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| The Sofia Coppola, Roman Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola connections to Redd Kross founders Jeffrey McDonald and Steve McDonald (in the Hawthorne T-shirt) are revealed in Andrew Reich’s campy and quick-witted Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story Photo: Born Innocent |
Andrew Reich’s campy and quick-witted Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story (executive produced by Josh Braun and Dan Braun) on Jeffrey McDonald and Steve McDonald takes us into their creative and private worlds through insightful on-camera interviews with the brothers and their parents, Jeff’s wife Charlotte Caffey (the Go-Gos, whose music was the linchpin for the Broadway production of Head Over Heels, directed by Michael Mayer), their daughter Astrid McDonald (The Side Eyes, Ze Malibu Kids), and Steve’s wife Anna Waronker (that dog, her father Lenny, when he was head of A&R for Warner Bros. is credited in Garret Price’s Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary as discovering Christopher Cross in 1979).
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| Andrew Reich with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze: “I remember I bought a lot of records at 99 Records in New York!” |
Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, who had a 92Y Sonic Life conversation with Anthony DeCurtis on Sunday); Vicki Peterson (The Bangles); Keith Morris (Circle Jerks, also seen in Rex Miller’s unrelenting Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos); Greg Ginn (Black Flag); Jeff Ament (Pearl Jam), and Kim Gordon (Body/Head, Sonic Youth), plus a plethora of former band members, especially drummers, all have their say.
Music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman had in the shop 99 (at 99 MacDougal Street), the first Jeff McDonald/Steve McDonald Red Cross 12” (with Greg Hetson, Ron Reyes on Robbie Fields’ Posh Boy, 1981)
The McDonalds’ explorations into the world of pop and camp culture include Elizabeth Montgomery as cousin Serena in Bewitched; David Cassidy (The Partridge Family); The Brady Bunch, and Annette Funicello movies.
From Death Valley, Andrew Reich joined us for an in-depth conversation on Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi, where are you?
Andrew Reich: Hi, I’m in Death Valley. A road trip, a little family vacation, so that’s where you’re catching me.
AKT: I’ve never had a Zoom with Death Valley before! Is it hot?
AR: No, it’s gorgeous, it’s actually a high of 65, beautiful weather.
AKT: I want to start by giving you a compliment, because most music documentaries are just so dreadfully humourless.
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| Jeffrey McDonald with Steve McDonald in the early Redd Kross days Photo: Al Flipside |
AR: Yes, it’s true. I really wanted this to be … I knew this could be funny because Jeff and Steven McDonald from Redd Kross are really funny. And I’m a comedy writer. I was always going to be focused on: where can we get a laugh? I’ve seen it with a lot of audiences at this point and it plays mostly like a comedy.
AKT: It made me realise what is wrong with the genre of music documentaries. So thank you for that!
AR: That’s the greatest compliment, thank you.
AKT: I also liked very much how city planning and the construction of the freeway came into it, everything about the California town of Hawthorne and its history. Did you always know that you wanted to include that?
AR: That part of their story is one of the really fascinating parts to me. The fact that they’re this band of brothers from Hawthorne, which if anyone knows Hawthorne, it’s because that’s where The Beach Boys are from, the most famous American band of brothers. I had heard them talk in interviews when they were starting the band and rehearsing, that they were in the last inhabited house in their neighbourhood.
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| Jeffrey McDonald and Steve McDonald in Redd Kross singing Stay Away Photo: Born Innocent |
The freeway was coming through and the way that worked, a lot of people don’t think about this, but the city governments just used eminent domain and said, hey we’re taking your land, we’re taking your house. You’ve got a couple of options, we can just buy it out from you or we can move your physical house to somewhere else and you can still live in that house if you could find another plot of land to plop it down.
And their parents were the last holdouts. So they’re rehearsing, playing their kind of ragged punk rock with the garage door wide open because there was no one in the neighbourhood to bother. Everyone else is gone. There’s something about that and the idea that they were going around to the abandoned houses sifting through stuff.
There’s a magpie quality to Redd Kross. I feel like they sifted through pop culture from the previous decades and plucked what they liked and put it to use. So there’s something about the fact that they were physically actually going through the ruins of the previous decades. It’s a story of these brothers and this band but it’s a story of Los Angeles over the last four and a half decades, too. And the freeway construction is a big part of that.
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| Elizabeth Montgomery as cousin Serena performing I'll Blow You a Kiss in the Wind in Bewitched |
AKT: You can feel the inertia of the Real, the Fifties suburbs are still there and they are still very much present in the brothers, the Fifties, the Sixties, and what they watched on television. I love the clip that you unearthed from Bewitched: “I’ll blow you a kiss in the wind!” Elizabeth Montgomery is so wonderful and the influence is just great.
