NOTES AND CHORDS MEAN EVERYTHING

Possibly one of the best markers to explain the DNA of Redd Kross unfurls in Amoeba Records’ What’s in My Bag? YouTube series, where Jeff McDonald and younger brother Steven get the prerequisite shopping spree in the store and eagerly explain their baskets of CDs and DVDs that sport James Taylor, Ty Segall, and John and Yoko’s Dick Cavett Show takeover, among other finds. When it comes to showing Steve’s copy of REO Speedwagon’s 1979 opus Nine Lives, there’s bemused squabbling on whether Cronin & Co. were attempting pre-hair metal or post-glam easy listening, finally deciding it was MOR new wave. It’s this attention to the finer details of rock excess, coupled with their being quite aware of what makes its elements succeed (or fail), that somewhat guides RK’s 40-plus-year span. Maybe they haven’t scored their own “Can’t Fight This Feeling’’ (however, they once grazed the U.K. Top 50 with a Carpenters cover in 1994), but they’ve got zero failures and are arguably at their peak these days.

It’s easy copy to plumb the McDonalds’ mythos by pointing out their Hawthorne/suburban L.A. upbringing, Partridge Family/KISS/Runaways/ Beatles obsessions, and unabashed allegiance to the minutiae of ’70s cultural signposts, but they’re no Civil War reenactors when it comes to their interpretation of it all. The Redd Kross code has always coupled a reverence of the glory days of pop/trash culture with a serious evolution in their own sound, all without sacrificing what they do for an easy brand stamp from record-company marketing teams. Their souls belong to the music hooks from a vast field where glam, pop, arena rock, bubblegum, and heady psychedelia coexist in style, and over the years they have amassed a track record with a fiercely dedicated, and growing, fan base. This saga has expanded exponentially in the past year with the fantastic Andrew Reich documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story; a dynamo 18-song double LP just titled Redd Kross (a not-so-subtle nod to the Beatles’ “White Album”); and now a collaborative memoir with Dan Epstein out called Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross. Recording and touring with strength and cohesion in reference to all they’ve done to date, it’s indeed an incredible story. What bands beside the Fall and Sparks have had such a strong run over such an extended period of time? Sure, there’s a list, but it’s a short one.

The brothers famously opened for Black Flag at a party with Jeff at age 15 and Steven at 11, traversing an assortment of lineups (that included Black Flag’s Ron Reyes and future Circle Jerks/Bad Religion mainstay Greg Hetson). Their early years saw the band accumulate a superb series of early-’80s releases as Red Cross, including an EP and that classic Born Innocent LP, before a looming lawsuit had them alter their moniker with a few extra consonants. Their covers release Teen Babes From Monsanto (1984) and solid classic Neurotica (1987) continued to give them national momentum in the underground. I clearly recall being in college and being utterly confused by their metallic cosmetic appearance on Neurotica's cover and wondering how the hell this band fit in at a time when SST punk was flowing into the radio station.

Eventually, they’d be cropping up on MTV’s 120 Minutes, with their signing to Atlantic for Third Eye in 1990 (by the same A&R guy who worked with the California Raisins) setting the stage for them to join in the fast current of the newfound mainstream awareness of Sonic Youth and the burgeoning explosion of Nirvana. They had the songs, the production, the cool videos, but they certainly confused the people. Notoriously Gene Simmons, farming hip bands for a tribute album to himself(l), caught wind of Redd Kross and dismissed them as “not being able to figure out if they wanted to be the Beatles or KISS.” Exactly.

Undaunted, the Redd Kross saga continued through two mid-’90s Mercury records, Phaseshifter and Show World, not reemerging until 2012’s excellent Researching the Blues, then 2019’s Beyond the Door. The new self-titled release collects their entire vibe into a psychedelic petri dish and was banged out quickly after absorbing the Beatles’ Get Back documentary, which showed how their heroes worked in basic piecemeal sensibilities of intuition and error to create. With the McDonalds’ return to business this past year, as well as the new book’s appearance, it seemed like a fitting time for CREEM to catch up on Zoom.

All your albums are completely different in evolution, but the latest seems like a very modern pop record with great classic elements to it.

Steve McDonald: To me it kind of feels like a cross section of everything we’ve ever done. It’s almost like a greatest hits without any of the songs ever having been recorded by us or something. We’ve had such a weird, long career that when someone just tries to jump in, and say they land on Born Innocent or Teen Babes or something, they’re gonna get this really skewed vision of what we are in 2024. But then if you put in all this time and listen to a big, long playlist that spanned those 40-plus years, then that’s gonna be really confusing. I feel like in some ways we kind of have by accident reduced that into a one-hour listen of all new songs.

