Redd Kross bassist Steven McDonald on double album, documentary, memoir ahead of Pittsburgh show

As far as Steven McDonald could remember, Redd Kross has never played a headline show in Pittsburgh. The bassist for the longtime power pop/punk band recalled driving through the city sometime in the 1980s, but their only shows here were in support of other bands (1997 with The Presidents of the United States of America and 2019 with Melvins).

After playing their first post-pandemic show in May, Redd Kross has just launched a national tour that includes a July 20 stop at Spirit Hall in Lawrenceville, with McDonald jokingly apologizing for neglecting the city so long.

“It’s our first headlining tour of the states of this size — we’ve done headlining tours off and on in the last 15 years or whatever — but not a complete cross-country, continental thing like this since like ‘97 or something,” McDonald said earlier this month from his home in California.

Founded in 1980 by Steven and Jeff McDonald (vocals/guitars), Redd Kross grew out of the punk scene (sharing early shows with Black Flag) but moved to a more pop culture-influenced sound that references punk, garage rock and 1960s psychedelia. Their 1987 album “Neurotica” has been cited as an influence on the grunge movement, earning praise from Sonic Youth, Stone Temple Pilots and more.

They’re now touring in support of their self-titled double album, which came out June 28 on In the Red Records. Besides the album, a documentary film “Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story” is hitting theaters, and a memoir, “Now You’re One of Us,” is slated for an October release. The 18-song album — the band’s first since 2019’s “Beyond the Door” — has received positive reviews so far.

“You never really know, but I did have a suspicion when we were making the record that something special was happening,” McDonald said. “But I try to just stay present and keep a lot of thoughts to myself. So it’s really neat now that we’re releasing this and, really, I couldn’t be happier with the response.”

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Initially, the band didn’t plan for a double album, although they went into the studio with 18 songs. The plan was to pare a few songs and save some for international release — “two songs for foreign territories because they always need bribing to put out your record or something,” McDonald added with a laugh.

So “Good Times Propaganda Band,” “Stuff” and “Emanuelle Insane” were put on the shelf, temporarily.

“But we liked those ones too. We just had to pick something to cut. And the idea was always like, OK, we’ll have a 12-song record,” McDonald said. “But then it just went really well and everything was exceeding expectations, or just coming out great and the chemistry was good between (producer) Josh (Klinghoffer), Jeff and myself.

“And so we just thought, well, what about those other songs? Wait, why don’t we do those too?”

The final song to make it, “Born Innocent,” was originally commissioned as “an origins story song” for the documentary, prompting a phone call with director Andrew Reich.

“I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got 17. If we can add the ‘Born Innocent’ song, then we’ll have the same amount of songs that the (Rolling) Stones had on ‘Exile on Main Street,’ and it can be a legitimate double album. What do you think?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, I was hoping to make a soundtrack album.’ I was like, ‘With what?’” McDonald said with a laugh. “With that one song and then a bunch of tracks borrowed from our catalog?”

Once the songs were finalized, the band pivoted to the record cover concept and videos, cranking out four to help promote the album.

“I think that’s even more ambitious than most indie bands do, but just this idea that now we’ve got to preview tracks and we did it with videos,” he said. “And we always did videos before, but back in the ’90s and ’80s, it was like you would spend this ridiculous amount of money to try to get one shot at national TV. It’s ridiculous and someone else was handling that, and now we’ve got these little minuscule budgets and you’re trying to become a video producer out of the blue and come out and keep the ideas flowing and all that.”

The first video, “Candy Coloured Catastrophe,” is a family affair featuring Astrid McDonald, the daughter of Jeff McDonald and his wife, former Go-Go’s guitarist Charlotte Caffey. It also includes Melvins drummer Dale Crover, who’s performing a solo DJ set and drumming for Redd Kross on this tour.

While they’re on tour, final preparations are being made on the band memoir, which didn’t originally start with a Redd Kross focus.

“A literary agent named Lee Sobel reached out to me on social media, and he tricked me,” McDonald said with a laugh. “He said he was a literary agent, and he was interested in a Steve McDonald book, and I was like, ‘Really? Me?’

“So I pursued it a little bit, or I let him pursue it, and then quickly, soon after, it was a bait and switch, and he wanted to drag the complication of Redd Kross into it.”

With writer Dan Epstein providing a buffer between the McDonald brothers, the oral history recounting the band’s past moved ahead. McDonald compared it to the punk ruck oral history book “Please Kill Me,” while his brother likened it to the Japanese samurai movie “Rashomon,” which recounts one story from multiple viewpoints.

