new undiscovered artists.

I heard of it as a young woman in the 2000s. I heard it referenced as a bit of a joke, a bit trivialized. It was just a few women with armpit hair and acoustic guitars on SNL and The Simpsons and all those things. It was so far from the truth. To me, I think I wanted to help with my own unlearning of that era and how it was framed, and just the unlearning of how we were taught to think anything we liked as young women back then was frivolous or not to be taken as seriously as male interest or what was liked and consumed by males in the mainstream.

Alison Stewart: I went to the Lilith Fair. I covered the Lilith Fair, and it was awesome.

Ally Pankiw: Congratulations. I know. I am very jealous that you got to go physically.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. Did you attend Lilith Fair? What was your experience? Call or text us now. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Did you discover any new artists? Did you make friends? What stood out to you? We want to know--

Ally Pankiw: Did you get engaged? Did you come out?

Alison Stewart: Exactly. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. If you do have any photos, actual physical photos that you want to share with us, you can put them on Instagram and tag us @allofitwnyc. First of all, where did it get its name from, the Lilith Fair?

Ally Pankiw: Lilith was Adam's first wife in religious mythology, but she was like, "This sucks to be subservient to you." She left the Garden of Eden. When Sarah was looking for a name, she just thought, and it was a bit prophetic because, in the way that Lilith has been written out of religious history books and definitely is not as famous as Eve, who stuck around, Lilith was also misremembered. Its massive contribution to pop culture into the music industry was also written out of the history book.

I think it's also fitting now, looking at the whole picture and the whole story. At the time, Sarah just thought, "Wow." This ancient woman just felt like a really good representative of her wanting to leave, maybe the garden of the mainstream music industry, and create this safe space outside of it, if only for a couple of summers.

Alison Stewart: Like Lilith said, "Peace out, I'll do my own thing."

Ally Pankiw: Exactly. I think that was edited out of the Bible, that exact quote, which is unfortunate.

Alison Stewart: What experiences did Sarah McLachlan have, we can ask her in a little bit when she's our guest, that gave her the idea for the festival?

Ally Pankiw: I think it was just. There is something so Canadian about her, too, in the fact that I think, and she says it in the doc, she was a bit sheltered from the harshness of the American industry early in her career. Then, when she was starting to achieve American success and she went down to work with American labels and that system, that's when she really felt a lot of the misogyny and the emphasis on image, and these are the rules, and you have to play by the rules if you're a woman in the music industry.

I think maybe having the softer, more welcoming or safe experience of being in this Canadian environment first and then coming and being able to have that perspective, looking at the system in the States and going, "Wait, that's strange. That's weird. That pushback is not what I want to be dealing with." Maybe it made her a little bit bolder to say, "I'd like to do things my own way." She was being told, as well as a lot of the other really high performing female artists of the '90s, including Sheryl Crow and Tracy Chapman, they were being told by bookers, promoters, "You can't pick your own openers. You cannot bring a female opener on your tour with you because we won't be able to sell those tickets."

I think Sarah just literally looked around and used her eyes and ears and was like, "I just know my audiences, and I think if I want to listen to Paula Cole, they'll want to also listen to Paula Cole." I think she just truly set out with a very honest, personal, authentic, small want, which was to be surrounded by the artists she actually liked and wanted to be in community with when she was out on the road, when she was on a tour, when she was doing shows. She just said, "This is what I'm going to do, or I'm not going to do it." That's really powerful, and often big ripples can happen from that very just small, but very honest and strong thinking.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a couple of calls. This is Maria, who is calling in from Flatiron. Hey, Maria, thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Maria: Oh, thank you. My pleasure. I am a makeup artist. Have been my whole life. I did a couple of little spare appearances with my dear friend and client, Emmylou Harris.

Ally Pankiw: Oh, my God.

Maria: Oh, yes. Sarah had this thing where she would go around and put pink glitter on all the artists. Pile of pink glitter everywhere. I actually had a little container of pink glitter in my makeup case that opened up and exploded. I'm still finding in that case, piles of pink glitter. You can't get rid of it. I'm curious if anybody else remembers the pink glitter image. It was pretty amazing.

Ally Pankiw: You are going to be pleasantly surprised when you see one of the anecdotes that Emmylou Harris gives in her interview. I don't want to give it away, the button of her joke or the big reveal, but I think you'll be very happy that she also remembers that.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Savik from Astoria. Savik, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. You're on the air.

Savik: Hi. Thanks. Very close, Savik. I went to the first Lilith Fair in '97, partly because I have been a huge Sarah McLaughlin fan ever since I found her in college. I have all of her albums, and I still have somewhere buried in my dresser, my 1997 Lilith Fair T-shirt, which got worn to death, and it's not appropriate to wear in public anymore, but I cannot part with it.

Ally Pankiw: Let me tell you, it's worth a lot of money on the Internet right now.

