Women's Music Festivals:
The Early Days

When Boo Price got involved in producing women's music festivals, she was one of the only female sound technicians around. Undaunted by rain, tornadoes, and possible electrocution, Boo started in San Diego and moved on to the mother of all fests, the Michigan Womyn's Music and Comedy Festival. Meanwhile, just two years after she took Robin Tyler to Michigan, the latter, an established comedian, decided to produce her own festivals on the West Coast and in the South. Girlfriends brings you their stories in these exclusive excerpts from Bonnie Morris's new book, Eden Built by Eves, and also comedy from Karen Williams, who is a little skeptical about the festival accommodations.

Boo (Barbara) Price
Coproducer of the Michigan's Womyn's Music Festival (1976-1994)
Producer, Main Stage, West Coast Women's Music and Comedy Festival (1979)

Those kids in Michigan

Ginny Berson [at Olivia Records] called me. "Who are these kids in Michigan? Do they know enough about what they're doing? They're trying to book Meg Christian. What do you think?" I said, "We're going to work with them. They seem really inexperienced, but let's give them a chance."

The next thing we hear, they're having internal problems because there's a question about whether it should be all women or mixed, men and women. I said, "It can be mixed if it's one day. If it's over the weekend and people are going to be sleeping out, it has to be women, or we won't be there." Eventually, that issue broke up their committee of producers. The people who really wanted it to be mixed left.

That's how I got there to begin with and I went as Margie's [Adam] manager. Then I asked, "Who's doing the sound?" They had a man and a woman, sister and brother, though it was his company. I said, "You have to have a woman engineer." Well, at that point there was almost nobody, just Marilyn Ries. Nobody had done outside stuff. I was just starting to work with Margot McFedries—that's a whole other story—I bought her first sound mixer for her, a little baby board; I said, "You've gotta keep learning, because I've got to have a woman engineer." So I said, "Bring Margot to Michigan," and they agreed. She worked with the sister of the team they'd hired, and that was our technical crew!

No stage production to speak of. One potato out of an oil drum for dinner. We were all so excited that it almost didn't matter. Lisa [Vogel] was finally allowed to come forward and talk with me; she had just turned 19, and I was almost 32. That's a huge difference. But I said, "If you're thinking of doing this again, I'd love to talk with you about production." And the first thing I said was, "You need better graphics," and I recommended Sally Piano, who had performed at that festival—a talented songwriter and pianist out of the D.C. area, and a great graphic designer who had just moved to Chicago. She designed the now-famous Michigan piano tree logo, and for a while she and Lisa became lovers. Meanwhile, I said, "There needs to be a production company and a producer. I'll produce the stage and bring my own people." Lisa was into it and convinced the collective that they could bring in this group of five or six women from California.

I've heard fire and rain

So from the second festival on, I was producing the stage. When did we get sign language interpreters?—Oh, that would be Susan Freundlich, beginning in 1980. Honey, at this point we barely had sound engineers! I brought in the values I had about production. I also said, "You have to have lights," and I brought in Leni Schwendinger, a lighting designer who I had met when she was working as a clown. She had started working as a reluctant lighting tech because we needed one, and quickly became a brilliant lighting designer who worked with me for many years. And Jennifer James, a friend of Margie's from Santa Barbara, was our first stage manager; so many women now in the field ended up being trained by Jennifer James.

It was a big step, having a production crew. And schedules! And sound checks! All of that. In Hesperia [the Michigan festival site until 1982], we did three concerts in the afternoon, three concerts at night. Lisa was trying to buy a sound system from this guy, and it was being kind of built and tweaked on the spot. And there was torrential rain, and everything flooded. We'd have to stop and take the whole system apart. This man was working boys' child care at the other end of the land, and we'd bring him in in the middle of the night to put the equipment together. We'd dry everything off, lay it out. It was nuts. Therese Edell would stand onstage, performing without amplification when the system wasn't working.

We were making it up as we went along. Like Lisa laid out snow fencing to accommodate women in wheelchairs; it was rough going to try to roll over, but it represented an attempt to provide accessibility. And so much of it was fighting the elements. The second two years were heavy rain years: 1977 had a series of the worst thunderstorms they'd over had continuously in Oceana County, and1978 saw a tornado.

