Last Updated on March 25, 2026 by Black Sunshine Media
I’m old enough to remember a time when rock star memoirs were rare occurrences. The last 20 years have brought an avalanche of memoirs and autobiographies from some of rock’s biggest—and sometimes, not-so-big names. What’s driving the boom is another subject entirely. But let’s just say that rock musicians are strongly motivated to write their books.
Several years ago, I did some freelance editing on the autobiography of a semi-famous non-L.A. producer and songwriter (you might be familiar with some of his work, emphasis on might). He was a decent writer, but he loved digressions. We worked together throughout the pandemic until he lost motivation, and the book was shelved.
The producer self-published his memoir last year, and it’s borderline unreadable. Whoever edited the final manuscript didn’t take issue with so much tangential information. The experience taught me an important lesson about writing my travel memoirs, the Lunar New Year series: Keep your reader on track. Don’t take them down your rabbit holes unless there’s something to see or feel.
The Gold Standard of Rock Star Memoirs
I’ve read fewer than seven rock star autobiographies, and I can list them if you want, but David Lee Roth’s Crazy From the Heat (1997) is the champion.1 It’s the best autobiography I’ve ever read. Period.
One of the more interesting aspects of Crazy From the Heat is that Diamond Dave worked with Henry Rollins to assemble the book. Yes, that Henry Rollins. And one of the rock star autobiographies I’ve read is Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag (1994). I’m fascinated by the idea of those two characters working together. Roth and Rollins have talked about it sporadically, but I find the nuts and bolts of the process to be almost as captivating as the writing itself. It appeals to my curious nature.
About Dan Epstein
Happenstance brought Dan Epstein into my orbit not long ago. He came up as a Facebook friend suggestion because we have several mutual friends from Chicago. So, I checked out his profile and noticed he was an author. I sent a friend request, and Dan accepted, to my surprise and delight.
Dan Epstein is an author, journalist, writer, scribe, raconteur, word-slinger, content consultant, etc. He writes primarily about music these days, but has also written extensively about baseball (including three books on the subject, including Big Hair & Plastic Grass), film, TV, food and beverages, and pop culture. He has worked as an editor at various sites and publications (including the L.A. Reader, ShockHound.com, and Revolver Magazine), but has been a full-time freelancer for over a decade. He was born in New York City, grew up in Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and now resides in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Soon, one of Dan’s Facebook posts appeared in my news feed. A post about the book signing/release party for his latest book, Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, co-authored with Jeff and Steven McDonald, founding members of Redd Kross.
What I Know About Redd Kross
I would describe myself as a casual fan of Redd Kross. I’m familiar with and enjoy some of their records. I’ve heard bits and pieces of their story. “The first kiddie punk band” from Hawthorne, California, home of the Beach Boys, the brothers started their career at exceptionally young ages. Their first gig was opening for Black Flag. Jeff and Steven were 15 and 11 years old, respectively. “Stay Away from Downtown”, “Jimmy’s Fantasy”, and “Annie’s Gone” frequently pop up on my random shuffle. I like them.
As a fan of autobiographies and memoirs, especially from rock musicians, I don’t have to love an artist’s work to read their stories. Immediately, I had two thoughts. First, I must read Now You’re One of Us as soon as possible. I’ve seen enough of Jeff and Steven McDonald to know they have a great story to tell. Second, I need to interview Dan Epstein. I want to know how he did it.
Next, I bought and read Now You’re One of Us, and it blew me away. It’s soooo fucking good. One of the quickest reads of my life. If I didn’t harbor such slavish devotion to David Lee Roth and Crazy from the Heat, I’d say Now You’re One of Us is the best autobiography I’ve ever read. It’s now a co-champion of the genre. Even more motivation for an interview with Dan. So, I contacted him on Facebook and asked if he’d be up for an interview. He agreed.
The Dan Epstein Interview
The following interview was designed to “pull back the curtain” on how books like Now You’re One of Us are made and how authors like Dan Epstein make the magic happen.
BSM: You wrote in the introduction that your agent hooked you up with the McDonald brothers. Can you provide more details or context about how that happened?
Dan Epstein: In the spring of 2022, I interviewed Steven McDonald of Redd Kross for FLOOD magazine about the then-new expanded reissue of the band’s 1987 masterpiece, Neurotica. It was a really fun interview, and when Lee Sobel (Lee Sobel Literary Agency)—with whom I’d previously worked on a handful of attempted book projects—read it, he asked me if I thought Steven would be interested in doing a book about his life and career. I said I thought he might, but I also thought a Redd Kross book (with Steven and his older brother Jeff involved) would make much more sense.
Lee reached out to Steven about it, Steven spoke to Jeff, and eventually, the four of us had a Zoom call in the fall of 2022 to discuss the project. Our timing was good because Jeff and Steven were already involved with Andrew Reich’s Born Innocent documentary, and thus were already in the proper headspace to tell their story.
