Being a fan of bands in the ’80s and early ’90s could often turn you into an obsessive collector. You’d find yourself hitting every independent and used record store within a 50-mile radius to dig through the bins. You’d hope to find that rare import 12 inch with a B-side that hadn’t been put out in America. You wanted everything your new favorite band recorded and bootlegs of buzzed about concerts. And you had to travel and dig for those gems because we didn’t have an internet with eBay or Amazon or other record exchange sites. Nowadays you hear about a new band and within minutes on your phone, you’ve located and streamed every track they ever released and videos of their concerts. The only thing in modern life that compares to the time-consuming obsession of a collecting records of a cult band is creating a documentary about that cult band. Andrew Reich can testify to that as he’s spent nearly a decade directing a documentary on Hawthorne, California legends Redd Kross. His movie Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is out on a 2 disc Blu-ray with the second disc containing the deleted scenes that are as long as the original film. Reich is best known for being a writer and executive producer on the later seasons of Friends. I spoke with Reich about his time with Redd Kross, how the brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald were supposed to be in Pulp Fiction and the odd connection between Redd Kross and the theme song to Friends.
Me: How hard was it to get the music rights, seeing how they’ve had so many record labels over the decades?
Andrew Reich: It wasn’t really that hard because they’ve gotten back their rights to a lot of their catalog. The only albums where I had to actually license things were the three major label albums: Third Eye, Phaseshifter and Show World. Those were tough. John Silva, their former manager who’s such a powerhouse in the music industry, helped me. But it did cost quite a bit of money to get the rights to the songs from those three records.
Me: Was it about the same with clearing clips in the documentary?
Andrew: Yeah. It’s really tough. Luckily the fair use rules make a lot of this stuff possible. If it wasn’t for fair use there’s just no way this documentary could exist. If you’ve got Jeff McDonald talking about the Ramones and then I show a clip of the Ramones; I don’t have to pay for that. That’s fair use. I really had to become an expert on how to do that to get all the clips of all the things that are in this movie.
Me: What sort of interesting items did you find while making the film?
Andrew: John Silva sent me all this stuff that he had. All these files. In there was this folder that was checks and money orders that people had sent around when the Neurotica album came out. There was some kind of Neurotica pack where it was like a T-shirt and a couple other things and all these people sent this, and the band just didn’t get their shit together. They just didn’t send them. I don’t think these checks have been cashed. There are money orders, and in there. I was like, it would be cool to make these shirts again from the original screens that Bill (Mooney of Tannis Root) has and then track these people down. There was one from Krist Novoselic from Nirvana, really, before Bleach came out or anything. And Krist had sent his check in for this Neurotica shirt and never got it.
Me: How long from the first time you said to the McDonald brothers, “Hey guys, let’s do something” to “We’re finished!”
Andrew: Both those dates are a little bit hard to pin down, but let’s say eight, nine years, somewhere around there. I mean, there were a lot of reasons for that. One was when I first approached them and they said yes, and we started; I’m a television writer and showrunner, which is my main job. I got busy with making TV shows. I was focused on that. It was really so it was very sporadic for a few years. I would maybe interview them and like six months later I would do another one. It was very sporadic for a while until I did the Kickstarter, which was like 2019. I got money from people that made me serious about buckling down. I was realizing that I’m never gonna finish this movie at this rate, doing it this way. It was costing money. The Kickstarter really gave me the kickstart. And then it was finished to varying degrees. It was finished enough to submit to some festivals. We submitted to Tribeca and South by Southwest. You submit and you wait. We got rejected from all those big festivals, but the movie was kind of done, at least done enough. Then we started getting into most of the music documentary festivals like IN-EDIT, Doc’n Roll and Sound Unseen. They started accepting it and showing it. And at that point, I finished it for a festival screening. And then in 2024 Abramorama came on board to distribute it, and that’s when the theatrical finished version was done.
It definitely took years and years, but that was not like I was working consistently on it for all those years. And also just, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I was kind of moving slowly because I didn’t really know how to do this. I was learning as I went. The more I shot and the more research I did and finding more and more archival material, I started to sense here’s the shape of this and started to figure it out. I’m glad it took that long because in that time I found so much amazing material that if I had banged this out in a year or two, so much great stuff would not have been in the film. It took me a long time for that stuff to be discovered.
Me: Do you also think it helped, taking so much time because the relationship between the brothers might have changed from when you started to now.