When we were in Hesperia, even though I was doing producing, I would run a workshop on production at least once or twice during each festival. And so women producers would come—whoever was there—and we'd share information. That was how we brought in crew, and it was the beginning of our awareness of a network of production people. Later, volunteers would just come to us. Here's a story of a woman who just walked up at the second or third festival and said, "I'll help": She looked like a good worker, and she helped as a stage hand that whole time. This was Muffin Spencer-Devlin. She told us, "I'm going to start playing professional golf this fall!" She was just barely on the tour then.

The year I took Robin Tyler was 1978; we were having a little fling. She came from television—she was on a contract with ABC then—and although she had all the best feminist politics in her act, I had to help her get over her feeling that the women's music scene was just kids in basements. And she was so fascinated by what she saw, by the huge audiences we had even then, that she went home and began to think about creating her own festival.

I had a very significant role in launching festivals where none had been before because I was a collaborator and consultant with Kristie [Vogel] and [Mary] Kindig before the start and then, by the second festival, with Lisa. I took a production team to produce the concert in Hartford, Connecticut, and then to come to Michigan to look over my shoulder, then go back to Connecticut to start the North East Women's Music Retreat. I took a production team to the first NEWMR to get them started and to train local women to continue. I took Robin Tyler to her first festival in 1978 and then later produced the main stage for her in California in 1982, when she was getting started with the West Coast festival.

Lisa and I worked closely together to create the concert production of the Michigan stage from the start, but it was she and Kristie and the women of the WWTM Collective who launched the Michigan festival. I would say that from 1983 on, Lisa and I developed the festival beyond the monofocus of the performance stages, into the form that is now recognized as "The Festival." The early years are significant because they were the organic creation of festival culture. The largest factor was that feminist women—mostly lesbian—would go to great lengths to get together in large groups, brought by the excuse of their new "women's music" but driven by a desire to affirm an identity as independent women forging a revolution.

There was an ecstatic quality to these first years of gatherings, punctuated by acts of social defiance: letting menstrual blood flow freely, throwing off shirts or all clothing, taking on male-identified jobs such as trench digging, tent stake sledging, stage rigging, tractor driving. Most of festival culture in the early days was the result of doing it all ourselves. The principle activity was sitting in front of the stage and waiting for or watching the concerts.

By 1982, the Michigan festival had been in operation for seven years and it seemed to be running its course. The collective wasn't willing to take on the real financial debt of buying property; there was so much internal dissent that little joy was apparent among festival workers. The leadership was putting far more of its energy into conflict than creativity. Large audiences began to dwindle and festival debt was mounting.

When Lisa and I agreed to pool our skills and experience and see what we could do as coproducers, I believed that the future of the Festival lay in the ability to create much more conscious community for both the workers and the campers. We began to build much more of a staff village and to actively seek women from other countries to join the working staff. Expanding the Signz area from Mitzi's lone drawing table to a whole artistic complex had the same effect that valuing art in any community has. Creating a meal area for all workers that was attractive and comforting—rather than segregating the staff by those who could eat with the performers and those who couldn't—was essential in building worker family esteem.

On the camper side, my personal determination was to create more and more opportunities for women to create and participate in Festival programs and traditions. The tenth Festival was the first year we ever had the international welcome, or an Opening Ceremony, and both had a huge effect in creating a sense of festival community and shared culture. The creation of the Community Center, One World Tent and workshop program, open reel video showings, Women Over 40, Women of Colors Tent, the Festival Band, Chorus and Choir, Festival dance classes, and quilting, transformed the definition of festival culture. Women returned year after year to create their own performances, to share their work, to find affinity groups with structures for networking. The printed program itself was important to the development of Festival culture, because it documented what we were all doing there together—the richness and diversity of who we were together. It gave words and context to what we created and elaborated on, year after year.

I believe the Festival would have foundered beyond repair in the early 1980s if there hadn't been a major shift in the priorities by creating a cultural expansion. What became known as "festival culture" was then replicated in many of the regional festivals (even carrying over Festival names, jargon, customs) with individual variations and distinctions. It created a common tribe of women who recognized one another across national borders, language barriers, ethnic backgrounds, and all the differences that so readily define and separate us.

More excerpts?  Here's Robin Tyler and Karen Williams.