Now You're One of Us - The Incredible Story of Redd Kross

Now You're One of Us
The Incredible Story of Redd Kross
Jeff & Steven McDonald with Dan Epstein
(Omnibus Press)

For those of us who are fans, Redd Kross’ lack of commercial success is an ongoing mystery. Redd Kross emerged out of LA’s hardcore punk scene in 1978, but always very much operating their own wavelength. The creative project of brothers Jeff and Steven McDonald, Steven was only 11 years old when they started playing music together. Precocious and music-savvy, Jeff and Steven were inspired equally by their love of the Beatles, hardcore punk and trash pop culture. They have released album after album of sublime power pop, each filled with exquisite tunes brimming with melody and hooks and crunchy guitar playing that should have been hits but weren’t. At long last, Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross (2024) allows the McDonald brothers, with the help of co-writer Dan Epstein, to tell their remarkable story of music, punk, pop perfection and frustratingly missed opportunities. It’s essential reading for Redd Kross fans, and released to coincide with Andrew Reich’s Redd Kross documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story (2023), hopefully it will bring the band to the attention of more music fans, who frankly don’t know what they’re missing.

How to write a band autobiography when a sibling relationship, with all the tempestuousness that can entail, is at the centre of the band? Epstein’s rather brilliant answer is to allow Jeff and Steven to recount their own version of events, with Epstein adding occasional context and clarification. He boasts in the introduction that Now You’re One of Us is the first music biography to use this technique, though in typical Redd Kross unlucky timing, it was beaten to the shops by the Jesus and Mary Chain book Never Understood, which uses the same technique to chronicle the Reid brothers’ musical journey, by two months. But this hardly matters when the end result is so entertaining. Jeff and Steven are natural raconteurs, and reading the book feels like hanging out with the McDonald brothers as they reminisce about Redd Kross’ remarkable history. There are humorous anecdotes aplenty, as the band careen around the US punk underground over forty years, misbehaving, influencing everyone from the Bangles and Sonic Youth to Quinten Tarantino, and making incredible music.

Now You’re One of Us takes us through the McDonald brothers’ early years, growing up in LA and developing their musical taste and vision early on through discovering the Beatles, the New York Dolls and the Ramones and absorbing 70s TV and cult films. Jeff takes up guitar and vocals, and Steven learns bass. They started remarkably young, playing anywhere in LA that would have them and befriending the fledgling Black Flag, who they would play many shows with. A revolving cast of varied musicians pass through the band over the years, including bassist Greg Hetson and drummer John Stielow, who would join the Circle Jerks and Black Flag respectively, guitarists Robert Hecker and Eddie Kurdziel, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover. But Redd Kross – the spelling changed from Red Cross following a threatened lawsuit from the humanitarian organization – have always been very much Jeff and Steven’s musical vision. They released their punky and rough debut EP Red Cross in 1980, and their debut album Born Innocent in 1982. These recordings are closer to hardcore punk than the traditional Redd Kross sound, but already the brothers’ knack for amusing lyrics about everything from Linda Blair to Charles Manson are in place. It’s with 1987’s Neurotica, released on Big Time records, that the mature Redd Kross vision comes into being. The album is crammed full of stomping glam rock, the best tunes since Alex Chilton disbanded Big Star, and gonzo guitar playing, all held together by the McDonald brothers’ fondness for trash culture. It’s an absolute solid gold power pop classic. While it established Redd Kross’ passionate cult fandom, it baffled the culture at large. Redd Kross toured extensively, bringing the theatricality they learned from being young KISS fans to the dingy clubs and bars they played. To this day they are a monstrously fun live band. Third Eye (1990) would see the band briefly picked up by major label Atlantic, though inevitably pre-grunge they dropped Redd Kross after sales failed to live up to label expectations. Phaseshifter (1993) and Show World (1997) were released on indie This Way Up, and contain some of the band’s best music, but their power pop brilliance didn’t entirely chime with the Seattle-led alt-rock explosion – Kurt Cobain famously dismissed them for being too happy. Following Show World’s lack of commercial success the band took an indefinite hiatus, further thrown into doubt by the tragic death of then-guitarist Kurdziel. But the McDonald brothers continued making music, returning with three excellent albums, Researching the Blues (2012), Beyond the Door (2019) and the superlative double album Redd Kross (2024), and the added attention of the documentary and book. 

It's a recurring theme of the Redd Kross story that our boys always seem just out of time, just too ahead of the curve or too eccentric to break through into the mainstream success their wonderful music so clearly deserves. Playing with everyone from Black Flag to Sonic Youth, they are a key part of the US underground music scene but never quite cross over. They are a noted influence on indie big-hitters like Pavement, and their merging of punk, pop and 70s metal was hugely influential in the formation of the grunge sound. Yet they wind up in the position of supporting everyone from Stone Temple Pilots to Lemonheads, but not getting to play the same level of shows. The grunge movement led to major labels snapping up independent bands and supporting all kinds of weird and unusual music, but because Redd Kross had their poorly timed major label debut before Nirvana broke through, by the time the major labels were picking up everyone else they were wrongly seen as yesterday’s news. They were friends with Quentin Tarantino, and undoubtedly influenced his love of self-referential trashy pop culture, but the scene for Pulp Fiction that had a Redd Kross song in it was ultimately cut from the film. As a fan, it’s easy to get frustrated in the band’s stead, given that eight albums of power pop perfection ought to be enough to propel any band to legendary status, but then being overlooked has always been part of the power pop story from Big Star onwards. And to be fair, there are plenty of instances in the book of the McDonald brothers sabotaging their career through their love of pranks and crank calls, which makes for thoroughly entertaining reading but not so much for building long-term relationships with record companies or potential supporters. 

 Thoughout it all, the McDonald brothers prove entertaining company. Both come across as remarkably well grounded given all their various misadventures – there’s a harrowing sequence near the beginning where Steven gets kidnapped by an older woman. Jeff and Steven’s love for music and film shine through on every page. And the brothers have clearly reached a stage in their relationship where they are able to look back at their younger impetuousness with the distance and clarity of maturity. Epstein does an excellent job both of setting the context and in letting the brothers tell their own story. In the end, though cult adoration and influence may not have translated into commercial success, the McDonald brothers can be proud of their remarkable musical legacy, and have the freedom now to make music on their own terms. As for the fans, we always kinda believe the next record will be the one that will finally garner them the success and acclaim they so richly deserve.