THE REDD KROSS STORY
Reich begins at the beginning with a look at suburban Hawthorne, CA in the years after the Beach Boys put the town on the map–but once its best days were over.
When fame comes fast for a band, though, there's always a dark cloud waiting around the bend. It's the way of the world, though nothing about Redd Kross conforms to cliché–there's often a twist–and at 13, Steve was kidnapped by a superfan. It's amazing he emerged from the experience largely unscathed. His abductor would not be so lucky.
Left: Jim Blanchard poster for a 1987
I was pretty disappointed, and in retrospect, Jeff and Steve don't seem all that thrilled either, though hearing songs like "Annie's Gone" live really emphasizes the fact that sterile production rather than the songs or performances deserves the blame. (At the time I was music director at KCMU, and though I added the album to rotation, the brothers saw my dispirited comment sticker while visting the station, and even quoted me on the air!)
At 84 minutes, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story doesn't cover everything, but it's a fast-moving, entertaining ride that ends up being inspiring, and even a little touching, without any heavyhandedness on the part of either director or subjects, but fans will absolutely need the special edition home-video version, since the extras include a commentary track and deeper dives into Jeff's record collection, their participation in Dave Markey's Lovedolls films, and live performances from most every stage of their career, including an unplugged living room session where it's just Jeff and Steve playing and singing super-catchy songs that will never grow old, no matter the vicissitudes of time and taste.
(Andrew Reich, USA,
2024, 87 minutes)
"Redd Kross to me will always be one of the most important bands, not just in America, but in the world."--Thurston Moore
Nowadays it seems as if every recording artist, no matter how obscure, has their own documentary, because many do.
With a lot of enthusiasm and a little crowd-funding, an untrained director could shoot an entire film about their brother's band on an iPhone and make it available on YouTube or even Tubi. It might not be any good, but it can be done.
Redd Kross, on the other hand, has fully earned the documentary treatment. They never hit the highest of highs, but considering those who did--some of whom came crashing down with a thud--it feels like a blessing in disguise, because after nearly 50 years, the McDonald brothers are still here. Still writing, recording, and touring. And musically: they still have the goods.
They were also fortunate to join forces with Andrew Reich, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker well suited to the task. Though Born Innocent marks Reich's directorial debut, he's an experienced television writer and producer (including seven seasons of Friends), a dedicated fan since the early-1980s, and a spectacularly determined individual, because the documentary was 10 years in the making, and it shows through Jeff's ever-changing hairstyles.
Reich uses footage from Penelope Spheeris's 1983 streetpunk film Suburbia to depict the extent to which it had fallen into disrepair. As Redd Kross associate Chuck Kelley puts it, "The American Dream was over in Hawthorne." (Reich doesn't mention it, but Chuck worked at Video Archives with Quentin Tarantino, and served as a music consultant on 1994's Pulp Fiction.)
Jeff (born 1963) and Steve (1967) had a roof over their heads and supportive parents, both of whom appear in the film, so it wasn't all bad. At 15, Jeff was in middle school when they started making music together, which isn't unusual, but what was unusual is that Steve was only 11.
It wasn't just the beginning of the band–first known as the Tourists, then Red Cross, and finally Redd Kross–but the beginning of a run of drummers, which has continued throughout their career. In the film, each one who appears on screen has a number next to their name, like "Keith Morris (#1)," "Ron Reyes (#2)," and "Dez Cadena (#3)." If you know anything about the Southern California punk scene, you'll recognize those names immediately, since all three fronted Black Flag before moving on to other bands, like the Circle Jerks and OFF!, in which Steve, a widely-admired bass player, reunited with Morris while on an extended break from Redd Kross.
Though Jeff and Steve were inspired by proto-punks like the New York Dolls and Ramones--Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, produced 1987's Neurotica--they skewed more pop than their punk peers. Their music was just as fast and loud, but less angry and more fun. In time, they would become a less-easy-to-classify garage/power-pop/psych-rock hybrid.
If they weren't the only So-Cal punks glued to the boob tube--Black Flag's 1981 "TV Party" is a case in point--they took things further as they worked in references from 1960s and '70s sitcoms, like The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, and made-for-TV movies, like Born Innocent with Linda Blair, into their work. Their cover of Boyce and Hart's "Blow You a Kiss in the Wind" on 1984's Teen Babes from Monsanto was directly inspired by the version sung by Elizabeth Montgomery, in her Serena guise, on Bewitched.
Beyond their obsession with self-described "psychotic garbage culture," they were relentless about calling and networking, and regional fame came early.