Savik: Not for sale. I think also, professionally, I'm an astrophysicist, which is another field where women are underrepresented. Obviously, women aren't underrepresented in music, but these disadvantages that were very structural. It's really hard to convey how bad the '90s were. People think, "Oh, the '90s." There's this nostalgia and stuff, but the misogyny was so out there to an extent that it was just everywhere. I loved being at Lilith Fair with all of these wonderful women artists and the women fans. It was just such a great space, even, obviously, as just a college student, grad student fan. I have very, very fond memories of it still.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling.

Ally Pankiw: When you speak of the misogyny of that time, it was very, very specific and very blatant. Obviously, there's been misogyny and homophobia and racism and all of these things in pop culture long before and there will be long after. In that time, it just felt like it was the trend in comedy. That was the thing that was a safe thing to say on some of the most mainstream large platforms that millions of people could watch.

When you start going through the archive and you start looking through it and compiling all of it and looking at it all together, it feels really relentless. It really took me back to that time of being a teenager in the '90s and in the early 2000s and going, "Oh my God, this was how I was taught how to look at myself as a young woman and for me specifically as a queer person. How did I ever survive that thinking?" It's taken many decades to unlearn that thinking.

This doc was a really nice opportunity to continue that work. You had some old late-night hosts talking about teenage girls' breasts more often than you could count. It's really crazy, and when you start walking down that memory lane. I think it's something we need to do right now in pop culture is look at that time period and go, "Oh my God, how'd we let that happen?"

Alison Stewart: My guest is Director Ally Pankiw. We're talking about her documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story. Did you go to Lilith Fair? We want to hear from you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more with Ally, and we'll have more of your calls after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Director Ally Penkiw. We're talking about her documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story. It will be released on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on September 21, 2025. I want to follow up. Many women joined the bill. They seemed ready to join the bill. Was anyone concerned at all about being blackballed in the industry when it first started?

Ally Pankiw: Yes, definitely. A lot of artists spoke about why I don't want to get lumped together with a bunch of girls. I don't want to be tokenized. Which was already happening, of course, in the industry quite a bit. As soon as Sarah started to explain, "I just want to prove that it's possible so that they can't control us in this way, I just want to prove them wrong, and then we don't have to do this anymore if we don't want to," people really got on board really quickly.

I also think, again, that's that internalized misogyny of that time, speaking through those responses of, we're all taught to align with the thing that isn't thought of as frivolous and isn't thought of as too overly earnest. Being in the music industry was about being good at being in the boys club, which happens a lot in the entertainment industry and in the arts. Then I think, though, that myth very quickly broke down when they got to Lilith, and they were like, "This is A, so fun, but also so cool and radical." There was a lot of mixed feelings, I think about it at first. Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: When you were working on the documentary, where did the footage come from? You have great footage.

Ally Pankiw: We got really lucky. We have lots and lots of beautiful archive. Almost too much because we couldn't use all of it. It came from a few different sources. There was a documentary that was being made at the time of Lilith that was being filmed over those summers, and it just didn't get distributed. That footage didn't really get used. We were able to license that group of filmmakers' footage from that time. That's where a lot of the never-before-seen footage came from.

Then, of course, there's media coverage and news clips that we licensed. Then also a nice mix of some video and a lot of photo from a lot of the artists that were there and the people that worked on Lilith. Some crew members brought whole scrapbooks with their lanyards and their photos and ticket stubs. It was very much a thing that you could tell already was something that people wanted to remember and hold on to when they were a part of it back then.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I attended the Lilith Fair in 1998 in Albuquerque. It was wonderful." This text said, "I attended '97. Fiona Apple was Mesmerizing. Tracy Chapman was unbelievable affecting. How many other people have ever heard The Cardigans play Lovefool live?"

Ally Pankiw: Oh, my God. That's one thing that I will forever be jealous.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Laurie, who's calling in from Frenchtown. Hey, Laurie, thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Laurie: Hey, thanks for taking my call. I went to the first Lilith, and I used to be a professional musician in a band in New York. I am looking through those eyes. I was very excited that there was a lot of female-dominated bands and artists. I was shocked at one performance that just blew everyone else away. That was Tracy Chapman. She's the only one she didn't have a band. She just came out by herself with a guitar, stood in front of the mic, and smoked the place. She was so good, it just blew my hair back. I couldn't believe how effective her voice was and how she transfixed that crowd. That's my memory.

Alison Stewart: Laurie, thanks for calling in. Suzanne is calling us from Philly. Hey, Suzanne, thanks for calling, All Of It.

Suzanne: Hi, thanks for taking my call. Boy, you guys just brought back great memories. My daughter was about 11 or 12. I think it was '97 or '98. We were huge Sarah McLachlan fans, huge Tracy Chapman fans. We were able to get two tickets to Lilith Fair. My husband and I decided that he would be the one to take her because the message would be men really need to support women in music and the arts.

They went, and I still remember them barreling into the house after the concert. Christina had been on his shoulders, and I don't know which band was playing, but someone tossed out a drumstick and Christina caught it. I probably think she still has it today. I'll check in with her later. It was just a wonderful experience for my daughter. She's a strong, wonderful woman today. I think these are the kinds of experiences that really helped make her who she is.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. How did the audience [crosstalk] fair at Lilith Fair? What was their experience?

