December 31, 1999

Publication title: Canadian Business, vol. 72, Iss. 21, pg. 116
Place: Toronto
Writer: Unknown

Her way: Sarah McLachlan

One thing about Sarah McLachlan, she speaks her mind. Case in point: it’s June 1994 and McLachlan, who’s in New York to perform at an AIDS benefit, is talking to a journalist about the upcoming North American tour to promote her latest album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Things are already off to a rocky start. The tour was supposed to kick off on July 1 in Newfoundland, McLachlan says, but the promoters pushed it back to July 2 to make room for the Canada Day appearance of Brooks and Dunn (“a f — ing American country act,” she calls them). On top of that, the singer is worried that the concert organizers are charging too much for tickets. “The thing is, nobody in Newfoundland’s got any money,” says McLachlan, whose ethereal singing belies the down-home Haligonian twang in her voice when she talks. But what’s really bugging Sarah — and you feel you can call her that, even after speaking to her for only 10 minutes — is the prospect of the months of touring that await her, the endless stream of sound checks and greedy hangers-on and screaming fans and smelly auditoriums and boring interviews — all the stuff that comprises life on the road. “I love playing live, but there’s a lot of bullshit that comes along with it that I’m having a really hard time dealing with,” she says with remarkable candor. “I’m going to have to get some stronger coping mechanisms, or else I’m not going to make it.”

Well, she must have found a way to cope, because she has definitely made it. Has she ever. At 31, the Halifax-born singer has achieved the kind of success that she probably only dreamed of back in ’94. Since that dreary beginning to the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy tour, McLachlan’s talent has propelled her into the ranks of fellow Canadian music superstars Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. And she has become an important, influential force in the $40-billion worldwide music industry. McLachlan is, after all, the Founding Mother of Lilith Fair, the road show/caravan/celebration-of-all-things-female that over the past four years became one of the most successful concert tours in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. McLachlan has not only sold millions of CDs and attracted even more millions of fans around the world. She has also transformed the way the recording industry looks at women, both as an audience and as artists.

Along the way, Sarah McLachlan the singer — with her elfin good looks and at-times lilting, at-times plaintive soprano — has become Sarah McLachlan the high-flying business concern. Let’s face it: musicians are not often thought of as entrepreneurs, but McLachlan’s success with Lilith Fair might just change that perception. After all, she is not only an artist, but president of a corporate entity — Sarah McLachlan Entertainment Corp., a recording and publishing company whose revenue is comprised mainly of royalty streams from record sales. (Vancouver-based Nettwerk Productions Ltd. is McLachlan’s Canadian record label; in the US, it’s Arista/BMG Records.) She is also 100% owner of Never Get Off the Boat, a touring company (separate from her eponymous company for liability reasons), and a majority shareholder (51%) in Amp Merchandising Inc., a concert paraphernalia producer/distributor that services her own gigs and those of acts such as Jewel, Moist and Barenaked Ladies. “When people think about entrepreneurs, they don’t often think about music,” says Fred Yada, McLachlan’s business manager. “I don’t think Sarah even views herself as an entrepreneur, but in a way that’s what she’s all about.”

And whatever else it was — a celebration of womanhood, a great party, a huge generator of funds for charity — Lilith Fair (25% owned by Sarah McLachlan Entertainment) was also big business. From 1996 to 1999, it drew more than 1.5 million fans to 139 shows, grossing well in excess of US$60 million. In any endeavor, that level of achievement is worth praising. And it’s the main reason McLachlan, who was not available to be interviewed, has earned an Entrepreneur of the Year special citation for product and marketing excellence. Lilith Fair is all the more remarkable when you consider that, before McLachlan came along, just about nobody thought a tour full of “girl bands” would ever sell.

Which is another thing to remember about Sarah McLachlan, as with most entrepreneurs: don’t tell her something can’t be done.

