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Last Friday, the main ballroom at legendary drag club Oasis — soaked in complementary booze and dewy, mid-summer evening sweat — fell to a near-total hush the second that Linda Perry’s raspy, booming voice hit the microphone.
The crowd, composed heavily of Gen X-ish lesbians, was decked out in leather and denim and Pride merch. It was easily, in the best way, one of the older, least-male crowds of any Pride event this weekend in San Francisco. For that demographic, it was the hottest ticket of the evening: A chance to see Let It Die Here, a disarmingly honest documentary about Perry’s life and work, followed by a show — her first in the city for a while.
Just a couple of hours after the documentary played at Herbst Theatre, Perry got on stage at Oasis.
“I’m going to play a couple songs you might know,” she said, and without skipping a beat, sternly added, “Just two.”
One of those was “Beautiful,” the anthem Perry wrote for Christina Aguilera. The other, of course, was “What’s Up?,” the chart-topping 4 Non Blondes hit, which Perry jokingly recalled writing “while my roommate Christa was having sex upstairs.”
As the first notes of “What’s Up?” hit, a sing-along ensued. Even if you don’t know the lore surrounding Perry and 4 Non Blondes, which she led from 1989 to 1994, you know the song. (Perhaps, like myself, you encountered it in a YouTube clip of He-Man and friends screeching a synth-heavy cover of the original.) A good chunk of the crowd sang the wrong words in parts, which Perry rightfully scolded us for. A light suddenly refracted on the disco ball as the song’s wailing chorus — “Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey” — filled the space.
Perry had, no doubt, done this song a thousand times before — but this time, in a room not so far from where she rose to fame, felt special. She had returned to San Francisco, her pre-fame home, with a renewed purpose.
“I haven’t written songs for myself in a very long time,” Perry admitted mid-show to the crowd.
In the late ‘80s, Perry was a struggling musician in San Francisco. She waitressed at Spaghetti Western, a now-defunct Lower Haight institution, while she busked and wrote songs for herself.
Then, Perry was tapped to join a band that became 4 Non Blondes, which she sang and played guitar for, often with a guitar that read “dyke.” The single she wrote for their only studio album, “What’s Up?,” became a worldwide hit.
4 Non Blondes soon disbanded; Perry could have just been a one-hit wonder. Instead, she moved to L.A. and became a songwriter and producer to the stars, pouring herself into career-making hits for Pink, Gwen Stefani, and Christina Aguilera in her mid-2000s heyday. The YouTube comment section of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” which Perry wrote and produced, is filled with confessionals about how Perry’s words saved their lives. Covers abound of “What’s Up?,” from Lady Gaga and Pink to a slew of young aspiring musicians on TikTok. She could have retired and earned royalties on these songs forever.
But that’s not really not her style.
“I kind of pride myself on being a pretty strong, resilient person and I keep myself that way,” Perry told the audience in a post-screening Q&A, to much applause. “I like it when people are intimidated by me.”
In interviews during Let It Die Here, Perry describes a feeling of writing songs that rang false. After two decades writing songs for and with other people, a list that eventually included Adele, Dolly Parton, and Brandi Carlile (the latter two of whom are interviewed in the film), she lost herself in the mix. It wasn’t until the death of her mother — and receiving an early breast cancer diagnosis herself — that she re-learned how to write songs for Linda Perry again.
Most of those songs will be on a yet-to-be-released album, including a song called “What Lies With Me” where she describes her mother as her “angel, devil, and muse.” In one of the final scenes in the documentary, she performs the song for the first time and becomes distraught, barely able to thank the session musicians before breaking down into tears.
Last weekend, at Oasis, she sang the song again. Her performance tapped into that same feeling, her voice cracked and bruised and spilling with anger and regret. It’s a rare, unnerving thing to see live.
“She’s turned her vulnerability into an advantage,” Debra Reabock, an abstract photographer and longtime Linda Perry fan, told me just minutes before the show. “She keeps reinventing herself; she could have sat on her laurels. But she’s a creative. She didn’t let fame get to her head.”
It must be a strange thing to have written at least two songs that will probably live on forever. Mean Girls immortalized “Beautiful” forever; that He-Man video probably did the same for a certain generation of people. But, really, it doesn’t matter where you encounter a song — if you heard “What’s Up?” at a lesbian bar in ‘93 or in a YouTube clip a friend sent you as a gag — if it sticks with you.