Ally Pankiw: We only heard overwhelmingly positive anecdotes like that of firsts and really formative memories, and that it was the first place that people felt safe. Festivals and spaces in music were not safe for young women. They still aren't all the time, and so it was very family-friendly. A lot of the artists brought their babies to the tour. I think it was just a top-down trickle-down effect of everyone on the tour was being treated really well. All the crew were being treated well. They were given health care. It was one of the first tours or the first tour to provide dental care to its crew members.

I think that environment of everyone's equal, everyone's deserving really trickled down to the audience. That was a really big feedback loop we've heard. Also, it was a big myth that men didn't go. That was a great anecdote from your listener to dispel the myth that it was like men wanted to listen to women artists. I just don't think they thought they had permission to in society at that time.

Alison Stewart: Speaking of men, let's talk to Lee from Morristown. Hey, Lee, thanks for calling All Of It.

Lee: Hi. Yes, speaking of men. I went there, I'm thinking maybe the first one, I'm not sure, with my wife and our two children. We all thought it was just fantastic. My kids got a great kick out of it when one of the artists started off by saying, "Yes, great effing audience."

Alison Stewart: Thank you for clearing that up. Let's talk to Kevin. Hey, Kevin.

Kevin: Hey, Allison. I went to all three of the Lilith Fairs. They were amazing. I'm a professional musician, and it was very exciting. I loved Sarah McLachlan. A female roommate of mine turned me on to her years in the earlier '90s. I remember going to one, and they had three different stages and one real small satellite. I saw Juliana Hatfield and then walked down and saw Aimee Mann, and then walked up to the main stage and saw The Pretenders, Sheryl Crow, and Sarah McLachlan. It was just phenomenal. It was amazing.

One thing, I had seen Sheryl before on her own tour with Wilco, and I could feel that her show had evolved so much, her performance. I felt like The Pretenders, because Chrissie Hynde is just so incredible as a performer. Later, I read in Rolling Stone that Cheryl said, "Yes, Chrissie Hynde really kicked my butt into gear about what." I just think there was so much cross-pollination among the artists. It seems like it was a great environment for them, which was just this amazing benefit for us, the audience. I really, really loved it. I wish it was still something that was happening today because it was just a fantastic festival, an amazing event.

Alison Stewart: Thanks.

Ally Pankiw: I think a lot of that cross-pollination happened, too, because there was equity among the artists. They all had the same-sized dressing rooms, and they were all in the same place, and no one was treated better or worse. They all actually hung out and talked to each other, and no one was shepherded in and from a different area or anything like that. It was very communal.

Alison Stewart: Something that it did take some criticism from, and you address it in the documentary, is that it was not diverse, aside from Tracy Chapman. How did Sarah handle that?

Ally Pankiw: I think Sarah handled that with a lot of grace that a lot of people could learn from today, of taking criticism and being like, "We'd like to hold you to a higher standard." They really put in a concerted effort to hold themselves to a higher standard in following years and to make the festival more intersectional. Obviously, that work was not done. I think they would have continued to improve had it kept going past '99.

It was never perfect, but there was this grace and this willingness to be like, "We really want to try. We want to also try and combat that issue that's industry-wide, that there's not a lot of representation in the industry." They brought on Erykah Badu, they brought on Missy Elliott in the second year, and all of these other artists. I just think it is really interesting that nowadays I feel like when people get criticism, they often dig their heels in, and there's this defensiveness. I think there wasn't a defensiveness. Though it was totally accurate criticism, there was an openness to be like, "Okay, well, we're going to try and do as much as we can in this moment in time in the industry to do something about it and do outreach." I commend her for her response in that time.

Alison Stewart: How do you think the Lilith Fair changed the music industry?

Ally Pankiw: In very tangible ways. Like we talked about at the beginning, or you set up in the beginning, there are literally radio show hosts and radio programmers that say before Lilith Fair, they didn't program two women back to back, and after Lilith Fair, they did. Something tangible like that. I think it really proved to promoters that they could book bills with more than one woman on them. Festivals are still learning to book more women on their bills, but it started then.

Then I think there's less tangible ripples of some modern-day artists that credit those women as their inspiration. One of the younger artists in our doc is Olivia Rodrigo. She said a lot of her songwriting, that spark in her comes from listening to that era of artists music. She's such a great lyricist. You can see it makes so much sense that there's a link to that era of lyricism and how those women were writing music.

There's that just to, I think, festivals trying to be safer spaces. Also, something that people don't know is Lilith was the first festival to have a village. Everything you see now, from a Coachella to all those things and the other smaller stages, Lilith pioneered that. All of those smaller discovery stages blossomed from Lilith. In many ways, I think it shifted things.

Alison Stewart: I've been speaking with Ally Pankiw. She's the director of the documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story. It's from ABC News Studio, and it will premiere on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ this Sunday, September 21st. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ally Pankiw: Thank you so much for having me. What a thrill. I hope everyone enjoys the doc.