The biggest con music writers try to pull on readers is to claim so and so would have been huge had it not been for the evil record company, the cowardly radio station, the incompetent manager. No, rubbish. Most bands are simply not meant to be huge, no matter how good they are, no matter how much they love huge pop hooks, no matter how much they might or might not be in tune with the times.
Redd Kross are one of those should-have-been-huge bands. Except there is no world in which they actually could have been huge. There might be those of us who wish it had been the case, but the mainstream market has never been wildly susceptible to what can look from the outside like a series of minutely observed tributes to the detritus of pop culture. It might be catnip to critics, but it seldom sets public pulses racing.
Redd Kross were never going to be huge because they devoted themselves to profoundly unserious things with intense seriousness. There can be no doubting their complete and sincere devotion to the music they love, a devotion that makes no division in quality between The Osmonds and The Beatles, between Kiss and The Kinks. They may have played their first shows as pubescent prodigies of SoCal hardcore with Black Flag, but as Steve McDonald observes tonight, introducing a cover of Kiss’s ‘Deuce’, “This was the first song at the first show I ever saw, and it’s the most rock & roll party song OF ALL TIME!”
Redd Kross always were, still are, and likely always will be too much. Too colourful, too unashamed, too goofy. Really, too much fun for the times that made them, when alternative music fans tended to look down their noses at the kind of band one might expect to say “really kick ass” without irony.
It’s also relevant that Redd Kross are a band of the pre-internet age. They are a Gen X band in both chronological position and cultural inclination. The former meant that for the first 15 years of their career they were little more than a rumour, in the UK at least. I first heard two outstanding tracks from their debut EP – ’Annette’s Got The Hits’ and ‘Cover Band’, both in their encore at Dingwalls – on an LA punk compilation called God Bless America in the mid-80s. Then nothing, until finding the album Neurotica in a bargain bin in 1987. Then nothing again. No press, no radio, no nothing. They barely existed.
The latter makes Redd Kross the musical iteration of something they perhaps actually shaped. Consider that notion of treating the unserious with the utmost seriousness. The sensibility of Redd Kross –nostalgic without being rose-tinted, celebrating of ephemera, trying to preserve the transient – is what fuelled the early films of Richard Linklater: Dazed And Confused is a Redd Kross song brought to life, a haze of teen memories in which somehow meaning can be found.
Or think of the themes of Gen X novelists, of Bret Easton Ellis and the compulsive namechecking of popular culture, the search for order in the chaos of TV and film and music. And the emptiness of his Los Angeles, where kids and cars and drugs and the beach and the club all become one interchangeable thing.
Redd Kross are the perfect Gen X band. Perfect, too, in that they were so focussed on their own details that they never noticed where they happened to be in relation to popular culture: more than once they released the right album for three years later. Not because they were wildly ahead of their times, but because they always knew which way nostalgia was blowing (think of them, maybe, as the rock & roll Saint Etienne).
For 40 years since first hearing them, I’d been somehow contriving to miss Redd Kross live. Perhaps it’s apt to have finally seen them at a point where they are no longer reviving anyone else – simply by still being productive, and being regular, they have become more than the sum of their parts. There’s also something sad, too – Redd Kross are the kind of band one would have loved to see in front of actual teenagers rather than the men my age who made up the bulk of the audience.
But, gosh, you wouldn’t hear them and think this was a bunch of old fellas going through the motions. The Melvins’ Dale Crover plays drums in a manner that strongly suggests they said something very disrespectful to him at soundcheck; Jason Shapiro is magnificent on guitar, shifting in microseconds from metallic shredding to Byrdsy jangling. And the McDonald brothers – Steve on bass and Jeff singing and playing guitar – remain one of the great wonders of the world of pop, musicians who want to show off but only ever to serve the song.
And the song is always the thing. Covers are chosen for the song – ’Pretty Please Me’, by The Quick, ‘Crazy Horses’ by The Osmonds – rather than to demonstrate exquisite taste. And their own songs are marvels: sometimes veering into pastiche, yes, but never with an eyebrow arched towards the audience. What separates this from, say, The Darkness, is the certainty that ‘Candy Coloured Catastrophe’ is called that not as a cheap Austin Powersish gag, but because ‘Candy Coloured Catastrophe’ is the perfect title for a Redd Kross song.
Good god, they rock, too. There has always been a metallic edge – though in truth, the metal in question is now what gets called classic rock – and at Dingwalls they are absolutely ferocious: a wall of power and melody. There’s something deeply physically satisfying about that precise combination, of the thud in the sternum and the treble of guitars and three-part vocal harmonies.
In a just world, Redd Kross would not have been huge. But in a just world, they might at least get the recognition that really is their due: as guitar pop songwriters on a par with Neil Finn; as single-minded pursuers of the groove as unyielding as The Fall. And if nothing else, they should get a rosette for having lived out the entire career of The Lemon Twigs 30 years early. What a fucking band.
