Vancouver has Lilith on Canada Day.
It is there as a festival and a political statement to remind us we have quality female musicians all around us. We have them in Prince George, in the region, and some have even played the Lilith stage in years gone by.
Lilith was first seen in 1997, '98 and '99. It has always been focused squarely on female soloists and band leaders, and it has always been produced by Sarah McLachlan with help from her manager Terry McBride of Nettwerk Records. This year, they have remounted Lilith for another 35 cities all over North America. McLachlan headlines every show, and she is backed by a rotation of other women stars and superstars.
The first two years of Lilith, northern B.C.'s own Dayna Manning was on the tour. The Stratford girl was living in Toronto and just getting started then. Now she is making music out of Fort St. John where she has lived for the past several years.
She was so nervous as she headed for her first Lilith appearance back in '97 - at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto in front of 16,000 screaming fans - that she forgot her guitar at home and had to borrow one.
"It was just unreal on stage and just hear that many people clapping. Tears welled up in my eyes and all I remember was Bob Saget was in the front row," she told The Citizen these 13 years later. She was only 19 back then, the youngest performer on the Lilith roster.
"I was really shy, and really young, and kind of ignorant. I remember at a press conference I was asked if I appreciated all the leaps and strides all these women in the music industry had made for me over the years and I said, you know, I grew up not thinking there was something I couldn't do. I didn't think I couldn't be a lawyer or a doctor or a singer-songwriter so they must have been doing a good job. But it was really intimidating for me, I was just so shy."
Rachelle Van Zanten from Francois Lake, just west of Prince George, has not played at Lilith, but she was part of another all-female cast of musicians. In November she was on stage at Massey Hall in Toronto with Sass Jordan and five other performers for the Toronto Women's Blues Review gala show. It had a full horn, string and rhythm section all to back up the all-stars of estrogen blues.
Van Zanten agreed with Manning that the stage is the focus of powerful energies when a performance is underway.
"I have to slip into a character when I go on stage. If I don't the audience will eat me alive," she said. "It is all about playing the part. It's more like you put on your game face, if you're an athlete (Van Zanten was a basketball star in the early 1990s for the University of Alberta). I can't do that all the time or I'd die from exhaustion. It allows you to survive, because it is two different energies. On stage I give 200 per cent, just full-on, going as hard as I can basically puking out my emotions to the audience so I'm completely drained afterwards. And you have to be able to shut off when you're off-stage otherwise you just go insane."
Like McLachlan, Van Zanten is blazing a trail for more women of the stage. She hosts an annual school of rock called Rocker Girl Camp with one of her special guests being former P.G. girl Lyndel Montgomery.
Erin Arding just got home this week from her first stint on the road, a six-date tour with music and life partner Jeremy Stewart. She represents the next generation in the local female music scene. She is glad there are people pressing for more women in the spotlight because, from experience, there is not equal gender representation yet out on the road.
"I personally have a sense that for every five male musicians there is one female musician out on the road," she told The Citizen. "I don't know why that is, but it feels outnumbered that way, so it is exciting to see women promoting women's music. I'm definitely all for it. And I think that stereotype has changed and women are seen now as rocker women and not stuck at home filling domestic roles."
It is not a record company-dominated industry anymore. There is no reason why anyone with a good song and sufficient talent can't be a professional or semi-professional artist.
And there is also no reason why that can't be done by any number of women.
