Once In A Dead Moon

I once found myself sitting at a bar beside Toody Cole and told her that she was my all-time favorite bassist, to which she blushed and said, “Thank you, I’m trying really hard, and I practice a lot.” A telling response from a humble punk veteran who is far too cool to play it cool. Over the past five decades, Toody and her dearly departed husband, Fred, have kept Portland's music scene alive with their bands—Dead Moon, the Rats, Pierced Arrows, and several others—self-recording and self-releasing music in their self-built Clackamas County home. While it’s easy to take one look at Dead Moon’s drippy font and iconic skull logo and assume that their music is raucous, dark, and speedy, you might be surprised to find the tenderness that runs beneath, exemplified on vulnerable, slow-paced tracks like “Where Did I Go Wrong” and “It’s O.K..” At the center of Toody and Fred’s projects has always been love: love for the community, love of music, and love for one another. Even in one of their most pissed-off songs, 1994’s “Poor Born,” Fred sings lovingly, “I’ve got a woman who still makes me crazy with the shake of her nightgown.” I caught up with Toody Cole over the phone ahead of her show at the Tractor Tavern with bandmates Kelly Halliburton and Christopher March (of Jenny Don’t and the Spurs).


 

I emailed you for this interview through the contact on the Dead Moon website. Do you run the site, merch, and press inquiries on your own?
Yeah, baby, I’m still DIY all the way! It has pretty much always been my gig. And, shit, I turned 77 in December. I'm retired now, and while it's great to kick back, I'm still used to being busy. So, it’s just something to do, and it doesn't take up that much of my time. It's cool because I can do whatever I want or not do anything at all, depending on how I feel.

I was listening to an interview you gave in 2019, and you said, “I’ve always had it in my head ‘70 years old, and I’m done.'” I assume you changed your mind?
I'm as vain as anybody. I just thought that I would look too old, and I didn’t want to get on stage. But at some point, I got past that and just went, “What the hell!” and got back on stage. The more I look at old pictures, the more I go, “Fuck, I look great!” But the coolest thing is that it still feels just the same to get up on stage. It's not easy to do anymore—it takes a lot of work and prep time to make it happen.

What got you back into playing shows?
When I lost Andrew [Loomis, Dead Moon's drummer, who passed away in 2016] and Fred, followed by the pandemic, wildfire evacuations, and a huge ice storm, I looked up at the sky and thought, God, what next? It was like a domino effect. But, in 2023, Eric Isaacson (who runs Mississippi Records and reissues the Dead Moon LPs) had a 20th-anniversary party for the shop and asked if I would perform. I had the idea to do a retrospective of songs written by Fred from all the bands we had been in together. I figured it would just be a one-off. But I guess the set came off really, really well. I'm not used to this whole social media thing—I don't check it out, I don't do it, I don't post it, you know, whatever. But that's like all anybody does right now. So, as soon as videos from the show got posted, I got a flood of messages saying, “Oh my god, you're back playing again?” and offering gigs. 

After that, I did a few local shows and got together with Kelly Halliburton and Christopher March from Jenny Don’t and the Spurs. It just fell together. At this point, Jenny takes care of all the bookings and detailed work for the band. I just resigned myself to booking a bunch of shows this year. This might be the last time I want to do it, I don't know.

How does it feel to play Dead Moon songs with different musicians, without Andrew and Fred?
Well, I'm not a songwriter—Fred wrote all the songs. I wish I had that talent. I really respect it. To me, his lyrics are amazing and timeless. People still love to hear his stuff, so I'm just doing the best that I can. It's not as good as the two of us together, that's for sure! One of my good friends said, “Man, know what I really miss? You and Fred’s harmonies together.” That's what I miss, too. It's just something that can't be duplicated, and thank God for that. It was the special ingredient.

