Legendary California punk rock band Redd Kross is coming to Louisville’s Zanzabar on Wednesday, July 31, touring behind their latest album, the self-titled Redd Kross. Formed in 1979, the band is having a huge year for their 45th anniversary, celebrating with a documentary, memoir, new album and, of course, a tour. We had the opportunity to talk with founding member and bass guitarist Steven McDonald, the younger brother of Jeff McDonald, who together make up the duo that is the core of Redd Kross.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LEO: You and your brother both write songs for the band. Do you each write independently and then bring them to the other, or do they come along together?
Steven: All different incarnations. Sometimes we start songs individually and finish them together, sometimes we start songs together and finish them together, sometimes we start songs together and finish them separately, sometimes we just write on our own. On this record, we had 10 songs we viewed as a 50/50 partnership, and then there were eight that we viewed as solo writing credits. I wrote five; Jeff wrote three. But, I mean, even those ones were somewhat collaborative, but if you finished lyrics on your own then that’s kind of what happened: It would be your own song.
LEO: Tell me a little bit about the origins of the band. You started this when you were really young, right?
Steven: I was 12, well 11, actually. When we started I was 11, but I was 12 when we had our first recording.
LEO: And you opened for Black Flag early on as well, right?
Steven: Yeah, early for Black Flag as well. They didn’t really have any fans either.
LEO: What was it like playing in that sort of environment as a 12 year old?
Steven: It wasn’t like what you would imagine it now. It wasn’t this sweaty pit of, you know, hardcore. They were not known, but they were still very loud and cantankerous, there was that. The very first show that we did was an eighth-grade graduation party in our hometown of Hawthorne, California, and Black Flag played the party, too, and we got them the gig. It was an eighth-grade graduation, but I was graduating from sixth grade myself. I was 11, and the crowd felt emboldened to boo us and heckle us because they were our age, so we learned how to deal with an antagonistic teenage crowd from early beginnings. It was in a living room of a suburban house, and when Black Flag loaded in all their scrappy gear into the living room after us and proceeded to turn it up really loud, all the teenagers that had felt emboldened to heckle us just left, they were just completely freaked out. They were probably in their early 20s, Black Flag, and it became a private performance for us in the living room. I always describe the living room as the first 10 minutes in Boogie Nights, like Dirk Diggler’s childhood home, the ’70s West Coast tract house, Black Flag, and adolescent Redd Kross.
LEO: You were very much a punk band with stuff like “Linda Blair,” which, by the way, I love that song, but now the band has kind of transitioned into more of this powerpop sound with more harmonies. Was it a conscious choice to step out of punk, or was it more of a natural transition into your current sound?
Steven: I think we maintain a punk spirit forever, but more stylistically, I think it’s just a matter of evolution. I was 11 when I started, and I had been playing for six months when I wrote “Annette’s Got the Hits.” We were never really a hardcore band, and hardcore has a lot of definitions and many eras. I was also in a band called OFF! from 2009 to 2019, and they’re like a hardcore revival band. While I was in OFF! I learned about how there was hardcore in the ’80s, and there was hardcore in the ’90s, and there was hardcore in the ’00s, and all these eras have their own set of rituals and their own things that define it. With Redd Kross, we were inspired [by a lot]. My brother, he’s three years older than me, and he saw the Beatles when he was two. We never had a life without Meet the Beatles. “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout,” that’s punk also in a kind of way. That’s always been a big part of who we are as people, and when the Ramones came around, for my brother Jeff, it was like rediscovering Meet the Beatles, so it all ties together. It’s just this primitive way of expressing yourself that is not weighed down with too many sophisticated chord structures, etc., but it’s still very melodic. Maybe our early stuff like “Linda Blair” wasn’t overtly melodic, but it wasn’t necessarily that we were making choices about styles; we were just doing what we could do and expressing ourselves how we could. But over the years, it’s been 45 now off and on, we took one nine year long hiatus from the late ’90s into the mid-’00s, but it’s bound to happen. You’re bound to learn how to play your guitar. You’re bound to learn how to harmonize. You’re bound to emulate your core idols and stuff like that. Sorry for the long-winded answer, but the point is it was never an explicit desire to hop any genre. We aren’t thinking with marketing in mind.
