One of the most highly anticipated sets of BottleRock Napa Valley Day 2 featured the unlikely reunion of 4 Non Blondes.
The San Francisco alt-rock band — best known for the ’90s smash “What’s Up?” — was reuniting after decades apart to play its first Bay Area show in more than 30 years at BottleRock.
The group’s previous Bay Area outing came way back at the Haight Asbury Street Fair in 1994.
Thousands of fans turned out to the BottleRock festival’s biggie JaM Cellars Stage late in the afternoon on Saturday (May 24) to find out how the 4 Non-Blondes — who are still led by singer-songwriter-guitarist Linda Perry — would sound in 2025. And, of course, the fans came out to scream from the top of their lungs “what’s going on?”
They’d get to do just that during a gigantic sing-along on “What’s Up?” that, surprisingly, didn’t come as a show closer, but rather mid-set.
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Not coincidentally, everything played after that felt pretty anticlimactic. But that’s not to say the other numbers, played both before and after the big “What’s Up?” single, didn’t sound good. To the contrary, the group sounded pretty strong — especially given the three-decade layoff — as it played tracks from its one studio album (“Bigger, Better, Faster, More!”) as well as a bountiful selection of newly penned numbers.
“These are all new songs,” Perry confirmed to the crowd, underscoring that she wasn’t content to be a nostalgia act by adding with both irony and sarcasm: “We are a 90s band.”
Yet, one of the best selections of the night didn’t hail from the ’90s but rather the early ’70s. And we’d get it right at the start as Perry and company roared through an impressive version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and “Roll.”
Further shaking the cobwebs off their instruments, 4 Non Blondes rolled through a likeable version of the “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!” track “Train” and then continued into the new number “What They Want,” which, Perry knew, wasn’t a song that could live up to its title for these fans.
“After that song, I feel like I should give you what you want,” said Perry, an accomplished songwriter who has worked with Christina Aguilera, Pink and others.
And what fans wanted, of course, was “What’s Up?”
The song lived up to expectations, bringing back tens of thousands of memories of car rides, backyard barbecues, wedding parties and the like. That was the peak moment of the show, of course, and all that remained was more new songs for fans to tolerate.
Yet, Perry likes these songs. And she believes that fans — eventually — will too.
“Next year we are going to be back here and all the new songs that you’re hearing?” she said. “You going to be bouncing up and down to them — all the way back to the vineyard.”