AR: I know, and for them to recognise, to just be watching Bewitched like so many of us did, and hear that song that cousin Serena plays, and say, that’s a great song, we should cover that song because it’s so good! That was the record that I first heard of theirs, Teen Babes from Monsanto, with that cover. I didn’t realise it was from Bewitched until much later. I just loved it. I just loved their version of that song.
I didn’t know why they said “A little light, a little atmosphere.” But when you see the clip, it’s like she’s using her witchy power to put on a little light show. Everyone else is dismissing this as silly, as dumb reruns of some dumb TV show and they were like, no! It’s a great song, written by Boyce and Hart who are great songwriters and we are goin to cover that song.
AKT: It’s where they come from, their education, too, as for many of us. I loved Bewitched reruns as a child. They have a very healthy attitude towards pop culture. They don’t care if someone calls it trash when they think it’s important.
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| Jeffrey McDonald with Steve McDonald, looking at their record collection Photo: Born Innocent |
AR: It’s very much like Andy Warhol painting a soup can. It’s a Pop Art move. For some people it might feel calculated, if they were art school kids doing this. But these are just two beach rats from the South Bay doing it so instinctually.
AKT: “Airport rats” they call themselves.
AR: “Airport rats” exactly, just hanging out at the airport, which is also wild to me that there was a time where you could just hang out at an airport just for fun. It’s a real Pop Art kind of move that feels very Warhol to me. But it wasn’t that they were doing it because they were so aware of Warhol.
AKT: No, it feels fresh and natural. Also the fact that you got so many of their childhood friends in the film! The 8th grade graduation girl!
AR: The party host!
AKT: Did you ask them to give you the names of all their school friends?
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| 99 Records - Glenn Branca Lesson No. 1 (99-01 EP) produced and mastered by Ed Bahlman Photo: Ed Bahlman |
AR: Well, there are a couple of friends who were pretty much still in their lives. Childhood friends who became roadies for them. And then one of their first gigs was playing this 8th grade graduation party where they invited their friends, Black Flag, to play as well. One of them was like, I’m Facebook friends with Lisa Stangl, who hosted that party. I got in touch with her that way.
She drove to Hawthorne that day so we could meet up. I wish that we could have gotten in the house. You can just see this Seventies den and imagine Redd Kross and Black Flag playing in that little living room. I think a lot of music documentaries are just filled with rock critics talking about: this band is important because I say so and I’m a Rolling Stone writer.
AKT: Very true!
AR: I just wanted eye witnesses. I wanted people who had first-person accounts of whatever the various moments in their story were. For the most part, the people that appear were there at some key moment early on or in Seattle when they played the famous show that everyone came to. They are not just there because they are in Pearl Jam, they’re there because they opened for Redd Kross in 1987.
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| Jeffrey McDonald with Steve McDonald in flight, 2019 Photo: Tony Molina Filmworks 2019 |
AKT: At their first official nightclub performance [at the Hong Kong Cafe] David Bowie was in the audience?
AR: I know! Unfortunately I couldn’t get him to talk about that. Late into the making of it, pretty far along, Greg Hetson, who was the original guitarist, who then formed the Circle Jerks and was in Bad Religion, he said: I think my dad took a bunch of colour slides at our very first show at the Hong Kong Cafe and I think I can find those. I was like, oh my god, that’s incredible! And I get them, thinking, hey maybe he turned around and got a shot of David Bowie. He didn’t. Maybe at that point Greg’s dad didn’t know who David Bowie was. So sadly, no.
AKT: You got the 8th grade graduation, you got to be happy about that. I have someone here who would like to say hello. He actually had the first Redd Kross [known then as Red Cross] release at his shop, 99. This is Ed Bahlman.
AR: Oh my gosh! I used to shop at 99!
Ed Bahlman: Hi Andrew! The boys must be so happy with your documentary.
AR: I will say, I think they really are. I know sometimes subjects of documentaries get a little… but they’re very happy with it. The warts and all stuff they’re okay with.
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| Jeffrey McDonald with Steve McDonald at the Santa Monica pier Photo: Born Innocent |
EB: When I had their first release in the shop, I didn’t appreciate them. They don’t come across on the early recordings as well as they come across in your film.
AR: I think it was the third record, that covers record, Teen Babes from Monsanto, where I clicked in. Like you, I’d heard those earlier records and I was like, no. Then that record really clicked with me and now I love all of them. I remember I bought a lot of records at 99 Records in New York!
EB: It’s great to see you. Where was Thurston interviewed?
AR: It’s closed now, but at the Rhino Records in Claremont.
EB: Teen Babes from Monsanto, as Lou Barlow [Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Folk Implosion] says: “It’s the way they play it, it’s so off the wall. I just don’t think we’ve caught up to it yet.”
