Dead Moon weren’t from Seattle. I’m putting them here anyway.
They were from down around Portland, and anybody who has a problem with that can go make their own website.
I first heard Unknown Passage sometime around ’90 or ’91, back when I was still in Queens. A friend played me “Dead Moon Night” and I wanted to know what the hell I was listening to.
It didn’t sound new.
That was the weird thing.
Even then, Dead Moon sounded like some record you’d found in a box in somebody’s basement that had been sitting there since 1967. Fred’s guitar was all fuzz and broken edges, Andrew Loomis sounded like he was playing the smallest drum kit in the world, and then Fred and Toody would start singing together and suddenly the whole thing made sense.
Once I started digging into them, the story got even better.
Fred Cole had been making records since the ’60s. The Weeds, the Lollipop Shoppe, Zipper, the Rats — the guy had already lived about three musical lives before Dead Moon even started.
And Fred and Toody did almost everything themselves.
They had their own label, Tombstone Records. They recorded a lot of the records themselves. Fred even cut their masters on this old mono lathe that supposedly had been used for the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.”
I mean, come on.
Everybody throws around the word “independent,” but Dead Moon actually meant it.
By the time I got to Seattle in ’92 I started seeing their records around more often, especially in the stores that carried the weirder Northwest stuff. Black-and-white covers, Tombstone logo, usually looking like they’d been made somewhere behind somebody’s house.
Which, basically, they had.
In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage and Defiance are probably still my favorite stretch. “54/40 or Fight,” “Dead Moon Night,” “Walking on My Grave,” “D.O.A.,” “Johnny’s Got a Gun.” There’s something about those records that sounds completely outside of time.
The funny thing is that Dead Moon never became particularly big over here, but apparently they’re huge in parts of Europe. They’ve been going over there for years and playing to people who know every damn song.
Good for them.
Americans can be pretty stupid about their own bands sometimes.
They just kept making records through the whole Seattle explosion without seeming to give much of a shit about any of it. Stranded in the Mystery Zone, Strange Pray Tell, Crack in the System, Nervous Sooner Changes — same three people, same basic setup, another bunch of songs.
No lineup drama. No major-label makeover.
Just Fred, Toody and Andrew.
Destination X came out in ’99 and Trash & Burn came out last year, and somehow they’re still doing it. Fred and Toody have been together forever, Andrew’s still behind the drums, and Dead Moon still sound like Dead Moon.
There’s something incredibly reassuring about that.
Maybe that’s why I wanted them on this site.
This archive is supposed to be about the Northwest music I cared about during those years, not some stupid argument about where the Seattle city limits are.
And if you’re talking about Northwest underground rock and you leave out Dead Moon, you’re doing it wrong.
Portland can have them back when I’m finished.
