Redd Kross have just embarked on their longest US tour in over twenty years, no longer teen babes from Monsanto, they are fully grown rock gods, that have receding hairlines, mortgages and even kids’ tuition to take care of. This makes imperative, insane and impressive the challenge of delivering punky precision blasts of gargantuan glammy guitar goo all over the place every night ever the more magnificent a mission amidst a missing “music industry”.
Steve & Jeff MacDonald, along with Jason Shapiro and Dale Crover are the latest incarnation of Redd Kross seen here on their 10 week fall 2019 US tour. When the boys hit the Cornerstone in Berkeley CA to a sold out crowd , with merch man and cartoonist Brian Walsby watching from the wings, the set list careened into this topical tune featured on their 2012 comeback album “Researching The Blues”. The band are currently promoting the followup to their last album with the 2019 release on Merge Records of a full length called “Behind The Door”
I shot just this hastily edited two camera bootleg video from high above it all in the balcony as the nightclub lackeys tried to thwart me at every step of the way, and eventually shut me down long before The Melvins took the stage. Ironically the Melvins are a band I used to have the home phone numbers of, and even help get gigs over 30 years ago.
Fun Fact : Dale Crover and I were both long haired hippie rock fans employed as extras in Oliver Stone’s Doors bio pic in the early 90’s, but I’m the only one of us that got screen time as I agreed to appear nude leaping over a bonfire…Dale hung with the Nancy Hayes extras talent agency long enough to be cast as a spit swapping young flannel flying Neil Young substitute in a convertible in Neil’s Harvest Moon comeback music video, and eventually get even more famous for turning down the drummer gig in Nirvana. I just faded rapidly into obscurity and became a barely employable blogger and bootleg video director chased by bouncer’s around craft brew bars in Berkeley… c’est la vie.