“I Hate My School” (1981) * Written by Jeff McDonald * EP: Red Cross * Label: Posh Boy
It’s quite a story: The two McDonald brothers, Jeff and Steve from Hawthorne, California, released their debut EP full of unserious pop culture punk in 1981. Shortly after, the serious legal team for the International Committee of the Red Cross informed them that they would have to rebrand. The moral, possibly, is that every band starting out should choose a problematic copyright name just to see if they can at least get arrested. “Annette’s Got the Hits,” a goof on Muscle Beach Party and its ilk, would be the one that got the attention of KROQ up the road in L.A., but the key track was “I Hate My School,” in which the McDonalds flip a minute-plus-seventeen bird at the “rah rahs,” surfers, jocks and bookworms at Hawthorne High. This happens to be the very institute the Beach Boys had drawn inspiration from in 1963 (the year Jeff was born) for “Be True to Your School.” Things change, or maybe not. In The Lost Beach Boy (2007), Jon Stebbins reports how David Marks and Dennis Wilson would have to deal with the ongoing sneers and assaults of the surfers and jocks back then. Red Cross would become Redd Kross and would work for decades in boiling down pop-rock to its essence in their mass kitsch kitchen.