They were just getting their feet wet when Hollywood's Posh Boy Records came to call. Things got off to such an auspicious start that David Bowie showed up at their first gig. It's possible he was there to see Black Flag rather than Redd Kross, but it's likely he got to hear their beach movie-inspired classic "Annette's Got the Hits," a Rodney on the ROQ fave.
The band would pick up where they left off, but they were growing tired of the whole punk thing, and set themselves apart by growing out their hair and their songs (by a minute or two). It wasn't the done thing at the time, at least not for musicians outside of the hard rock and hair metal scenes.
Unfortunately, Jeff also developed a serious drug problem. Though the brothers admit they were hopped up on speed while recording Teen Babes, things would become so bad for Jeff that he declines to go into any detail, while Steve is succinct: "It was a nightmare." It seems wise that Reich spoke to the brothers both together and separately, because Steve proves more forthcoming when it comes to their most painful experiences.
KCMU-presented show at the Central Tavern
Though many fans assumed the band were hopped up on hallucinogens while recording Neurotica, their trippiest album, they actually made it after Jeff emerged from rehab.
Even if it features some of their catchiest melodies, the album made a big impact on the Seattle scene of the 1980s, possibly because they found the sweet spot (pun intended) between the tough, anthemic rock of KISS--they even covered "Deuce" on Teen Babes–and the bubblegum psych of Tommy James and the Shondells. That isn't to say they sounded like Cheap Trick or Sweet necessarily, but they're in a similar ballpark, and their exuberant live shows went down a storm in the Pacific Northwest.
In the film, Reich speaks with a number of PNW (or former PNW) musicians, including Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney, Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover of the Melvins (with whom Steve has played bass), Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, and the entirety of the Fastbacks.
No one from Nirvana puts in an appearance, though the band, especially on 1991's Nevermind, came closest to forging a similar hard-meets-soft alchemy, but with less of the groovy, tambourine-bedecked vibe that set Redd Kross apart from the PNW crew.
It's no surprise that major labels came to call, and the band signed with Atlantic, which released 1990's Third Eye, the album on which they adopted a more overtly peace-and-love look in combination with a cleaner sound.
At the time, they were hanging out with more of a movie-oriented crowd thanks to Steve's relationship with Sofia Coppola. In fact, that's her on the cover of Third Eye with a mask obscuring her face and strategically-arranged hair keeping the censors at bay, unlike the then-contemporaneous topless cover art for Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking or Boss Hog's Drinkin', Lechin' & Lyin'. When sales didn't live up to Atlantic's expectations, the band segued to Mercury subsidiary This Way Up through which they released two more full-lengths, Phaseshifter and Show World, before packing it in.
The brothers were burned out, and went their separate ways. As they put it in a song off their first EP, "Burn out, something once for fun, burn out, now I can't get it done." That might have been the end of that, except it wasn't.
Just as drug addiction didn't destroy the band, an extended break didn't either. Granted, I wouldn't blame them for reforming simply to play some anniversary shows before going away again, but that's not what happened.
Instead they came roaring back with all-new material on their 2012 Merge Records debut, Rehearsing the Blues. They've since released a second album on the label and a double-LP set on In the Red. Though the pandemic put the kibosh on a tour behind 2019's Beyond the Door, they're on the road at the time of this writing and they'll be continuing on through late June.
There's a lot to like about Redd Kross, but until I watched this documentary I didn't appreciate what a significant role women have played in their musical lives. It's yet another characteristic that sets them apart both from their brethren in the SoCal punk and PNW grunge scenes.
Consequently, a lot of women appear in the film, including Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, Lulu Gargiulo and Kim Warnick of the Fastbacks, the late Kim Shattuck of the Pandoras and the Muffs, filmmaker Allison Anders, and Jeff's wife, Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's, and Steve's wife, Anna Waronker of that dog. Not too surprisingly, Jeff and Charlotte's daughter, Astrid McDonald, is a musician.
Even at the height of their glam era, I don't believe that Jeff and Steve cared that anyone might think they were gay or fey or girlish. Some speakers go so far as to claim that hair metal bands like Guns N' Roses and Poison took their cues from Redd Kross. I have no idea if this is true, but members of those Sunset Strip outfits were known to frequent their shows.
Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is out now on DVD and two-Blu-ray set through MVD. Additional extras include featurettes, reproductions of original handbills, and an essay from Andrew Reich. Also out: the band's oral history, Now You're One of Us, written with Jeffrey Epstein. Images from the Born Innocent Kickstarter (poster image and "Burn Out" cover art), Al Flipside via Pop Matters (on stage in 1979), Hake's Auctions (Redd Kross "Linda Blair" poster), and Wanda Martin via Lyndsanity (Jeff and Steve in 2024).
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