Outside of the MTV Video Awards 1993 (l-r:) Roger Rocha, Sawn Richardson, Christa Hillhouse, Linda Perry
In early August we attended the MTV Video Awards, where our What’s Up? video was nominated in the Best New Artist category. As we walked towards the Universal Amphitheatre there was a wall of paparazzi standing on the other side of a rope, on bleachers, flashing bulbs non-stop – just like in the movies. Microphones, cameras everywhere … even a red carpet. I walked up the stairs to the nominee’s entrance behind Curt Kobain, Courtney Love, and their daughter Francis. I told Flea I wanted to have his baby. I followed Sinaed O’Connor into the bathroom. Our seats were close to the podium, in front of Dr. Dre and beside Natalie Merchant. Pearl Jam, Neil Young, and Aerosmith all performed that night. I was on top of the world.
BRAVO Magazine 1993 (Germany) featuring individual pull out posters of each band member. Collect all 4!
BRAVO Magazine 1993 (Germany)
We played Late Night with Conan O’Brien on October 13 and then left for Europe again. We played in Stockholm, Helsinki, Paris (television) , Oslo, Copenhagen, Zurich, Vienna, Bologna (and did television with Ricki Lee Jones), Milan, back to Paris, Barcelona, Madrid (television), Amsterdam, Holland, Brussels, and Munich. We flew to London for a few days, did a show … and I turned 32. I celebrated backstage after the show and it was memorable, to say the least. My friend Lulu brought a bunch of her gorgeous friends and I loved the attention. Being applauded at the shows by an audience is one thing, being adored by gorgeous queer women is something else entirely.
In early December, we flew back to Los Angeles to perform at the Billboard Music Awards show from the Universal Amphitheater. The highlight of the evening was watching Whitney Houston sing “I Have Nothing”. She was at the peak of her success as that was the year she took home the Grammy awards for Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, and Best Pop Vocal Performance. I also fondly recall chasing down Dennis Hopper and telling his date that he was the sexiest man alive. And then he laughed that little laugh that he does .. it was awesome.
I recall we were pretty much running on fumes at this point. All of the traveling had completely wrecked Linda’s voice for the performance, and I recall we were all relieved after the show was over that she had managed to pull it off by changing the melody at the end on the fly. She did push herself as hard as she could as she always does and could hardly talk afterwards. There was an after party I remember going to, and at some point I left with a bunch of Marines just for the hell of it and brought them back to my suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. I remember driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a Jeep with a half dozen of them, I’m sure I was sitting on someone. 
One of them used to write me letters and send me shirtless photos and seemed to have a crush on me, which I found amusing since I’m so openly gay. It was a crazy night.
Linda was drinking hard and ended up back at our hotel. There was a piano in the lobby and she decided to play it. The hotel staff told her to stop – it was after 2:00am in the morning for chrissakes – but Linda refused and kept on playing. Then they told her to stop or else they were going to call the police and she still kept on playing. When a security guard approached her, she picked up a glass table in the lobby and smashed it onto the floor. Linda got arrested and when I woke up the next morning she was being bailed out of jail. She was also hanging out with the singer from Blind Melon, Shannon Hoon, and the next day she told me that when the hotel staff called the cops he took off running down the street. We all laughed about that. He seemed so innocent. A few years later he was dead from drug abuse.
In late December we performed at the Christmas show hosted by LA’s KROQ radio. We played between the Cranberries and Tony Bennett – and the show also featured Bad Religion, Belly, Blind Melon, Cowboy Junkies, Cracker, General Public, Nick Heyward, Billy Idol, The Lemonheads, Porno for Pyros, Primus, Rage Against the Machine, Henry Rollins, The Smashing Pumpkins, They Might Be Giants, US3, The Violent Femmes, and The Wonder Stuff. The production staff asked for a song list before the show but we ended up sneaking in “Down on Your Face” at the end. They had to bleep out Linda saying “fucked” twice.
There’s a cute comment by the DJ Sluggo at the end commenting on how nice we were to everyone and how strange it was. I guess being a DJ in LA one can bruise, what with all of the egos constantly bumping into you.