BSM: How did you come up with the format? For example, you refused testimony from sources other than Jeff and Steve. Did you have to sell them on that idea?2
Dan Epstein: Having interviewed the guys together in the past and having watched an early cut of the documentary, I was very much aware of how the big brother/little brother dynamic still dominates Jeff and Steven’s interactions. I figured I had a better shot at getting them to open up to me if the other brother wasn’t around to interrupt, contradict, or make them feel self-conscious in any way.
Whenever their memories or opinions contradicted each other, I would give Jeff a chance to clarify or rebut something Steven said to me, or vice versa—but Jeff and Steven are very different people with very different personalities and perspectives, and I think part of what makes the book so interesting is that they often have very different takes on what happened and why.
As far as not including anyone else’s voice in the book, the Redd Kross story is ultimately Jeff and Steven’s story, and I didn’t want to distract from that. Plus, I was very clear from the get-go that I didn’t want Now You’re One of Us to be a book version of the documentary, which is what it would have become if I’d tried to wedge quotes from every former band member, A&R person, road manager and friend from the old days into it. And because we had 300 pages to work with (though I wish it could have been 500), we could go a lot deeper into their personal stories, some of which the documentary only skimmed or left out entirely.
Jeff and Steven did ask me a couple of times early on if I was going to talk to any of their former bandmates, but once they wrapped their heads around my concept, they were totally cool with it.
BSM: How and where were the conversations recorded? Did you have a list of prompts, or did the topics flow organically?
Jeff and Steven live in L.A., and I live in New York, so all the interviews for the book wound up being done by phone or FaceTime/Zoom. We would set aside a specific time per week to talk—Steven was usually available on Monday mornings, and Jeff was usually available on Thursday afternoons—and we just kind of went chronologically through their career. Though oftentimes a basic prompt like, “Okay, so where did you do the demos for this album?” or “What’s the story behind this song?” would produce any number of unexpected and hilarious tangents, and I was happy to follow them wherever they went.
BSM: How much of a jigsaw puzzle was putting this together? Or did it evolve more linearly? How much “editing” did you have to do? E.g., were any conversations spliced together?
Dan Epstein: Because we’d done the interviews in more or less chronological order, putting the book together was a fairly linear process, though, of course, sometimes there would be a throwback to an earlier song or album or situation when talking about something that happened later in their career. (For instance, the story behind the title of their 2019 album Beyond The Door came from a third-rate Exorcist knock-off film that they’d dragged their mom to see when they were kids.)
Ultimately, the real challenge was breaking up their stories and interviews to flow in a conversational oral history-type format, as opposed to just having Jeff speak for three pages and Steven speak for three pages… But by the time we’d arrived at that point in the project, I’d been speaking to them on the phone on and off for over a year, and thus had a pretty good sense of their respective conversational cadences, which helped a lot.
BSM: I think this might be a question you don’t want to answer, but I’m curious, and I think other authors would want to know, too. Did you get paid on spec or flat rate? How do the publishing royalties work?
Dan Epstein: I wrote the book proposal on spec, with the understanding that we wouldn’t actually start on the project until we had an actual book deal in hand. Once Omnibus Press offered us a contract, we agreed to split the book advance and royalties equally—one-third apiece, minus our agent’s percentage—which I felt was very fair.
BSM: Another one. How did you find your agent (or vice versa)?
Dan Epstein: Lee Sobel initially reached out to me back in 2017; he was a fan of my writing and had a potential book project happening with an artist that he wanted to pair me up with. That project sadly didn’t pan out (the artist in question sadly died before we could get it rolling), and two other projects that followed—similar “as told to” projects with musical personages of note—didn’t pan out for less-lethal reasons. But I’m so glad that this one did!
BSM: How much research did you do about the band before meeting them?
Dan Epstein: I mean, in a sense, I’d been researching them since 1987, when I first became a fan of the band and realized that they’d already been involved with a lot of cool side projects like Tater Totz and the Lovedolls films. I’d followed all of their ups and downs very closely since then, and had even interviewed them before, so I was pretty well-versed in the basic “plot points” of the story when we first got together to work on the book. However, an early cut of the doc (which Andrew Reich generously shared with me) and some then-recent podcast interviews really opened my eyes to the whole insane story of Steven’s kidnapping, which I had no idea at all about.
BSM: How did you organize the physical content (recordings)? Did you have help with transcription?
