Toody Cole has the best laugh I’ve heard in a long time—big, unabashed, spontaneous. We’ve traded emails for a month or two, trying to find room for an interview between my touring schedule and hers. I had purchased some Dead Moon gear to wear for an upcoming book event—the band gets a nod in my latest novel, with Strange Pray Tell in rotation for much of the writing process—and was surprised to find an email reply about my order signed “Kathleen/Toody.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been; Dead Moon has always been a DIY operation.
“We started out with nothing but each other,” Toody tells me of her early life with husband Fred Cole, who fronted so many different bands over the years it’s tough to keep track of them all. Together with drummer Andrew Loomis, Fred and Toody formed Dead Moon in 1987 and soon became cult heroes of the Portland punk scene.
Both born in 1948, the Coles were raised by parents who had lived through the Depression and World War II; Fred was the head of his household by the time he was ten. “That responsibility came early in life,” Toody explains, whether you were putting food on the table or chasing a dream. “If you wanted something for yourself, you had to go out and work for it.” But necessity wasn’t the only reason Dead Moon did almost everything themselves. “90% of it honestly is the pride and the sense of accomplishment of doing things yourself,” she’s quick to add. “It wasn’t just music for us, it was everything,” including “living in a tent for six months” while building a house from the ground up. The Coles were “both basically control freaks,” she admits. “That’s a big part of it, too.”
You might not guess that, listening to any of the band’s records. Dead Moon’s music is unfussy, fizzing lo-fi, the songs by turns brooding and ferocious, most recorded on the same (in)famous disc cutter that produced the Kingsmen’s (in)famous “Louie Louie.” I can’t resist asking to hear the origin story, and it comes with another big laugh. “It used to be in the station at KSAN radio,” Toody tells me. “They had this disc cutter in the studio for the disc jockeys to cut their jingles, their spots, their ads, and the guy who managed the Kingsmen was a disc jockey there.” It eventually turned up at Portland’s Rec Recording, “completely taken apart, all the parts in boxes.” Fred heard about it and “hounded them for a whole year about he wanted to buy it” before finally giving up. Toody decided to try one more time for his birthday. “I talked the guy into giving it to me for $200 bucks. We got it home and it’s heavier than shit!”
They reassembled it in the bedrooms their kids had moved out of. “It took like two, three months,” she says. “[Fred] had a Xerox of the original manual, and he tinkered with that thing and figured out how to it get back together again. And then we cut our first 45. It’s a mono disc cutter—and at that point everything had switched over to stereo, and that’s one reason it sounds so distinctive.” Fred was a tinker at heart. “He just loved it. He was a kid who took the radio and the alarm clock apart and tried to put them back together again.”
The same instinct defined much of Dead Moon’s songwriting process. “I didn’t have that particular talent,” Toody admits. “I love playing music and I love being up onstage and being part of this band, but we each had a different role to play and served a different purpose.” Fred “heard the whole song in his head and knew what he wanted it to sound like” and taught the bass runs to Toody. “He’d have Andrew play what Andrew felt like needed to happen… and then at some point it just became what it was going to be onstage.”
They test-drove most tunes live before committing them to acetate. “We were a live band!” she exclaims. “We hated recording, and we hated spending a lot of time on doing recording, and that’s part of the reason it’s as lo-fi as it is. We needed that chemistry onstage between the three of us.” That chemistry was key to the longevity of Dead Moon, who put out ten studio albums—as well as compilations and live albums—before disbanding in 2016. “I think that’s a reason why a lot of people don’t make it,” Toody says. “That ego-clash.” For her and Fred, “There was no animosity, and there was no competition,” even though “we’re both very competitive!” She laughs again. “Keeps the relationship interesting.”
Chemistry and kismet wrote the story of Dead Moon with Fred and Toody. Of all the Coles’ musical projects over the years, she can’t put her finger on a more specific reason why Dead Moon was the one that took off. “All of it was luck,” she says. “Right place, right time. The northwest was happening at that particular point.” The band never achieved mainstream success in the States but became household names in the Portland scene and attracted enough of a following to tour extensively abroad.
The Nineties were an incredible decade for live music, she reflects, but especially in the Pacific Northwest. “I been lucky enough in my life to see a couple of those cycles and be part of them,” she says. “There’s just something in the water here in Oregon… we weren’t hype. We were us. We were naturally funny, we naturally dug each other, it was a million different things.” She reaches for a comparison but doesn’t have to reach far. “It’s like falling in love. You can’t explain it, you just feel it, you know it’s there, and feel luckier than shit to be a part of it.”
By now, Dead Moon is much more than just a part of it. In 2017, a few short weeks before Fred’s death, October 5 officially became “Dead Moon Night,” a punk-rock holiday that speaks to the band’s outsize impact on the city. “We had a partnership with my younger brother Pat at Whizeagle Records,” Toody says. “And then in ’86 we split up all the product in the store and my brother stayed downtown and we moved out to Clackamas.” The community followed wherever they went. “We had a lot of bands coming into the store because they heard Fred had a lathe… a lot of them were local artists and word got out. Everybody wanted their thing cut on the magic disc cutter. It was kind of a cooperative thing and we did everything at cost and Fred charged a little bit for his time for doing it.”
For years, the Coles ran Tombstone Records in the same ad hoc manner. “There’s always been a collaborative thing among musicians, artists, dancers, photographers, in this particular area. Everybody getting together… It’s still very much that way.” The PDX punks remain great equalizers. Even though Dead Moon hasn’t played a gig since 2015 and Toody herself has been “out of the loop,” for a while, she’s sure “that camaraderie still exists.”
But Toody has been running the label and managing the Dead Moon legacy single-handedly since the deaths of Fred Cole and Andrew Loomis—hence her email to me about T-shirt sizes that got this conversation started. I ask about carrying the torch by herself, which can’t be easy after so many years of good chemistry and good community. “All I’ve been doing besides getting talked back up onstage lately is handling the Dead Moon website,” she tells me. “It was awesome to have that right after Fred passed. The outpouring was just unbelievable. I spent night and day [on it], because I do everything myself, the first couple of months.”
Still, the busyness of the business doesn’t distract from the fact that she’s now the one surviving member of the band. “It’s been a journey,” she says. “It’s just weird. I’m missing half of myself. There’s some days I get melancholic and wish I could have it all back, but I’m trying to grow old just as gracefully as I can.”
But “graceful” maybe doesn’t do it justice. She’s not ready to hang up her spurs yet; she’s soon off to Spain and then Australia and New Zealand to do what she does best: play music. “I’m going to turn 77 this year, so, you know, what the fuck!” She gives me her biggest laugh yet. “I know I can still do it, but it’s a lot more work than it used to be.” She sounds thrilled more than daunted by the prospect. “It’s been a while since I’ve done anything more than one-offs so it’s exciting and scary at the same time.”
I tell her I hope I get the chance to see her onstage, because she makes 77 sounds like dynamite. She gives me one more laugh. “It’s good to be wanted,” she says.
