Well, it finally happened: Four months after the publication of Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, my co-authors Jeff McDonald, Steven McDonald and I managed to get together in Los Angeles and celebrate our book with a bonafide reading and signing event. And it was, unsurprisingly, a total blast!
The action went down last Thursday evening, February 27, at Stories Books and Café in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Jeff, Steven and I read a few pages from the book (specifically, the ones pertaining to their notorious Poison- and Stryper-related pranks back in the mid-eighties), and then answered questions from the audience for about 45 minutes. The McDonalds were, as usual, funny as hell, and the crowd (which spilled over from the store’s back patio and into the parking lot) was full of good vibes as well as good questions. If you wanted to be there but couldn’t make the scene, fear not — the reading/Q&A part of the event was captured on video, which I have now uploaded here for the enjoyment of all.
Thanks mucho to Jeff and Steven for making time in their busy schedules (which last month included promoting Andrew Reich’s excellent documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story and Steven rehearsing to go on tour with The Melvins) to do this, and to Liz Garo at Stories for hosting the event. Big thanks as well to my cousin Whitney Padgett, who video’d our event for posterity; Whit found the the patio’s lighting a bit challenging at first, but was eventually able to find a sweet spot with it — so if you’re frustrated by how dark the clip looks at first, rest assured that the visuals improve significantly around the 9-minute mark. (The audio, happily, is quite clear throughout.)
And thanks so much to everyone who showed up, bought books and generally helped us put an exclamation point on the project; it was absolutely lovely to see you all. Given the fact that my co-authors and I live 3,000 miles apart and have schedules that are generally pretty difficult to sync up, this will most likely be the only time all three of us are able to convene for a Now You’re One of Us book event; Steven and I may be able to swing something this spring to coincide with The Melvins’ East Coast dates, but that’s all still up in the air.
Finally, thanks to the folks at Omnibus Press for seeing the potential in this incredible story, and to our awesome agent Lee Sobel for making the book deal happen. As a hardcore Redd Kross fan since 1987, it was both a pleasure and an honor to collaborate with Jeff and Steven on this book, and I could not be more proud of what we came up with together. If you haven’t bought a copy of your own yet, Now You’re One of Us is still in stock over at Bookshop.org, and any self-respecting independent bookstore should be able to special order it for you. You can also order our book online from Barnes & Noble or (if you must) Amazon. But wherever you get it from, I can guarantee that you’ll enjoy the hell out of it, unless perhaps you’re a member of Poison…
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