Andrew: I think that and also my relationship with them. They grew to like trust me. As I got to know them better, different questions arise. We could dig into things. Things happened during that time. We would check in each time. We sat down and did another interview; I was getting a better sense of their dynamic. Who they were. They were trusting me more, and we were able to just get a little deeper into things. I feel like all of that adds to the richness that the movie has.
Me: Did the time help with other interview subjects?
Andrew: It’s tough to track some of those down. It took me years to get Keith Morris to do this. It took some other people a while. I think the trust that we built up over those years is why they finally let me interview their parents. They were really reluctant to do so for years. I just earned their trust that I wasn’t going to do this in some kind of exploitative way or whatever. Those interviews with the parents are really a key part of the movie.
Me: After knowing them for so long, was it really like going to meet the parents?
Andrew: It was tough because I knew that I was going to have to ask them about the abduction story, this horrible chapter in their life. That it was something that had really just been buried and not really talked about. Steve had talked about it a bit, but the parents really don’t talk about it. I’m not a news reporter who’s used to interviewing people about uncomfortable subjects. It was not something that I had done before or was really comfortable doing. They’re just the most like salt of the earth, great people. They’re really nice and I liked them right off the bat. I went over there with Jeff’s daughter so I think that put them a bit at ease. We had a really nice conversation talking about grandkids and all this stuff. And then at a certain point, I gotta bring this subject up. And you hear in the movie, how sort of stammery and nervous I am asking the question and then immediately how emotional they get. That was a really intense, tough day. And then it took years before they saw the movie and I was very nervous. They came to a screening in Santa Monica. I was very nervous about what their reaction was going to be. These are not people who sought out show business. They didn’t want to be. Their kids are in show business, and they didn’t want to be. I was really relieved that they loved the movie. They felt like I had handled it respectfully.
Me: How far away was the McDonald’s childhood home from the home of the Beach Boys (The Wilson brothers)?
Andrew: Oh, they were pretty close. They’re like five to 10 minutes away. Quite close.
Me: The movie links the McDonalds and the Wilsons, Hawthorne, California’s most iconic musical siblings with the clip from Best Buy. How did you select that?
When I found that, I was looking around on YouTube or whatever for just Beach Boys or whatever. I just found that. I love that guy. I love the whole thing. And I think it’s just like a nice way to, like, sort of set a tone for the movie.
Me: When you’re doing this, were you discovering how people discovered Redd Kross? It’s not like, oh, I turned on MTV and they were on there 24/7.
Andrew: Well, there’s this weird thing where if you were a kid in LA in the 80s, in the second-half of the 80s, Redd Kross was a huge band. They were packing clubs. It was one of those things where I think a lot of those LA kids sort of assumed they were big everywhere ’cause they were so big in LA. Then they realized you go outside of LA and no one’s heard of them. There were tons of other bands opening for them. They were a big draw because they were such a fun live act. There’s Redd Kross fans everywhere, especially among musicians. You would just see someone with a Redd Kross shirt. You’re like, oh, wow. I never did get to talk to Dave Davies from the Kinks, but he’s a Redd Kross fan.
Me: There’s something about Jeff and Steve that reminds me of Dave and Ray Davies.
Andrew: Jeff and Steve get along a lot better than Ray and Dave for sure. There’s just so many brother bands. It’s such an interesting thing. I mean, at one point when I was making this, I thought I was gonna try and cover that terrain and talk about all these (musical siblings). The Everly Brothers hated each other like the guys in the Black Crowes and Oasis. There’s barely enough time to tell the Redd Kross story. There was no way to just go and do that detour.
(note: Steve played with Sparks for a while that features the brothers Ron and Russell Mael.)
Me: You’re part of a trilogy of Redd Kross releases coming out from MVD with Desperate Teenage Lovedolls & Lovedolls Superstar: The Complete 4K Remastered Collection coming out on Blu-ray later this month. The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell which Redd Kross is all over is already out. So it’s kind of this great triple feature around Redd Kross.
Andrew: Dave Markey started the Bill Bartell doc so much later than I started mine. And yet his Blu-ray came out a month before mine did. And it had so many of the same interviewees in the two movies. It is cool that the Blu-ray of the Love Dolls movies is coming out. When I was doing these festival screenings, the most common question in the Q and A’s after was “where’s Desperate Teenage Love Dolls and Love Dolls Superstar.” Why isn’t that in your movie? Now its own little featurette on the Blu-ray on the second disc. It was in the movie for a while. I just realized it’s not really part of the Redd Kross story. I was watching cuts and the movie just seems to sag here because there’s nothing going on between Jeff and Steve.