You guys also kind of sync up with movements that have nothing to do with you, but somehow you get embraced into it. The post-1990 underground surge into the mainstream, going to the U.K. with Phaseshifter, I had wondered, “Hmm, so will the English people get references about Mackenzie Phillips and stuff?” But you had already moved on, and then the Brits were sort of discovering Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. You guys were slightly ahead of a pack that maybe doesn’t exist in your world or something, but somehow easily fell in there.

Jeff McDonald: Yeah. We try to go where the rock ’n’ roll is! We did slot in really easily in the early ’90s in England, because they had a resurgence of rock ’n’ roll. And a lot of those Britpop bands were influenced by ’60s American groups like the Byrds. We didn’t really have to feel like outsiders amongst those people.

The book is great, like it’s a Please Kill Me-style narrative of recollections.

SM: Dan Epstein is our cowriter, and he really took on the job of interviewing Jeff and I over a series of the better part of a year separately. So a lot of times there’s moments where you’re getting, like, contradicting versions of the same story [laughs], which is interesting. I love a rock oral-history format. As far as the content is concerned, it’s just our story.

JM: The thing that makes the book a little different from Please Kill Me, it’s actually written with three voices. It’s Steven, myself, and then Dan’s commentary. So it has a little bit of a bookish aspect coming through with Dan, who is great. And then just the straight interviews with Steven and myself. It’s a fun read. I mean, I read it once and I wasn’t bored!

SM: Dan is sort of like a pop culture historian, on an academic-level kind of deal, so he’s able to kind of preface each chapter with a historical context to things.

JM: And weird sports tie-ins. I just read that Dan said that the Boston Red Sox organ player is a Redd Kross fan.

Well, you know, sports is a good crossover for you. Like Mark E. Smith got all this mainstream attention only after he did the football results on TV.

JM: What about Huey Lewis & the News? Didn’t they have an album called Sports?

Uh-huh. And I saw a preview show at a little Western-themed amusement park in Pennsylvania. They did Sports and nobody knew any of the songs yet. Huey was also the best and classiest part of the We Are the World documentary. Everybody else was crabby because it was late at night after the American Music Awards.

JM: Yeah. It looked hot and stuffy. I liked the fact that Stevie Wonder was trying to get them to sing in Swahili, but Ethiopians don’t speak Swahili.

Waylon Jennings was like, “Fuck that,” and walked out.

SM: I've seen the little clip of when Huey sings this part, and it goes from Michael Jackson and then there’s, like, a couplet of Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, and Kim Carnes.

Huey had to cram to do it and do impromptu harmony, on the spot, and he did that very well.

SM: It was good. I mean, I felt bad for Cyndi Lauper ’cause she was, like, killing it, and then they would do a harmony together and someone was flat and she was like [exasperated /ace].

Yeah, but her necklace was rattling and it was ruining all the takes. So, CREEM must have been a formative thing for you guys, right? Were you buying it as kids? Where did you see it?

JM: It was hard [in Hawthorne], there were no indie record stores or anything like that there. The only way to get magazines like CREEM or any of those was at the local liquor stores, like next to the porno magazines, like Hustler and Playboy. There wasn’t a huge market for that kind of rock ’n’ roll where we grew up, you know? I didn’t know any kid when I was, you know, 12 years old who read rock magazines. We were the only ones who did.

SM: It was like ’76, ’77 was the transition from obsession with arena rock and your standard Led Zeppelins and KISS and stuff. And then we started to phase in things like the Runaways and the Ramones, and that was via CREEM or whatever magazine. We’d cover them. And then once we tapped into Rodney Bingenheimer’s show in ’78, that’s when we heard about the L.A. scene.

Was your dad into punk rock at all?

SM: He’s not really a rocker, but Jeff had mentioned in an interview recently that, when he heard us playing the Ramones, he’s like, “Oh, I like it. It sounds like Jan & Dean.”

JM: You know, I’ve been grilling my parents a lot lately because they were right at that age to have been there for the birth of rock ’n’ roll. I asked my mom, did any of your friends ever go see Elvis or anything? Because she grew up in rural Indiana. She goes, “We didn’t go to concerts.” And I was just, wow. My dad was a motorcycle racer in the early '60s, and he never experienced any of that stuff. Or the ’60s stuff. Yeah. So it was kind of weird.

SM: Our dad is the oldest of eight siblings. So he had younger siblings that were teenagers in the early/ mid-’60s. Our aunt Colleen just recently told us about the time she saw the Beach Boys at a department store in California. And she even was like a deep enough fan to say, “Oh, it was when they had that cute boy David Marks in the band, the Al Jardine replacement. [Laughs]

She might have liked that John Stamos got in the band as a fitting replacement. What were the first gigs that you saw?

JM: Well, my first gig I was very young, and I only have early trauma memories from it. I had just turned 2 and I was a huge Beatles fan. I guess my mom said that the Beatles’ names were some of my first words. I only remember screaming and terror from that. But the first show I went to, like, on my own, or with a friend, was in 1974, Elton John at the Forum, Kiki Dee opening up. I was 11. It was the year after the Yellow Brick Road tour.