AR: People that weren’t in that moment of what hardcore was like, because that’s the scene they’re coming out of, that regimented hardcore scene that has very strict rules and Redd Kross just blew up all these rules, growing their hair, wearing kind of glammy clothes, embracing kind of schlock, Camp culture. All of that was so against the grain of the punk rock world that I was coming up in and Kurt Cobain was coming up in. That had a huge influence on anyone who was following underground music in the early Eighties. It was like: You can do that? You can put on a show? Not that Nirvana did. Nirvana was much more like, we show up in our street clothes and we’re like the Minutemen version of things.
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| Redd Kross Photo: Steve Applefford |
EB: Another great juxtaposition you have is showing Axl Rose.
AR: He stole the dance moves. Obviously all of those glammy metal bands that became hair metal, they all were going to Redd Kross shows and they were taking certain things from them. But then Redd Kross, because they looked like those bands, did get lumped in and they hated it because they were such a different thing. They were not just taking style cues from The New York Dolls but musical cues. Maybe a lot of those Sunset Strip bands took some fashion cues from The New York Dolls, not really musical. They didn’t sound like the Dolls.
AKT: Steven says this very interesting sentence: “The devil never came knocking at my door.” The deals with the devil didn’t come maybe partially because the devil knew to stay away from them.
AR: Yeah, they never had to make that decision. Will you make this really overly produced pop whatever? Will you make a Bon Jovi-sounding record? They would never have done it anyway! But he’s right, they never had the dilemma because no one was knocking. The Faustian bargain was not being made.
AKT: In that context, I noticed in the end credits there is someone thanked by the name of Tannis Root [remember the amulet in Rosemary’s Baby?] Apropos devil?
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| Ed Bahlman having drinks with David Bowie at The Bottom Line, 1977 Photo: Ed Bahlman |
AR: Yes! That’s Bill Mooney and Barbara Herring who run a graphic design company in Chapel Hill, called Tannis Root. There’s a lot of classic Redd Kross shirts that are now extremely collectible. They sell for like $600 on eBay now. These designs with Cher, or Jimmie Walker or Sammy Davis Jr., those are Tannis Root designs and they do merchandise for bands. So Tannis Root is not from Faust, it’s from that.
EB: You also show what good musicians they are. They could have gone in that direction to give the major labels what they wanted.
AR: Yes, and the moment when they signed to Atlantic, that grunge sound that they had helped pioneer had started to bubble up. It hadn’t made it to the mainstream, it was starting to. Jeff at that point was really into the 1910 FruitGum Company and the Archies. He was like, I want to make a bubble gum record. That’s what he was into. He’s just going to do what he wanted to do. He wasn’t like, our sound is maybe starting to become commercial, let’s stick with it. No, that was never going to enter into his calculation.
EB: You deserve a lot of praise for how you handled the parents.
AR: That story is really dark and comes at such an odd place when you’re thinking about a traditional act structure of a movie. It comes in the first act and we’re having all these laughs, like you were saying. It’s funny, this eleven-year-old kid in this band and it’s all so funny, until it’s not. To ask the parents about that was very uncomfortable. You can hear me asking the question.
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| Jeffrey McDonald with Steve McDonald (in The Side Eyes T-shirt) on the couch Photo: Born Innocent |
I’m so hesitant to ask it. I don’t want to bring up painful things, but what I was concerned about, telling that story without the voice of the parents, is that you may think that they were neglectful parents in some way and that’s what happened. That’s so not the case - they were loving, great, supportive parents. Still bad stuff happened that I feel they compartmentalised away afterwards. And you can see how painful it is for them to talk about it because it’s not that they talked about it a lot.
AKT: The big-eyes paintings that Robert Hecker has and that both of the brothers have displayed behind them in some shots - is that just something they adore?
AR: Yes, that’s a little Easter egg. If you looked on the back cover of Third Eye, those three paintings are on there. Their friend Vicki Berndt, who is an artist, they commissioned sort of Keane-style big eye paintings of the three of them that are the back cover art. They all have them. So I thought the Redd Kross fans will recognise what these are and for everyone else it’s kind of an intriguing thing. Those are paintings of each of those three band members in a Keane style. They’re not Keane paintings.
EB: And that Jeff is married to Charlotte Caffey, the Go-Go who wrote “We Got the Beat”!
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| Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story poster |
AR: Yes, Charlie Caffey. There’s no end to the fascinating aspects.
EB: 99 was the first shop in all of North America to have it [The seven inch single on Stiff Records].
AR: Oh wow!
EB: Stiff UK. Nobody looked to sign The Go-Gos.
AR: I know, they had to go over there and The Specials had to give them some credit.
AKT: Is the daughter Astrid named after Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstocking?
AR: That’s a good question. I never asked them. I’ll have to find out.
AKT: Thank you so much for this!
EB: Stay in touch!
AR: I’d love it! It’s so cool to see you. I’m sure I bought records from you back in the day. This is great, thank you both so much!
Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is screening in cinemas across the US.
