Notes on Redd Kross

autopia’s children (and everybody’s)

1

There’s just something about Hawthorne.

Some call it the Liverpool of the West.

It’s a beach-adjacent township, it’s an airport-adjacent drag strip, it’s hellishly suburban in places, weirdly pastoral in places, and yet, and yet…some say you can see the Hollywood sign on a clear day.

2

The Beach Boys were the last “rock and roll” band in the pure land of the 45. American Graffiti and Shampoo both end on Bri-Fi tracks, the former to mark the end of the ‘50s, the latter to mark the end of the ‘60s. The Beach Boys are the soundtrack to Autopia and its subsequent loss of innocence. “Do you remember all the guys that gave us Rock and Roll?”

Redd Kross are the last “rock” band in the pure land of the LP. Like the Beach Boys, they represent a synthesis and a culmination as well as an ex-post-facto re-examination. Very few artists are dimensional enough to accomplish all three… Dylan did it to the folk song, Zeppelin to the electric blues. Their very presence signals the end of an era and the carving of marble heads.

3

Jeff McDonald as Warhol for the latch key generation. By refusing to repudiate the past, he “reframed” guitar rock and rock culture the way Warhol reframed Marilyn—not with ironic distance but with the spirit of worship. (Warhol allegedly got his inspiration from portraits of the saints sitting next to his mother in church.)

Redd Kross has sometimes been misread as parody but Jeff has said in interviews that he never “likes things because they’re bad” and I believe him. Others—many—tried to capture the spirit of rock in a bottle. Jeff McDonald pulled it off precisely because they were joking and he wasn’t. He’s a true devotee.

4

Steve as real live rockstar, Jeff as passionate superfan: The thing itself and a running commentary on (and love of) the thing. They actually play guitar the way others play air guitar.

Hawthorne—the nearest faraway place to a little town and idea called Hollywood. These two sons of a Hawthorne welder took the North by storm, using its own fire. “The most adventurous music springs from the liminal classes.”—Simon Reynolds

The Paisley Underground—an attempt to cling to ‘60s innocence (and wisdom) as the dark curtain of late-era capitalism falls on America.

Redd Kross—they are of Hollywood, and not. They are of the Paisley Underground, and not. They are of Rock, and not. They are of alt rock, and not. Of show biz, and not. Jeff and Steve are the Janus-face of SoCal pop culture.

5

Jeff McDonald is a kind of genius of cultural blur. He’s created two “inventions” both of which touched me on a very personal level.

First, he saw first what should have been obvious but wasn’t: that the ‘70s contained the ‘60s, that the ‘70s were, in fact, a crazy branch growing semi-wrong off the tree of the ‘60s. He found a place where the ‘60s and the ‘70s blur and divorce from chronological time. Dig his hair: One part Beatle bob, one part stadium shag.

“Beatlemania” Broadway show 1977, dust jacket disclaimer: “Not the Beatles but an incredible simulation.”

That would have been cool enough, but he pulled off an even more sublime invention: he found the place where pop culture and reality blur and divorce from physical space. The people on TV are your friends. Secretly—you feel you know them.

Bowie: “Ziggy will be more plastic than the Monkees.” Jeff pushed this plasticity beyond rational space: no matter the intent, no matter the event, there is no distinction between real and unreal rock, real and unreal life. Our generation is an extension of the TV, it’s our mother, our nanny, literally our reality check. Marshall McLuhan would dig. Also: Steely Dan “We like fake soundtrack jazz as much as real jazz.”

“We’re the dead mind babies of the TV war.”

 (Doesn’t Jeff thank Tutti from Facts of Life on Neurotica liner notes? Not Kim Fields, mind you, but “Tutti” herself, that platonic being that only “exists” inside your technicolor Zenith.)

Growing up on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1970s, what we saw on TV were often the same streets our parents drove us around in, probably in a station wagon that did not look unlike Mike Brady’s. Hollywood the idea and Hollywood the place were right outside the same car window.

6

Prehistory: LA punk (unconsciously) grew out of Busby Berkeley, RKO, MGM, the LA backdrop. It’s presentational, and it ribs itself with its own uncanny sense of self-reference, a long-standing Hollywood tradition. “Blow up Disneyland! Blow up Anaheim!”

