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Linda Perry pauses, then lets out a hearty, resonant laugh. “On a daily basis, Todd, I laugh,” she says by phone from her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks.

Perry has a lot to be happy about. The 40-year-old former singer for 4 Non Blondes, the band whose album Bigger, Better, Faster, More! sold 6 million copies thanks to its inescapable 1993 radio single, “What’s Up,” is one of the hottest songwriters and producers in music. She’s written hits for Pink, Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani and recently worked with artists as diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Cheap Trick, a favorite from her youth. “I couldn’t believe I got that phone call,” she says. “I got stoned and air-guitared, jumping up-and-down on my bed, to Live at Budokan over and over.”
But getting from successful singer to industry player wasn’t a straight line. Perry had a disappointing run as a solo artist after leaving her breakthrough band, releasing her album In Flight in 1996 on Interscope Records to little acclaim and even less in terms of sales volume. “It basically was shelved,” she says.
It wasn’t until recently that Perry says she could stop blaming herself for her fall from stardom to “where is she now?” status before her behind-the-scenes career took off. “I really thought I failed when I made that record,” she says. “It was a very dark place for me.”

Perry wanted to try a more subdued approach with her solo disc. “I really felt suffocated in 4 Non Blondes because I really didn’t enjoy being there in that band, and the music that we were doing and the way I was singing,” she says. “All I can say is, that girl was annoying.

“When I went to go make In Flight, there was this whole other person that just wanted to come out, that was very mellow, that used the low voice and try to be a little more calming.”

Certainly the album has nothing of the shrill insistence of 4 Non Blondes’ music and bears only a passing resemblance in vocal styles. Compared with the slight, hippie-punk pop of What’s Up? In Flight, with Perry’s Grace Slick-style passion and use of strings and moody guitar effects, evokes the bittersweet Americana of Chris Isaak or the somber psychedelic-folk of Pink Floyd. (Of Roger Waters, Perry says: “I absolutely love that man. I think he is brilliant.”)
Perry says she thinks the record label was unhappy with the low-key album it got from the one-time pop sensation. “I don’t know what a hit is,” she says. “All I know is when a song feels good.”

Eventually Perry used her music-biz clout to persuade Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine to give her control of the masters. She will re-release In Flight on Oct. 11 on Olympia, Washington’s Kill Rock Stars, in conjunction with her own label Custard Records, and she’s set to play Oct. 14 at Slim’s in San Francisco and Oct. 20 at the Roxy Theater in Los Angeles.

But wait a minute. What’s a rock star doing on Kill Rock Stars?
“I’m not a rock star,” Perry says, pausing before unleashing a deep belly laugh. Well, maybe not anymore, but she’s certainly a star of the music business.

“It’s actually a full-circle thing for me,” she continues, “because I had a label called Rockstar Records [in the late ’90s] just to help San Francisco artists.”

In the mid ’80s, Perry says she would “panhandle for beer and drugs” in Balboa Park in San Diego, where she tried without much luck to get her music career off the ground. Her luck changed when a friend asked her to drive with him to the Bay Area for New Year’s weekend, offering a plane ride back in exchange for the company.
“I was in San Diego, no job, no money, no nothing,” she says. “And I didn’t even know this person, it was a friend of a friend, and … I reach into my pocket and I had 50 bucks, you know, and I’m like, ‘Shit, why not, what do you got over here Linda?’ And so I just packed a little backpack and I got into the car with him, we drove to San Francisco, and literally coming over the Bay Bridge … I just got that feeling, this is where I’m supposed to be.”

Perry moved to South of Market and got into the music scene, mingling with Stone Fox (who signed with Rockstar), Jackson Saints, MCM and the Monster and the Sextants. “There was this really great vibe where we all helped each other, traded instruments. You’d play just for a couple of beers, not for money,” she says.

But after her unsatisfying run with 4 Non Blondes and her disappointing solo try, Perry fell out of love with post-dot-com San Francisco. “The computer generation took over, bought up all the great, little, old record stores,” she says. “All the dirt got swept under the carpet.”

She moved to Los Angeles and started working on the other side of the recording booth, finally finding happiness in helping other artists instead of focusing on her own ego.

“I don’t have to be Linda Perry, the dark, depressing girl. I can be happy-go-lucky ‘Get The Party Started’ girl. Or you know, I can be ‘Beautiful,’” she says, referring to her Grammy-winning single for Aguilera. Perry insisted on using the scratch vocal for the final mix.

“The song wasn’t meant to be perfect,” she says. “It was just meant to be real and honest and for other people to relate to it.

That approach has won Perry the respect of her peers, allowing her to work with artists ranging from Lisa Marie Presley and Courtney Love (“She’s so brilliant, that woman,” Perry says) to Korn and Unwritten Law.

So having come up from the underground ’80s scene, what does Perry think about holier-than-thou indie rockers and their contempt for major labels? Is there an unbridgeable divide between Top 40 chart positions and artistic integrity?

Perry says the record business operates on a 1950s model of hit making, where commercial trends dictate aesthetics, and performers are marketed as celebrities. So an artist needs to be wary of compromising her vision to satisfy a producer’s sales-figure goal, but she also has to know which battles to fight.

“Some of these independent artists piss me off because, you know what, maybe some music would be a lot better out there if you guys didn’t have this attitude like … ‘I’m too cool to be signed to a major label.’ That’s so lame to me,” Perry says. “Go out there and show everybody you’re good.

“Do they not have a fight in them, and so it’s easier to just be an underground artist?”

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