Despite her misgivings about the hardships of life on the road, the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy tour was the turning point in McLachlan’s career. Before ’94, she had achieved a more or less cult following in Canada with her first two albums: Touch (1988), which featured the campus-radio hit song Vox, and Solace (1991), whose single Into the Fire became a hit in Canada. But the US market had proven elusive, and her songs were rarely played even on Canadian commercial radio — certainly not on Top 40 stations. But Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, released in Canada in 1993, changed all that. Thanks to a carefully targeted North American touring schedule (a favorite marketing technique of McLachlan’s manager at Nettwerk, Terry McBride) and hit songs such as Hold On, Possession and Good Enough, the album gradually built up sales in the US throughout 1994. Eventually it went multiplatinum — selling more than five million CDs — and McLachlan was a bona fide pop star.

As a breakthrough hit, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy — a CD title that gave a name to hordes of so-called Fumblers, who are to McLachlan what the Deadheads were to The Grateful Dead — was a tough act to follow. By the end of the tour, McLachlan was in what McBride describes as “a writing rut” for her next album. “The way for me to get her motivated was for her to do some live shows,” recalls McBride. McLachlan agreed to do six shows, two of them opening for Sting, but she didn’t want the pressure — or the extra work — of headlining the other four. Instead, she wanted to be part of a multibill festival, and came up with the idea of making it all female. In 1996, McLachlan was joined by such acts as Paula Cole, Lisa Loeb and Suzanne Vega at concerts in Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the time the road show hit Vancouver that September, McLachlan had settled on a name for the event: Lilith Fair.

The name is fitting. In Hebraic legend, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, who refused to obey him and was so expelled from Paradise. By organizing an all-female concert tour, McLachlan was also going her own way. Even during the Ecstasy tour in 1994, one concert promoter (history does not record his name) famously questioned McLachlan about the wisdom of signing on Paula Cole as an opening act: was she sure she wanted to have two women featured in one concert? Not surprisingly, McLachlan figured that was just plain dumb. Says McBride: “Sarah wanted [Lilith Fair] to be all female because it was different, it was a challenge, and she was tired of the attitudes within the business toward female artists.” Even five years ago, he points out, you would rarely hear two female recording artists played back-to-back on radio. The thinking was that listeners would just switch stations if the music lineup seemed too “feminine.” Concert promoters thought the same way.

“You had to mix it up,” says McBride. “The thinking was, you could put three boy bands together and sell tickets, but you couldn’t do that with female bands. It was a very misogynist point of view.”
In 1997, the 35-stop Lilith Fair tour proved the misogynists wrong. In a market already crowded by more established (and male-dominated) rock festivals such as Lollapalooza and HORDE, Lilith Fair not-so-quietly kicked the competition’s collective butt, routinely selling out throughout North America. McLachlan and her co-Fairers — notably Paula Cole and Jewel — became media darlings. In fact, the ’97 Fair was not only the most popular festival of the year, but a marketing coup for its stars. In mid-July, with Lilith in full swing, McLachlan’s long-awaited new album, Surfacing, debuted at No. 2 in the US, selling 160,000 copies in its first week. Jewel, Cole and Fiona Apple benefited from the Lilith effect, too, as sales of their previously released CDs grew as the summer went on.

By the time the Grammys rolled around in early 1998, it was no surprise that the gals from Lilith raked in the US music awards — McLachlan grabbed two (for best vocal performance and best instrumental performance) and Cole garnered best new artist honors. The 1998 installment of Lilith Fair was an even bigger event than before, expanded to 57 shows over 12 weeks from 35 stops in eight weeks. The bill, meanwhile, incorporated more (and more ethnically diverse) acts, and Lilith Fair became not just a musical experience, but a social event — part love-in, part feminist revival meeting. And it was more popular than ever. That summer, the tour grossed a whopping US$30 million.