LEO: Going off that, the new album is self-titled. It’s usually the first album of a band that is self-titled, a sort of statement of “this is the band,” so I thought that this kind of presented as almost a rebirth of the band, a new statement on your current identity. Is that accurate?
Steven: I do feel like it’s an identity thing. We’re an underground band forever. We’re like punk famous, and if you know, I guess you’re in some sort of club. When someone hears us for the first time, and is like, “What should I listen to?” I’m always a little, “Oh, I don’t know” because everything is so different and spread over 45 years in order to get a sense of who we are. But now, I go to this one. It’s got a little bit of everything; it’s gotten the closest to what I think of as who we are and where I’d like people to go f irst. We’ve also got a documentary now and will hopefully be released by the end of the year, and it kind of helped to inform the making of this record. I kept thinking that if this documentary comes out, maybe there will be this whole other section of the population that will get exposed to us, and where do they go, so I hope they land on this record. We were in a reflective mode, we had done tons of interviews for the documentary and tons of interviews for a memoir that is coming out in October, so it’s been a crazy time of reflecting, and that has made its way into the lyrical content of the album. It felt like a bit of a mission statement of who we are. I’m also writing now more than I have before, and I finished a few on my own, so it does feel like kind of a debut for me.
LEO: Earlier you mentioned the Beatles and the Ramones, what other artists influenced the sound specifically on the new album? I think I heard a little Big Star in there?
Steven: All that stuff is just a part of our DNA at this point. Big Star I got into in the late ’80s. I first heard them from the Bangles because they used to cover “September Gurls.” Big Star was a very underground band when they came out in ’74 and I was seven, so I wasn’t exposed to them. But I took a big dive into those three records, and now they’re just a part of who I am. I have pretty broad taste, but now I listen to a lot of what my 15-year-old son plays me in the car, and he has even broader taste. He hasn’t really dug into Redd Kross yet. I keep hoping the record will get reviewed in something he reads, and he’ll be impressed by us. I made a mixtape when I was touring with the Melvins in 2023 when I was writing a lot, and its Kinks, Stones, Beatles, Stones, some soul music, but hopefully we’re adding our own thing, our own experiences into that brew as well.
LEO: As you mentioned, you’re doing a lot of stuff for Redd Kross this year. How does it feel doing this 45 years since you started at the age of 12?
Steven: The big thing is that it’s about my partnership with my brother. Like I said, Jeff and I took a hiatus in ’97 and started back up in earnest, but it was never my predominant concern in 2006. I’ve done a lot of different things: I’ve produced records. I’ve been in a bunch of bands. I’ve been a musician for hire. I’ve never stopped, but it hasn’t always been Redd Kross. Once we went on hiatus in ’97, I had to make it my passion project, but not my predominant thing. Nowadays I’m always hoping I can turn it into my job, a permanent, full-time job. But then there’s also the sibling thing, and there’s friction. It’s never easy. Any collaboration, any band, is always like a dysfunctional family. There’s always stuff that pushes each other’s buttons. It’s always a learning process. I’m interested in getting more and more functional. One of the ways I can gauge that is by if we are able to function, we’re able to make things because when you can’t function production stops. So I think the fact that we put together the record, a double record, and we’ve never had an hour’s worth of music like that, and it seems like a positive direction in that functioning direction. Now we’re on tour, it’s our first headlining tour of the U.S. that’s this extensive, we had yet to do the classic six or seven weeks. Last night, for instance, my brother’s battery pack died in his wireless system mid-song, and we actually played songs without him. It’s trial by fire, and how you weather these surprises can be an example of growth or no growth, step backward or step forward.
LEO: Thanks for the interview. I’m excited for the band to come to Louisville on the tour.
Steven: We have been to Louisville a few times in the last decade. We played that big festival Louder Than Life when we did a tour opening for the Melvins, who I play with also. It’s funny, at Louder Than Life, they give you a Louisville Slugger, a personalized one, and my wife actually keeps that under the bed. Anyways, I guess I would say we have a very personal connection with the city of Louisville, and all dysfunction and function aside, we’re having a good time on tour, and the show promises to be a lot of fun.
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