Dig the Germs posing with a Barbara Streisand cardboard cutout (and she’s donning a Superwoman t-shirt—artifice on artifice, blonde on blonde.) To grow up in Los Angeles is to grow up with the fluid sense of Real Life as movie set.

Jeff and Steve lighting firecrackers on Lucille Ball’s lawn at 2am is the human act of breaking the television’s invisible wall, sneaking up from Hawthorne into Bel Air/Beverly Hills and announcing your existence in the most disruptive way possible. Literally: forcing fantasy’s hand into reality, a sting operation.

7

Hepburn on Fred and Ginger: “He gave her class and she gave him sex.” Jeff and Steve also share symbiotic exponential force—Jeff brings punk rage, bewitchment (did I just make that up?), and psychedelic giddiness, where Steve delivers starpower, sex appeal, and extremely strong musicianship. The Lovedolls roles boil it down to a funny pair of essences: Jeff as Manson-like homeless freak singing TV commercials on the boardwalk, Steve as slick image conscious Fowley/Spector/David Lee Roth on the make.

Steve Jobs on the Beatles: “They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts.”

8

You can’t talk about Redd Kross without entering the “corridors of gender”. At a glance they’re soft boys, glamor boys, Sixties Peter Pans occasionally leaning into an energy that verges on fey. But there’s also something tenacious and very male about the McDonalds and when they fuel inject the music (see: motorcross dad?) they’re at their best.

English shoegazer audiences reportedly went ga-ga when RK took the stage, like lonely school marms who’ve never before had a confident lover. 

RK have sometimes made the mistake of underplaying this aggressive side and they’re at their least convincing when they aim for Clean & Reasonable. And yet their ability to juxtapose dirty glitter with clean harmony is part of what pushed them beyond the pack. When they used to belt out “Who Loves the Sun” (VU of all things) all of a sudden – wow, these guys became a real singing group.

Rodney: What chicks are you guys into these days? Steve: Cloris Leachman is really hot.

9

“My name is Robert I like to boogie and when I boogie I really do my thing!” Followed by raging solo. McDonalds copped (African American?) high school Drill Squad shtick for their Variety Arts Center show and blew away the crowd. Every Redd Kross show is, at some level, a high school battle of the bands where they aim to “blow away” their peers. Even as middle-aged men, they jam with the “full on” commitment of kids putting on their first show.

10

Like Warhol, Jeff is a kind of warlock, a conjurer, even forbidding at times (“can I wish you away?”) but full of surprises—bizarro mini-movies and soundscape pieces that would be at home in a Chelsea gallery. Steve is like a charming, exuberant boy stoked to discover that his science experiment has blown the door off the family garage. They are different of course, but like all siblings they share something nobody can name.

Can you imagine if Lennon and McCartney had been blood brothers?

11

From the Map of Disneyland 1976: Monsanto’s Adventure Thru Inner Space sits at the delta of Tomorrowland, caddy corner to the America the Beautiful movie (Bicentennial Edition) in 360 and the Tomorrowland Stage where groups like Papa Doo Run Run, the Fab Four, and the All-new Mickey Mouse Club (featuring future Facts of Lifer Lisa Whelchel) perform. At the far end of Tomorrowland, America Sings, the all-animal animatronic puppet show, follows the history of our national hits from “Yankee Doodle” to “Joy to the World.” And beyond that, Autopia, the final destination. Designs for Tomorrowland began in 1957—the land itself was to be set in the far-off year of 1986. (!) No, actually, you know what? Let’s type out that mindblow little factoid again, because it contains the secret electron that spins at the heart of our mad youth: Designs for Tomorrowland began in 1957—the land itself was to be set in the far-off year of 1986.

But where do you go when the days of future pass?

12

“High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course Baroque art…true High Camp has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp about love…” – Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening, 1954

13

Huge Wonder / Small Wonder: What happened to the sitcom, why did it lose its cultural mooring? In a nutshell, the world caught up with the McDonald brothers.

