Third Eye

Redd Kross’s 1990 LP Third Eye is at once the band’s most explicit celebration of '70s kitsch culture and its most calculated bid for mainstream success. Where its previous album—1987’s Neurotica—had been a wild and woolly ride, Third Eye is polished and genial. It might lead listeners to believe that the clean and likeable pop album is an effort at replicating the success of '70s bubblegum champions like The Bay City Rollers and The Cowsills (whose youngest member, Susan Cowsill, sings backup on “Bubblegum Factory” and “Love Is Not Love”). Between their lovable tributes to Planet of the Apes (the romantic “Zira”) and the 1980 Jodie Foster/Cherie Curie flick Foxes (“Annie’s Gone”), no song epitomizes the group’s nostalgic celebration better than “1976.” Its chorus functions as the group’s mission statement: “Feels so good to see you here/Nothing ever seems to happen in this place now/Tomorrow's bright or so they say/Forget the days of future past because now it's 1976.” Before '70s nostalgia became a cliché in and of itself, Third Eye showed how much fun it could be to rummage through the closets of decades past.