It’s interesting to fans. But I was just like, this is just gonna have go. It was a painful thing because I had spent a lot of time interviewing people. This is just gonna have to come out and I’ll be able to let it breathe more by making it its own thing. And I also think for some people who maybe didn’t see it at the time; seeing it now, they might just be like, “This is just the most amateurish thing.” Not everyone’s gonna get the charm of those movies. I love them for the historical value of the location. You’re seeing this LA that’s kind of gone. And they are so fun. A bunch of teenagers putting on a show.
Thank God, Dave was obsessed. There’s so much footage in the movie. If Dave didn’t have that Super 8 and wasn’t shooting that stuff, there’d just be no (visual record). There’s more great quality video and photographs of Redd Kross from the last three weeks than there is from the first 20 years of their career. Before the stuff was cheap and easy to do. People weren’t even bringing a camera to shows.
It was frustrating that there were so many great stories about certain shows. Thurston Moore is telling about when they played Danceteria on the first tour of New York and how amazing they were. There’s just no footage of it. I had to cheat and show footage from a show in LA at that point. It doesn’t exist. And all the guys in Seattle talking about that Crescent Ballroom show in Tacoma, this legendary show. Green River and Soundgarden and everyone opening. I asked everyone I could think of from that whole grunge scene: did anyone bring a camera to this show? I could not find a single photograph. That’s a major show, right? Everyone was there. No one’s got a picture. As I said, it always ticks me off in one way.
Me: I feel bad that when I saw Redd Kross at the Cat’s Cradle during the Neurotica tour that I didn’t have a camera to capture them.
Andrew: That’s a time where everyone’s just coming in their street clothes and suddenly you’ve got this band that’s putting on a full-on rock and roll show, glammed out.
It obviously is so retro, and yet it’s not retro. They’re taking all this nostalgia stuff, but they’re making something new out of it. It’s like why they never really fit in. They played a bit at the Cavern Club here, which was Greg Shaw’s ’60s thing, where everyone was really just ’60s revival. They could play those shows, but they didn’t fit in, because they’re not really 60s reenactors. They’re not 70s reenactors. They’re just magpies and who love what they love, and they take all those bits and pieces and made something that felt their own. I remember first hearing Soundgarden. I was just like, wow, they’re really trying to be Zeppelin, aren’t they? I never felt with Redd Kross. Oh, they’re really trying to be… Because it was all just so mixed together that you get these bits and pieces, but it was never so much one other band.
Me: I remember Quentin Tarantino hosted Saturday Night Live, he came out and sang “Blow You A Kiss In The Wind” from Bewitched. And the first thing that hit me was, “He’s ripping off Redd Kross!” (Their cover of the song was on the Teen Babes From Monsanto EP.)
Andrew: I talked about the whole Tarantino thing on the Turned Out a Punk podcast. There’s a huge Tarantino connection. Jeff was a real regular at Video Archives and Quentin was there and Chuck Kelley, who was in the movie, worked there with Quentin. I’m sure, like all of us, Quentin probably watched that episode of Bewitched. He probably knew the song because he watched, but it would not have occurred to him to cover it if it wasn’t for Redd Kross. I mean, Quentin was a Redd Kross fan. He was going to use their cover in Pulp Fiction. The studio thought it sounded a little too lo-fi or whatever. That’s why the Urge Overkill song ends up in there.
Me: (Andrew was the head writer and show runner on Friends in the later seasons. This leads to me mentioning that I ran into the Rembrandts when they showed up at The Fallout Shelter, a basement nightclub in Raleigh before they had the Friends theme. This turns into a “Kevin Bacon” moment of connecting The Rembrandts to Redd Kross).
Andrew: I always feel like Redd Kross is kind of like Kevin Bacon. The Rembrandts are members of The Quick (a LA based power pop band from the late ‘70s). Redd Kross in a way are keeping The Quick alive. They still to this day perform two Quick covers. They do “Pretty Please Me,” which I think a lot of people think, “They’re covering the Dickies.” But that’s The Quick. And then they do “It Won’t Be Long,” the Beatles song. But when Redd Kross does “It Won’t Be Long,” they are really doing the Quick’s version of “It Won’t Be Long.” The Quick sort of morphed into the Rembrandts (Danny Wilde led both bands).