“It seems like you need to put someone between us who has some kind of equal say,” McDonald said, “and then we behave and it can move along in a way that might be something that is surprising to me sometimes.”

Rehashing the past has been an interesting and surreal experience at points for McDonald, who has seen the documentary several times at festival screenings.

“I kind of leave my body to do that, but it’s been pleasantly a relief that (Reich) did such a good job with it, he told our story,” he said. “That was also one of the (stipulations) working with Andrew is that he got final cut. We didn’t get to step in in the editing bay and shape how we’re presented, as much as that would be a temptation.

“It was challenging to let that go, but also, at some point, I realized, well, I like this guy and his motives seem to be good. And it’s probably good that I’m not in the editing bay because I’m gonna end up with something like Gene Simmons’ reality TV show or something that just feels very staged.”

There are plenty of stories to tell from the band’s career, like when Big Time Records went under. Their label mates, Australia’s Hoodoo Gurus, wound up with the label’s assets.

“And the Gurus, very beautifully — I think it was probably a privilege for them to be able to do that for another artist — they just gave us all of our stuff,” McDonald said, “and they gave us whatever contractual stuff they had to prove that they had the right to give us our release rights back.”

The label’s demise happened as Redd Kross was on the road in support of “Neurotica.”

“When we were touring that album, when we left L.A., they had an office in L.A. and it was a busy hub,” he said. “And when we got back from tour, there was like one person left and we’re like, what’s going on? And we didn’t understand. So basically the campaign for that record came to a grinding halt.”

After “Neurotica,” the band signed with Atlantic Records, which released “Third Eye” in 1990. The album featured “Annie’s Gone,” with McDonald playing an eye-catching Carvin bass guitar — which he no longer owns.

“I guess I was broke and I just thought, like I’m never gonna play this thing. It wasn’t very practical. It was basically like I still lived at home and I had gotten signed to a record label,” he said. “Maybe I felt like it mocked me in my 40s or something, the idea of the 20-year-old flushed with cash from a stupid record label, a record deal he wasn’t ready for yet.

“And I did things like that, opened up a guitar company catalog and dreamed up some ridiculous custom deal which was a double-neck purple bass: one was fretless — both were four strings — and the other one was fretted, but it had a whammy bar,” he added with a laugh.

That actually ties into the latest album and a song that almost didn’t make the cut — which would have been OK with his wife, That Dog singer Anna Waronker.

“It’s so weird because I wrote this song called ‘Stuff’ on our record, and it’s really about me talking to my wife, saying like we don’t need all this stuff,” he said with a laugh. “And she doesn’t really love this song. She’s like, ‘I’m not a hoarder, what kind of impression are you giving people?’ And I’d always be like, ‘Oh I’m a minimalist. You saw my apartment before we got together. There was nothing in it. By choice! Except for guitars.’

“That’s definitely my weakness, but I’m always like, ‘But they’re practical, I use them.’ They’re the tools of my trade. It’s not like a handbag. Anna’s not a handbag person, but all the same.”

Another Redd Kross weakness in the past was crank phone calls, whether it involved Courtney Love, Poison or Stryper. McDonald can’t recall the last time he made a crank call, but shared a story involving Tito Jackson of The Jackson Five.

”I had a girlfriend once that worked at a fancy appliance store. She got Tito Jackson’s phone number off his wife’s check — this is in the ‘80s so I’m a kid, but I called Tito Jackson as Michael Jackson and got through,” he said with a laugh. “Got past his wife because I knew her name from the check — this is horrible — and I was like (imitates Michael Jackson) ‘Dee Dee, hi, it’s Michael. Can I talk to Tito please?’ Tito got on the phone and I was like ‘Hi Tito, it’s me, it’s Michael.’

“He’s like ‘This ain’t Michael,’ and he hung on me. (laughs) I wish I could say that was my last crank call, but we went on to jeopardize our career many times over through ridiculous phone calls soon after.”

And to complete the circle, his 4-year-old niece started crank calling him with the aid of some technology.

“So my wife, Anna, said if you get a caller ID blocked call, it’s a crank call from Rosemary and she was just riffing,” McDonald said. “I guess the idea now is I pass on to the next generation and hopefully they’ll learn from my errors, or they’ll do great or they’ll learn from my crank call successes as well.”