Did you see the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl?

SM: Jeff saw them at Balboa Stadium in San Diego in 1965. I just looked it up, August 28th. And actually, Jeff, you had just turned 3 years old. So I guess that makes sense that perhaps, you know, some of the trauma work you’ve been doing about the hysteria when you were 3 years old at the Beatles concert is legitimate.

JM: I only have memories of the Beatles concert. It was my aunt saying, “Oh, there’s the Beatles down there,” and them sounding just like a tiny, tinny transistor radio—a really terrible one. I had never been to a concert, so I was excited, but I just assumed that it was gonna sound really bad. I guess they just played through whatever baseball stadium PA speakers there were.

We took a class trip to New York, 1977, and saw Beatlemania on Broadway, and they planted girls, like they just had people scream. I felt terror too. What was your first show, Steve?

SM: February 1976. The first band that hit the stage was Montrose, featuring Ronnie Montrose and Sammy Hagar on their first album, and they were supporting KISS around their first live album. Jeff was there too.

To me, the greatest thing Paul Stanley ever did, though, was the Folgers commercial. That’s just genius.

JM: You know, I just posted that on my Instagram Reels. I took Britney Spears doing one of her bikini posts dancing around and spinning in circles and then I put a cartoon filter on it. So she appears as a cartoon, and then I used the Paul Stanley Folgers commercial as music. [Laughs] She’s dancing around wildly, it works perfectly. It’s like that Wizard of Oz/ Pink Floyd mash-up.

I was just blown away by the Stuart Swezey documentary Desolation Center [documenting a series of concerts in the Mojave Desert that included Redd Kross, Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, and more]. What an odyssey. What was it like for you? When you finally made it out there you were greeted by everyone on acid. You guys got in the car with somebody and they drove you off with no plan and got lost in the desert!

JM: Then dropped us off. Well, by the time we played, it was a relief to actually be on stage. It was a whole odyssey to get there from San Francisco. We didn’t have gear and we had to wrangle from the other bands, so when we finally hit the stage, we had achieved our first goal. But as far as being on LSD, I appreciated the fact that everyone else there was on LSD. I personally wasn’t. But you know, I definitely had a contact high. It was just, just so bizarre and surreal, and then groups like Sonic Youth playing. The ultimate psychedelic band.

I have to admit, the first time I ever heard you guys, when I was in college, it was the Tater Totz album, and then it was a promo interview album, before I even heard Redd Kross music. [Laughs] Which is weird because now it’s full circle, I’m doing an interview and I don’t have any Tammy Faye Bakker gossip or anything. But how come there’s omission of some of the cool side stuff that you guys did in the movie? No mentions of the Tater Totz or Anarchy 6, Love Dolls/Dave Markey movies?

JM: There was too much, it clocked in at almost 90 minutes. It would just be so many rabbit holes that, you know, maybe we’ll do a sequel, who knows? Maybe it'll be released on Blu-ray. I know that Andrew promised to put Dave Markey’s story and the Love Dolls and all that stuff on the bonus extended version.

SM: For starters, I always like to say it’s not our movie. We didn’t have final-cut approval or anything like that. I mean, we signed off on him telling our story how he wanted to tell it. I know his mission was always to try to reach a larger audience with our story. I think he had this goal that it would play well with anybody regardless of if you had heard a single note of the band or not. So it wasn’t necessarily for the really deep hardcore fans. It was kind of more like an introduction to the band. If you need a deeper dive, there’s now the book as a companion piece. It’s just that he wanted to try to suck people into our world that Jeff and I have created, you know? Then for us, I just felt like it was our responsibility to have a new record out in case he ever got the movie on a streaming platform or something.

Well, it’s also at a really good time because most of your music’s available now thanks to all the reissues.

JM: We weren’t really in the streaming world for years and years. Well, that kind of started happening. I started doing reissues, collector’s volumes of records that we owned and recordings that we owned, and they were really popular and they were selling out really fast. So it was really kind of fun keeping our name out there and our history out there. And by the time we started working again with Merge, they released all those records that had been put out, so I didn’t have to deal with it anymore. It was fun.

I always tell people the best records on Atlantic are Third Eye and the Rose soundtrack with Bette Midler. [Laughs]

JM: Oh, wow. [Laughs] Well, we would do the theme from The Rose occasionally. But that was instrumental. I didn’t sing it, Steve didn’t sing it, yet everyone in the audience knew it. And I’ve never actually seen The Rose, so I don’t know the song. [Laughs]

I woke up to school every morning to “The Rose” on the radio and “Seasons in the Sun,” heavy AM rotation. And then I’d go to school really depressed. It would be cold out.

JM: We were more of the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson A Star Is Born soundtrack.

Redd Kross’ self-titled LP is out now on In The Red. Now You're One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross is available via Omnibus.