But Lilith was not just about profit (and it did make money, Yada says, although he will not disclose how much McLachlan personally earned from the venture). It was part and parcel of the concept that charities would also see a good chunk of change. For every ticket sold in each city played, $1 was donated to a local cause — a program that, by the end of the scaled-back 1999 tour, had raised more than US$1.5 million for women’s shelters and domestic violence crisis centres in Canada and the US. McLachlan also demanded that the tour’s corporate sponsors (which included Tommy Hilfiger clothing and Chevrolet) be both socially responsible — no child labor, no animal abuse — and actively involved in charity. “Sarah’s point of view with corporate sponsorship was, she’d prefer to do everything without it,” McBride says. “But presented with an opportunity to get extra dollars for charities that really need it, it was hard for her to walk away from it.” In total, Lilith Fair and its corporate sponsors raised an estimated US$4 million for charity.

By 1998, it was clear that Lilith Fair had become a beast unto itself — emphasis on beast. Throughout, McLachlan had given credit for operating the event to her three partners: McBride, comanager Dan Fraser and agent Marty Diamond. But the 1998 festival tested the mettle of everyone involved — it was, after all, a logistical nightmare of organizing sponsorships, booking talent and getting people from one place to another. In all, more than 150 people were working on the Fair at any given time, including eight or nine staffers at Nettwerk’s Vancouver offices putting in 60- to 80-hour weeks. Organizers scaled back the event to 40 dates in 1999, but by then McLachlan and her team had decided to call it quits after the summer run. “It comes from realizing that we’re all well into our 30s, and some of us want to have babies,” the singer told a press conference in New York this past April. “[Lilith Fair] is an awful lot of work, and even though it’s amazing and rewarding in so many ways, we decided to end it here.”

OK, so Sarah McLachlan isn’t your average corporate executive. She doesn’t have to wear a suit. She doesn’t sit through boring meetings with underlings every day. She doesn’t have to put up with the drudgery of office work or worry about casual Fridays. Even the day-to-day operations of her businesses are largely left to her management team. But in the end, McLachlan makes up her own mind, no doubt about it. “She makes a lot of decisions on her own — she has to agree to everything,” Yada says. “She pays attention, and she’s a very smart woman.”

And in case you think she has an easy job, ask yourself this: if you had to pay the price that McLachlan has in order to succeed, would you? In itself, a career in music is hard work. But stardom brings its own hardships. In the early ’90s, an obsessed fan from Ottawa, Uwe Vandrei, stalked McLachlan and obsessively wrote her letters. She got a restraining order against him, after which he sued her for using his correspondence in one of her hit songs, Possession. (Vandrei committed suicide in late 1994.) More recently, McLachlan has appeared in court to answer charges from a former drummer, Darryl Neudorf, that he was given neither credit nor enough money for helping the singer write four songs on her 1988 album, Touch. The trial ended last summer in Vancouver, but a decision on Neudorf’s suit for copyright infringement and breach of contract has yet to be reached by the BC Supreme Court.

Through it all, however, McLachlan seems to have grown more comfortable with her celebrity. In 1997, she married longtime drummer Ashwin Sood during a Caribbean holiday; they now live in suburban Vancouver. If anything, says McBride, she has become easier to deal with as her fame and fortune have blossomed. “She’s just a very nice person,” her manager says. “I’ve dealt with a lot of artists who, when they get big, become huge prima donnas. But this girl has gone absolutely the opposite way. It’s like she has no ego.” Meanwhile, her professional success continues: her current CD, the live album Mirrorball, has gone double platinum in the US, and hit No. 3 in the country following its summer release.

For now, McLachlan is taking time off — to write, to recuperate from Lilith and to spend time with her family. As for Lilith Fair’s return, McBride is adamant — despite rumors to the contrary — that it is over, at least for the foreseeable future (which for him is a bit of a relief: “I’m sad to see it go, but on the other hand, I’m not”). McLachlan probably won’t even consider doing it again until after she releases two more albums — at least five or six years in the future. So, after transforming the face of pop music, she is now just a regular old superstar. But you can count on this: if and when she decides to put Lilith back on the road, nobody’s going to tell Sarah McLachlan it’s a stupid idea.