One of the crucial extremely anticipated units of BottleRock Napa Valley Day 2 featured the unlikely reunion of 4 Non Blondes.
The San Francisco alt-rock band — finest identified for the ’90s smash “What’s Up?” — was reuniting after a long time aside to play its first Bay Space present in additional than 30 years at BottleRock.
The group’s earlier Bay Space outing got here method again on the Haight Asbury Road Honest in 1994.
Hundreds of followers turned out to the BottleRock competition’s biggie JaM Cellars Stage late within the afternoon on Saturday (Might 24) to learn the way the 4 Non-Blondes — who’re nonetheless led by singer-songwriter-guitarist Linda Perry — would sound in 2025. And, in fact, the followers got here out to scream from the highest of their lungs “what’s going on?”
They’d get to just do that in a huge sing-along on “What’s Up?” that, surprisingly, didn’t come as a present nearer, however fairly mid-set.
Not coincidentally, the whole lot performed after that felt fairly anticlimactic. However that’s to not say the opposite numbers, performed each earlier than and after the large “What’s Up?” single, didn’t sound good. On the contrary, the group sounded fairly sturdy — particularly given the three-decade layoff — because it performed tracks from its one studio album (“Bigger, Better, Faster, More!”) in addition to a bountiful choice of newly penned numbers.
“These are all new songs,” Perry confirmed to the group, underscoring that she wasn’t content material to be a nostalgia act by including with each irony and sarcasm: “We are a 90s band.”
But, among the finest picks of the night time didn’t hail from the ’90s however fairly the early ’70s. And we’d get it proper in the beginning as Perry and firm roared by a powerful model of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and “Roll.”
Additional shaking the cobwebs off their devices, 4 Non Blondes rolled by a likeable model of the “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!” observe “Train” after which continued into the brand new quantity “What They Want,” which, Perry knew, wasn’t a music that would dwell as much as its title for these followers.
“After that song, I feel like I should give you what you want,” mentioned Perry, an completed songwriter who has labored with Christina Aguilera, Pink and others.
And what followers needed, in fact, was “What’s Up?”
The music lived as much as expectations, bringing again tens of hundreds of reminiscences of automobile rides, yard barbecues, marriage ceremony events and the like. That was the height second of the present, in fact, and all that remained was extra new songs for followers to tolerate.
But, Perry likes these songs. And he or she believes that followers — finally — will too.
“Next year we are going to be back here and all the new songs that you’re hearing?” she mentioned. “You going to be bouncing up and down to them — all the way back to the vineyard.”