Dan Epstein: I used a digital recorder to record the interviews, and after every interview, I would transfer the file to my computer for safekeeping; I kept them all together in a single “Redd Kross Interviews” file, organized by date. I used a couple of different AI programs for transcription, neither of which were great; I always had to go back through every transcription and make abundant corrections, but it was still quicker and less agonizing than transcribing the recordings word for word, which is how I typically transcribed interviews for the first 30 years of my career. I’m really not down with the whole “AI stealing copyrighted works to train itself” thang, which has apparently happened with three of my books—but I’m all for using AI as a tool for transcription.
BSM: Did you work with an editor? If so, were they developmental or line editors?
Dan Epstein: Yes, but the Omnibus editors were thankfully very hands-off when it came to the concept and execution. In the first draft edit, they did try to insert all these “informative” footnotes (“The Partridge Family was a fictional band created for TV…” etc) which were both hilariously awful and completely unnecessary—Redd Kross’s whole shtick has always been about dropping hip references like breadcrumbs instead of hitting you over the head with the whole loaf. So, once I put my foot down about that, our editors backed off and pretty much just stuck to copy editing.
BSM: Was this a full-time gig or something assembled in chunks (for lack of a better term)?
Dan Epstein: I mean, I WISH it could have been a full-time gig, but it’s impossible to live on a book advance these days, much less one that’s split three ways. So I just looked at it as the most enjoyable of the many freelance projects that I was juggling at the time. There was a point when we got down to the manuscript deadline that I had to push everything else off to the side for a few weeks; it was stressful, but at the same time, it was very fulfilling and a lot of fun to spend 12-15 hours a day in Redd Kross Land.
BSM: How much input or control did the McDonald brothers have over the book’s content? Did they have any preferences?
Dan Epstein: I made it very clear to them from the beginning that they would have final approval over every word in the book, as well as full control over what would be kept in and/or left out. Steven was more meticulous than Jeff, as far as going over the manuscript and making suggestions for rewording and/or inclusion of certain things that had (for one reason or another) initially been left out… but neither of them objected to anything that I wanted to include. To be honest, I expected them to fight me on certain things, but that didn’t happen at all.
BSM: Can you share any interesting anecdotes about your experience writing the book?
Dan Epstein: One of my favorite memories from the project is the day in August 2023 when Steven and I got to hang out in my neck of the woods during a day off between his NYC and Albany gigs with the Melvins. At that point, the book project had been on temporary hold for a couple of months while Jeff’s daughter was getting married, I was dealing with some heavy family shit, and Steven was off on tour with the Melvins; and while we always knew we’d get back into the groove once things settled down, our conversations that day (which were strictly casual, as opposed to any sort of interviews) got us both really pumped up again about doing the book. Plus, as I was driving Steven to his hotel in Albany, he played me several demos for what would become The Redd Album, which was quite a treat.
BSM: How much did you enjoy the process of writing Now You’re One of Us?
Dan Epstein: I’ve honestly never enjoyed a book project more than this one. Not only was it a huge honor to be able to help tell the story of one of my all-time favorite bands—one that I’ve been fairly evangelical about for nearly 40 years—but Jeff and Steven are two of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with, and our interviews often had me literally crying with laughter. Plus, even as a hardcore Redd Kross fan, there was so much about these guys, their band, and their records that I learned from each conversation we had. There was never, ever any point where I felt like, “Ugh, I’ve gotta do another interview with Steven (or Jeff) today…” Quite the opposite, truly—those interviews were usually the highlights of my week, and I really missed them once the book was finished.
BSM: What’s next for Dan Epstein?
Dan Epstein: I’m currently working on a book about the history of Electro-Harmonix, the guitar gear company that produced the legendary Big Muff pedal. It’s a crazy story that goes way beyond guitar pedals, and it’s tentatively scheduled to be published in early 2026 by Third Man Books, Jack White’s publishing company.
Check out more of Dan Epstein’s work on his Amazon author page. I’m salivating over this one:
- For the record, cuz somebody is going to ask, I’ve read cover-to-cover the autobiographies of Chuck Berry, Henry Rollins, Keith Richards, John Lydon, Boy George, and DLR. I’ve skimmed maybe two dozen others by Elton John, Neal Peart, Gregg Allman, Lemmy, Kim Gordon, Morrissey, etc. Does the Zappa book count as an autobiography? ↩︎
- Unlike many biographies, documentaries, and other memoir-type proposals, Dan didn’t want to interview any of Jeff and Steven’s former bandmates, associates, etc. ↩︎
1 Comment
Redd Kross never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Jeff McDonald is 65 . He changed his age to re-invent himself in the 90’s.
Clue: the only people who constantly bring up dates when telling stories are Marilu Henner and people with something to hide. In their documentary, they carefully chose who would be interviewed to keep the false narrative. Where were their best members like drummer, Glenn Holland ? So many secrets. What do you call a girl who just goes after rich male lead guitarists? Is there a name for a guy who does that? Epstein should have done a little research. The book should have been called “Long sleeves in the summer”.