What advice would you give to couples who want to create art together?
There are a lot of people who can and a lot of people who can't. I think one of the reasons that it worked so well for us was the fact that I wasn't a songwriter—there was no competition on that particular artistic level. Fred was pretty much the only reason I ended up playing music. He talked me into it, showed me how to play bass, and it just kind of grew from there. I got bit by the bug. I ended up loving being on stage. For me, it was more about performing in front of people and feeling that vibe, rather than getting satisfaction from writing a great song. We were both really good at different things. 

We were an incredibly great partnership. I did all the paperwork and 90-percent of the business for the band: taking care of booking, hotels, flights, tour managing, and dealing with the money. Because of that, Fred got royalties from his songs. He never would have gone through that on his own. Some people are just too artistic to worry about money. So, anyway, we had everything handled between the two of us. That's why that worked. It was a really unique situation. 

What was your first time on stage like?
My first show was with the Rats in 1977 or ’78, just doing punk-rock stuff. Fred had just started playing electric guitar on stage—before that, he was on lead vocals with the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe. I had only been playing bass for a couple of weeks, and our drummer was this kid who had never played drums before. [laughs] One night, while we were rehearsing together and having a drink, Fred said, “Oh, by the way, I got us a gig—we're playing a house party on Friday.” I was like, “What!? I can't do that, no way!” And he goes, “No, it'll be fine. Get a couple of beers in you, and you'll be great.” That was my first gig. It was in somebody's little teeny bar or front room or whatever, in front of about five-10 people. 

Were there any musicians whom you were looking up to or emulating at the time?
Oh yeah. Greg Sage, man, the Wipers! A lot of my bass-playing style was influenced greatly by Dave Koupal, the bass player of the Wipers. 

Between the Rats and Dead Moon, you released a solo single of Brenda Lee’s “Coming on Strong” and “Rather Be Your Lover,” written by Fred. How did that single come about?
Well, that happened because Fred was playing with his country group, the Western Front, at that time. We had broken up the Rats, and I got to a point where my kids weren't quite grown yet. My younger son was around 12/13, and he guilt-tripped me about going out of town and not being around. So I told Fred, “I'm done.” He ended up kind of messing around with country music and got the Western Front together. I would sing with those guys off and on. And that's how the Toody single happened. I love singing country, but it's not as exciting to play on stage, which is one of the reasons we left it behind and started Dead Moon. 

I know that Fred was heavily inspired by seeing the Ramones to start the Rats. Was there a similar event that inspired the start of Dead Moon?
Fred wanted to go back to his roots and play rock and roll again. You know, real rock and roll, like the stuff he was doing with the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe. We got started by playing covers and a few of his older songs. Fred quickly got inspired and wrote so much incredible material in the first three years. From there, we got picked up locally, just from the reputation of our previous bands. The Wipers had started touring in Europe, and Hans Kesteloo (who ended up signing us to his label Music Maniac Records in Germany) hounded Greg Sage, saying, “You're living in Portland, right? Do you know Fred Cole?” So that's how that connection happened. It's just so weird. Everything seemed fated. It just fell into place. 

I love that Dead Moon has some really pissed-off songs followed by some really sweet, tender songs, like the first album, when “Out on a Wire” goes into Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Was that intentional?
Fred was always looking for material for me to sing before he started writing songs with me in mind to do the lead vocals. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” just kind of happened. At some point, we started playing it live, and I don't know, maybe we used it because we needed filler on the album. For whatever reason, my version of that song just caught on. Everybody loves hearing it. 

Mixing the hard and the hopeful, the light and the dark, and that girly vocal thing, added a whole new dimension to Dead Moon. It’s what Fred used to call a roller coaster—he'd make setlists based on it—He liked to hit the audience hard at the beginning and the end. In the middle, we would build it up, and then bring it back down into a ballad or something slow, or start all over again. He totally learned it from watching punk-rock bands. You know, when everything's BAM! BAM! BAM! in your face, the effect wears off. Fred was an amazingly multifaceted individual, and he felt everything—you can tell just by the way he carried off his vocals. Every feeling was equally important to him. 

See Toody Cole with Semisoft and DJ Kurt Bloch at the Tractor Tavern on Mar 6 at 8:30 pm.