14

I can’t prove it in a court of law, but there’s no Quentin Tarantino without Redd Kross. From the South Bay petri dish, QT says that the “Blow You a Kiss in the Wind” episode is the greatest moment in television history…and it’s impossible to view Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without thinking about the peculiar relationship Gen X has with the crumbling tower of “show biz,” Manson, and the TV—a relationship that Jeff, Steve, and Dave Markey helped concretize. On some quantum cosmic plane, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a Redd Kross Production.

15

At the premiere for the original Hairspray I was seated directly behind Deborah Harry and Sonny Bono. She’s my very favorite singer, and he’s…well, he’s Sonny fuckin’ Bono—the Last Ambassador of High Show Biz. (Incidentally someone once told me Sonny was discovered by Phil Spector when he delivered roast beef sandwiches to the studio. I can’t corroborate that but refuse to not believe it.) Anyway, point is I was sitting five inches from Debbie Harry and Sonny Bono—you know I was starstruck.  

But when the McDonalds walked into the movie theater, the atmosphere changed. The starpower froze up, heads turned. These two dudes weren’t just (almost) famous, they were keepers of the flame, the ‘60s flame, the ‘70s flame, the Utopian flame, the hair-shaking head-banging rock-music-as-saviour flame, the thing everybody misses in their kishkes.

16

Jeff and Janet at the record store on LSD laughing at the Marie Osmond album cover – Marie’s eye is slightly askew and it makes her look half-nuts. This little vignette though is Jeff’s magic par excellance—he somehow manages to cast his gaze on the place where pop culture is askew, telegraphing unintentional absurdities. It isn’t a “joke.” It’s more like Henri Bergson’s accidental humor…mechanical man disrupted by animal nature.

17

Sticker on the cover of Phaseshifter: “Warning: This is a Redd Kross album.”

18

Like all greats, Redd Kross are also notable for what they don’t do. They don’t drown in solipsistic gloom (Nirvana), they don’t virtue signal (U2, Pearl Jam), they don’t front that they’re stereotype bad boys (Guns ‘n’ Roses), they don’t trade in nihilism and Armageddon (Sonic Youth, Jane’s Addiction), and they don’t mug for the cameras like minstrels while leaning on black culture (RHCP.) They make no excuses or apologies, need no “mature” context.

They’re like the MGM lion: rock for rock’s sake.

19

The seeds of post-war prosperity were planted and, by the late ‘50s, America blossomed like a flower garden. One long stretch of pop music magic as far as the eye could see, decades of it. Jeff’s genius was to treat it as a kid would, without the need for categories. Hayley Mills, the Bags, Fleetwood Mac, the Shaggs, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Partridge Family, the Who, the theme from Good Times—like that other great McDonald, Ross McDonald put it, “It’s all one case.”

On the one hand, it doesn’t seem like there are “privileged texts” in Jeff McDonald’s world. But on the other, he isn’t afraid of the marble heads either. He calls the first live Stones LP his favorite punk album and holds Creedence in the same esteem as the Cramps. Somebody smartly wrote that Redd Kross finds similarities where others see differences.   

There’s a powerful side effect: Without ever stating it outright, they exposed something bigger than pop culture, something absolutely life-affirming, re-affirming: Stop pretending the child inside has died. Stop pretending your heart doesn’t soar when the harmonies kick in. They snatched our innocence from the jaws of cynicism and death.

20

There’s another curious dualism with Redd Kross. Every new LP does represent a surprising leap in growth…yet the core “invention” is right there on The Siren and in some ways it’s never been topped. The “meta-rock” of Cover Band. The Cali history-surfing of Annette’s Got the Hits. The Clorox girls are blonde on blonde and Poseur is across the street from Famous Amos cookies, down the street from LA Xpress, around the corner from Art Laboe’s Original Sound, the delta of the Sunset Strip. That’s Redd Kross—the crossroads of rock music.  

21

“Driving down the highway in my Trans Am custom T-top car.”

The dream of Autopia.

The SoCal dream.

The rock dream.

It wasn’t “just another episode” in the 20th century.

It was an awesome dream of total liberation.

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