What were you doing at age 12? I can tell you what I was doing. Living in a one traffic light town in South Central Pennsylvania, playing backyard football with my brother, sister, and neighborhood kids, plowing through all 167 paperbacks in Ballantine Books Illustrated History of WWII, and serving as co-founder and vice president of the Anti-Orioles Association, a two-person organization (my older brother was president) dedicated to the hatred of the Baltimore Orioles.
Meanwhile, across the county in Hawthorne, California (home of the Beach Boys!) middle-schooler Steven McDonald was playing in a hard core punk band called Red Cross, whose first gig was opening for Black Flag. Steve’s band mates included older brother Jeff on vocals, Greg Hetson (who would go on to the Circle Jerks and Bad Religion) on guitar, and Ron Reyes (who would become the second of the three pre-Rollins vocalists of Black Flag) on drums.
After being threatened with a lawsuit by a certain international vampiric blood-sucking organization sharing the same name, Red Cross changed their name to Redd Kross, but not before releasing their first record, the eponymous EP “Red Cross,” in 1980. Meanwhile they were playing gigs in Orange County, whose hardcore scene was infamous for its ultraviolence. The McDonald brothers, who were friendly and smart and too busy sponging up the pop culture references that would inform their subsequent albums, thought it was all pretty stupid. Much as the Beastie Boys, who were undergoing a crash course in pop culture on the other side of the right coast, likely felt about NYC’s fist-to-the-face hardcore scene.
Anyway, “Red Cross” is a great little record, six songs with a total running time exactly one-minute and 22 seconds shy of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” But it’s far cooler than “Stairway to Heaven” because instead of bustles in hedgerows and spring cleans for the May queen, “Red Cross” includes songs about cover bands, hating high school, girls who use Clorox Bleach to lighten their hair (not a good idea!) and various and sundry other important cultural issues. The piper may indeed lead us to reason, but who needs reason when they’ve got Annette Funicello?
Hardcore’s friendliest band open “Red Cross” with Hetson’s “Cover Band,” a one-minute and 20 second blast of energy featuring the dual vocals of the McDonald brothers. For a band that would go on to cover songs by everyone from the Partridge Family, Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, and Charles Manson, Red Cross’ take on cover bands is brutally hilarious—the band in their song listens to Kiss (who Red Cross themselves would go on to cover), are proud of their Marshall stacks, and declare “we can’t write for shit/Because we’re illiterate.” On a side note, Hetson would swipe the song when he moved on to the Circle Jerks, changing the lyrics and renaming it “Live Fast, Die Young.” The Circle Jerks did the same with other songs by both Black Flag and Red Cross, a tendency that led Jeff McDonald to dub them the “hardcore Monkees.”
Follow-up “Annette’s Got the Hits” is a kissing cousin of the Riviera’s “California Sun”—later to be covered in hilarious fashion by the Dictators—and has the feel of a secret agent TV show theme song. The “Annette” in the song is—I think—original Mouseketeer turned pop singer and beach movie vixen Annette Funicello, and Red Cross sing about going to the beach (“because it’s fun”), surfing—which I doubt they did—and being “just hopeless beach kids/We don’t go to bars.” Which could be because bars don’t serve twelve-year-olds.
The far more power pop than hardcore “I Hate My School” is the perfect expression of a sentiment shared by every self-respecting and truly intelligent human subjected to what the Dictators’ Handsome Dick Manitoba called “edjumacation.” Unlike Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” Red Cross’ gripe is more with their peers than teachers and administration: “Rah-rahs at my school,” sings Jeff McDonald, “They make me sick/Surfers at my school/Are the biggest pricks.” They’re not big on jocks or bookworms either. And naturally they “can’t hardly wait to graduate,” which is too bad for Steve because his own graduation date lay in the distant, distant future.
“Clorox Girls” is back to basics hardcore and features some furious guitar work by Hetson; the gist of this one-minute to the dot classic is that the boys see through the girls’ transparent lies about their hair color being the result of days spent in the sun, but they don’t much care: so far as Red Cross are concerned Clorox girls are “out of sight.” “S&M Party” is the album’s only misstep; not so much because Red Cross ignore the cardinal rule that goes write about what you know, but because the song isn’t in any way, shape or form clever or funny. “Tell me that you love me/That you really care/But then you slap my face/Then you pull my hair” is as close as they come, and it isn’t close at all. They’d have been best off leaving subject matter like this to the Sex Pistols, because Johnny Rotten might have injected a bit of menace into the thing. Or the Dead Kennedys, who would have done something truly awful with it, like turn it into a self-righteous parable of Reagan era corporate amorality.
It’s a pity the lyrics of the 38-second blast of galloping sound that is “Standing in Front of Poseur” are impossible to make out, but that “Hit it!” at the beginning and the McDonald brothers’ screaming vocals make the song great. This is the way the Runaways might have sounded had they upped the tempo a couple of notches, and best illustrates how Red Cross snagged that gig opening for Black Flag in the first place. For once they sound truly pissed, as they do on the live “Fun with Connie” included on Merge Records’ 40th anniversary of the EP. It’s a real winner, and reminds us once again that these are teens we’re talking about—you have to love that parting shot, “I hate my school! I hate Hawthorne High! It sucks!”
Redd Kross would go on to dumpster dive into popular culture with salutes to Linda Blair, Lita Ford, Tatum O’Neal (“Tatum O’ Tot and the Fried Vegetables”), Mackenzie Phillips, Frosted Flakes, elephant flares, America’s Bicentennial Year, After School Specials, and various and sundry other critically important societal issues. And they would become one of the premiere (and fun) power pop bands of our time—imagine the Raspberries had Eric Carmen been obsessed with Pop Tarts. Redd Kross were always too cool for school, and they graduated a very, very long time ago. But they’ve never stopped furthering their education, and you’d have to be a real bastard of a teacher not to give them an A.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