Me: That I did not know.
Andrew: Yeah, so there’s a connection there. Danny Benair, who was in The Quick and The Three O’Clock, and he was in the movie briefly; he handled Redd Kross’s publishing in the ’90s. Anyway, that’s a big detour into The Quick, but you brought up the Rembrandts. I gotta say, these guys are not as lame as you might think.
Me: How hard was it to get old videos of the band? When sort of shape were their music videos at this point?
Andrew: You mean their official videos? It’s not like there were a lot of them. Rocky Schenck did the two from Phaseshifter: “Jimmy’s Fantasy” and “Lady in the Front Row.” Rocky had really good versions of those. Everything in terms of the archival was hard. It’s not like… I’ve said this in a couple of Q&A’s, but I saw the Wham documentary (directed by Chris Smith). I’m just like, God, these filmmakers had it so easy. Everything that they did was shot by professional camera crews. And there’s so much. A lot of music docs, you could go to the MTV archives and come up with a lot of stuff. I couldn’t do that. What I had was boxes of VHS tapes from Jeff McDonald and another one from their guitarist, Robert Hecker. Their friend John Cropp, who runs their website. He had a box. A couple other places you would just find stuff. You had to go through all these things and sift through a lot of real crap, like a lot of stuff that’s badly filmed or that’s disintegrated so much. So yeah, with the video, like the “Annie’s Gone” video, I might have been able to track down a better version of that, but I liked what I used was what was shown on request video, which was a sort of early show here out of Southern California, out of Anaheim. But nothing in terms of any of the archival material for this movie was easy. It was all archaeological.
They survived so much. I mean, it really is, it’s very inspiring to me. Like, you know, I think I was able to finish the movie because of the spirit of Redd Kross. The inspiration of those guys. It’s sort of meta but the movie was that you know it was about them but it was also inspired by the spirit of them. No one was clamoring or very few people were clamoring for this. I was talking to my friends about what I was doing, until the movie was out, they thought I was making a movie about the American Red Cross. So many people were just like, “What? What is this that you’re spending years about who? I’ve never heard of this band.” I don’t care. I love this. And I’m gonna do this because I love it because that’s what Jeff and Steve have always done. They’re just like, we’re gonna do what we love and we’re not gonna take any commercial considerations. We’re not going to let them stop us. We’re not going to really think too much about them. We’re going to pursue making the music that we want to hear. I’m going to make the movie that I want to see. It would be nice if I could have just gone to see it. Someone else made it, but no one was making it.
Me: How was it trying to put together the narrative of two guys who didn’t have a massive hit or even a cult hit?
Andrew: It was hard because you’re right. There’s a couple standard structures for these kind of movies. The New York Dolls movie that did come out, New York Doll led to the reunion. It’s all leading up to like the bands getting back together. There are a few like that. Anvil! The Story of Anvil, they’re going on that sort of comeback European which the director of the film made that happen so he could film. Or you’ve got it all leading up to the tragic death like Jeff Buckley or whoever it is right. None of these cliche structures were really available. There’s no tragic ending to Redd Kross. There’s no steep rise and fall. What it became to me was a story of a band that just kept following their muse and making great music? They never really have a misstep, never put out a bad record, and end up having good marriages and kids who love them. They never hit it big, but keep making great music, getting better at what they do and having good lives. This is actually the greatest kind of rock and roll success story there can be. I worried for so long about how do you end this movie when there isn’t a natural endpoint. There was a point where I was thinking I’m gonna stage this big concert where we’re gonna have every lineup of the band play you. They’re going to start at the beginning with the Posh Boy and they’re going to play there. It’s going to be 40 years of Redd Kross with all the different lineups, this huge celebration. And we’ll film that and that’ll provide the ending. And then COVID hit and just blew that all up. It wouldn’t have worked. Because if you did all that, you can’t just shoot like two minutes of it and put it at the end of the movie. Like that’s like a whole movie to itself. That’s Redd Kross’s version of The Last Waltz. But it really was just kind of like, no, the end is that this isn’t the end, that the story continues.
