Mark Blackwell

The 1993 Miss Teen USA pageant got off to a typically glitzy start, but turned into a raging fiasco as the lame duck Miss Teen USA violently shoved this years winner off the runway in a jealous rage. The room fast became a blur of flying roses, fighting teens, spilled drinks, and smashed tiaras, as the elderly ladies and gentlemen in the Hollywood crowd scrambled for cover. As if this incident itself wasn't bizarre enough, while this contest was in progress, a gang of rowdy youth visiting from Seattle broke into the home of the emotionally distraught queen, ransacking and destroying her quaint suburban bedroom.

Well, actually, all this did happen, but within the fictional confines of a soundstage on Sunset Boulevard, as the Best Kissers in the World filmed the first video from their major-label debut album, Been There. For the track "Miss Teen USA", the Kissers, who deal in catchy Paul westerberg-cum-Cheap Trick guitar pop (often sounding somewhat like a very alternative REO Speedwagon), put on quite a pageant. The seeds of the song were planted in the brain of the Kissers leader Gerald Collier last year during a Manhatten fashion party, at which the real Miss Teen USA was in attendence. No riot occurred, but it was a pretty weird scene. Since this SPIN writer was the guy who took the Seattle quartet to the party-while documenting their participation in the CMJ convention-I earned a dubious place in rock history when the words "The name is Mark, and we're from SPIN" appeared in the ensuing song. Then came the video, for which the Kissers invited me to do a cameo and lipsync the line. (Michael Stipe held out for ten years and it takes me about ten seconds.)

The shoot culminated rather abruptly with Collier bashing his thumb in the process of smashing the teen queen's bedroom vanity. When asked to comment on the day's events, the singer, coddling his injured digit, merely winced and replied, "Ouch."