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It’s hard to get a word in edgeways. Jeff and Steven McDonald could host their own talk show. Over the space of an hour in their company, they finish each other’s sentences, trade pop culture trivia, get a bit prickly, get over it, and laugh uproariously.
The brothers formed Redd Kross in 1979, when Jeff was 15 and Steven was 11. Their first show was a house party, opening for Los Angeles punk icons Black Flag. Legend has it that their first gig in a real club was attended by David Bowie.
“Well, that’s the folklore, anyway,” says Steven, who is now 58.
“I mean, we didn’t jam with him or anything,” says Jeff, 62.
“In the film version of our story we would have,” says Steven. “We’d play the riff to Rebel Rebel, and someone would go up to the microphone and say, ‘There’s someone very special in the audience tonight, and we’d like to invite him up onstage.’ And we’d play a pitch-perfect version of the song with Bowie on vocals.”
They both laugh at the idea. But the truth is that the real history of Redd Kross is wild enough without making any embellishments.
And now there is actually a film about them. It’s called Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story, directed by former Friends show runner Andrew Reich.
They grew up in Hawthorne, the Los Angeles suburb best known as the place that spawned the Beach Boys. As we see in the documentary, Hawthorne was not exactly a Californian paradise.
“It was a planned suburb and a very boring place,” says Jeff. “There was nothing to do and we were basically trapped. It was like being in East Berlin until we were old enough to drive.”
“And there was urban decay,” adds Steven. “The 105 Freeway was a project that went on for decades. They would buy entire tracts of houses to be knocked down, so there were these half-decimated neighbourhoods with vacant houses. Our house was taken by the freeway, and so was Brian Wilson’s family home.”
‘It was considered strange to smile on stage back then. But the stage is a joyful place for me.’
Jeff McDonald, Redd KrossWith that backdrop, it’s no surprise that the brothers found an escape in music. They loved The Beatles and pop radio, but when Jeff discovered The Ramones and The Runaways, he was galvanised, thinking to himself: “Oh, we can do this! You don’t have to be Jimmy Page to be in a band!”
He took on guitar and lead vocal duties and enlisted 11-year-old Steven on bass. The ensuing decades found them as Zelig-like characters, adjacent to – but never fully-fledged members of – a number of music scenes: punk, power-pop, the Paisley Underground, grunge, alternative rock.
As Dale Crover of The Melvins notes in the documentary, after a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain saw them play, he said: “These guys are too happy. Why are they so happy?”
“It was considered strange to smile on stage back then,” says Jeff. “But the stage is a joyful place for me. I’d be amazed when we pulled off certain things and that would always show on my face. We just weren’t afraid to show what a good time we were having.”
They embraced pop and trash culture, lionising The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family and schlocky made-for-TV movies such as 1974’s Born Innocent. They also bucked the dress code trends of the day, whether it was punk or grunge.
Instead, they blurred gender lines, wearing make-up and adopting a dayglo glam/trash look that spanned the ’60s and ‘70s. Rumour has it that members of the burgeoning ‘80s LA glam metal scene, such as Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses, attended their shows and took note.
“I remember we were on the British TV show The Word in 1994, just before Oasis made their television debut,” says Steven. “I’ve seen it on YouTube since then, and we looked like we were opening for Slade. I think Jeff was wearing a blue lamé jumpsuit.”
“I was!” exclaims Jeff. “I styled it after Suzi Quatro’s jumpsuit.”
“We definitely didn’t fit in with what was happening, but at the same time we weren’t seeking anyone’s approval,” says Steven. “When I look back at that show in 1994, and I know I’m biased here, but we slayed all of them.”
The documentary touches on a particularly bizarre and troubling moment in the brothers’ history. At the age of 13, Steven was kidnapped by a woman almost twice his age, who had allegedly entered a physical relationship with him. He disappeared for three months. The brothers and their parents are interviewed in the film about this, but you’re left with a lingering sense that they’ve never fully dealt with it.
“I decided to talk about it in the film, but I was a little protective of my parents,” says Steven. “Luckily it took them so long to finish making the film that my son was 15 by the time he saw it. I basically told him what to expect when we were in the car driving to go and watch it.
“In terms of what happened, I’m still not really sure why I was vulnerable to that bullshittery and was susceptible to such manipulation.”
Something else that is touched on in the film is Jeff’s drug addiction, which he kicked in 1997.
“Luckily I came out the other side,” he says. “I didn’t go too deeply into the graphic aspects of my drug addiction in the film because it can get really romanticised. It wasn’t Keith Richards cool or Johnny Thunders cool. It was a painful time in my life.”
Alongside the film is a memoir co-written with Dan Epstein called Now You’re One Of Us: The Incredible Story Of Redd Kross, so there’s been a lot of looking back for the McDonald brothers of late. But despite a hiatus from 1997 to 2012, the band endures.
In fact, after they wrote the song Born Innocent for the closing credits of the film, they got on a roll and ended up with enough to fill a self-titled double album, which was released in 2024.
On film – and even during this interview – it’s obvious that the brothers have their differences.
“Steven is an intense Gemini, which means he’s hyper-analytical, while I’m very spontaneous and impulsive,” says Jeff. “When we disagree on something, we do butt heads, but we’re not like the Gallagher brothers. I’ve been pissed with him and we’ve got into fights, but I’ve never hated him.”
“Being the younger brother, I’m always pushing to change things,” says Steven. “Jeff is more globally progressive than me, but when it comes to the band he can be remarkably conservative and likes things to stay the same.”
“What do you mean by that?” says Jeff.
“Things have to shift sometimes,” says Steven. “It’s like tectonic plates in the earth having to shift or we’d be a dead planet, like Mars. Relationships are like that, too.”
“I rest my case,” says Jeff, shrugging. “He’s the tectonic plates, grinding away until things explode. We just think differently sometimes.”
The brothers still live in Los Angeles, just an eight-minute drive separating their homes. Steven is married to songwriter and composer Anna Waronker, who is daughter of producer Lenny Waronker and brother of drummer Joey Waronker. And Jeff is married to Charlotte Caffey of The Go-Go’s.
Steven, who also plays bass in The Melvins, spent five years in veteran art-pop band Sparks with brothers Russell and Ron Mael. He remembers an interview with Ron, who is now 80, when he was asked why he still wanted to play music at his age. He replied: “I always have something to prove to myself.”
“I think that’s a really good quality to have,” says Steven. “I still have things I want to prove, too. I want us to make another record now.”
“A triple album!” says Jeff, clapping his hands together.
“Sure!” says his brother. “Why not?”
And they both laugh.
Redd Kross’ national tour includes shows at Sydney’s Paddington RSL on March 7 and Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre on March 14. Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story screens at Sydney’s Ritz Cinemas on March 7 at 3pm and Melbourne’s Lido Cinemas on March 14 at 3pm, and include Q&As with the McDonald brothers.