I asked them to record a song for the end credits, and I gave them this sort of prompt. I was like, can you write a song that’s like “The Ballad of Mott The Hoople” or “History Lesson Part Two” by the Minuteman. A kind of tell your story song. They wrote this great song and it kind of kick-started their songwriting. And then they put out that last double album (The Redd Album), which is maybe the best Redd Kross record. So it proves the point of the movie. This doesn’t from the outside look like a success story because everyone’s like, “Did they ever have a big hit?” No, they didn’t, and that’s what’s so great. And they weren’t a one-hit wonder. When you go to a Redd Kross show, it’s not a bunch of people yelling for them to play their one hit. It’s people yelling out 20 different songs that they want to hear. Everyone’s got their different song from a different record. They don’t have to just be like, “All right, we know you’re all here to hear the hit, and you’re going to put up with the rest of the songs.” They have the greatest career. They can walk around in public without being mobbed. They have privacy when they want. To me, it’s just such an incredible success story that just doesn’t look like what we’ve been trained to think a rock and roll success story looks like. They really are better than ever right now. I feel like the last record’s amazing. The shows are so good. They’re hitting a peak. It’s great to see.
Me: It is an unorthodox structure because what would normally be the third act crisis is in the first act with Jeff being abducted.
Andrew: It was messed up. And as someone who writes stories for a living, who’s trained in story structure; this is really bothering me. This isn’t where this should come.
Me: How did you make this film work for people who don’t own Redd Kross records?
Andrew: My guiding light was this is a story about the brothers. People who maybe have no interest in this kind of music can get something out of it because they have a sibling and recognize the dynamic. The way they deal with each other. The way they can fight and then the next day be totally fine. How Steve is still the little brother looking for that approval from Jeff. You feel that so viscerally. They’re not these gods on a pedestal. They really are still just people. And we just recognize our own relationships in them. It becomes this real family story where we’ve gotten to know the parents and the wives and the kids a little bit.
Me: What gets me is you tracked down all their former drummers and lead guitarist and you don’t feel the normal tension of them feeling cheated out of something when they left the band. None of the drummers are screaming, “I should have gotten a bigger piece of this record.”
Andrew: Right, because there was no big pie. No one’s fighting over the pie because the pie remained quite small. The fact is their peer bands from the sort of grunge era that have hit it big; the track record is not good. The singers of those bands are pretty much all dead. It just didn’t work out getting that huge. Even though these guys wanted it more than most of the other punk bands; it’s good they didn’t get it. Now that I know them so well, they were not suited to Mega stardom but they got tastes (this includes the Francis Ford Coppola story in the movie that led to them being in The Spirit of ’76 movie).
Me: Did you try to get any of the Partridge Family to be in the movie?
Andrew: I think David Cassidy would have been the one. (editor’s note: David Cassidy co-starred with the brothers in the time travel comedy Spirit of ’76.) I think he died while I started making it. So I didn’t try. I tried Danny Bonaduce, but the only connection there is with their side project, the Tater Totz. There was endless people that you could reach out to, but I wanted people that were witnesses, first person witnesses, significant parts of the story. I don’t want to load this up with Rolling Stone writers talking about how significant they are. I didn’t want to do any of that. There’s only one rock critic. Lorraine Ali is in it, and she’s not doing what the rock critic usually does. She was at tons of shows, she was a big fan, and she was the one who saw Axl Rose dancing like that. She’s like, “He’s doing that because he’s been to so many Redd Kross shows.”
Me: Now here’s a horrible question: Are you going to do another documentary?
Andrew: At this point I would say probably not. But you never know. I’m not going to mention it. There was a subject that came up that occurred to me that I got excited about. I don’t think it’s going to happen. But it at least told me like, oh, you know what? There could be another idea where I get this obsessed. You have to be so obsessed. Now I know it more than I did even before. It requires so much work and dedication and so much time and money that you can’t be casually interested in something. I’m torn between like, okay, I’ve now acquired some skills. I learned so much about how to do this, I think I would have an easier time the next time, maybe. And so it just feels like, all right, well, if you learn how to do something, you gotta wanna do it again. And then on the other hand, it’s like I know how much work it is and how small the odds are of breaking even. And also, I’m a little bit spoiled because Jeff and Steve are so nice and they’re such great guys. We’ve really become friends and I would hate to do this and do all this work on a subject that I didn’t like that much. I think it would be sort of torture. I don’t know, never say never. No plans at the moment. I just sold a pilot that I need to write. So I’m back to the sort of TV job for a bit. But I don’t know…maybe. It just has to be that idea where I’m not looking to do it just to do it. I guess if they could just pull up a U-Haul full of material you can pry through, why not?
Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is out now on Blu-ray.
