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, because Fred Cole really had been making records since the ’60s. He came out of Las Vegas and ended up in the Northwest with the Weeds, who eventually became the Lollipop Shoppe after somebody decided that was a better name. It wasn’t. They made Just Colour in 1968, and “You Must Be a Witch” is the one to find if you want to hear why garage freaks were still talking about Fred twenty years later. There were more bands after that — Zipper, King Bee, Western Front and others — but the other important stop is the Rats, because by then Toody was playing bass with him.
Fred and Toody had met in Portland back in the ’60s and had been together ever since. That matters because Dead Moon wasn’t Fred Cole plus his wife and some drummer. Toody was the bass player, she sang, she had already been making records with Fred, and she was part of the machinery that kept the whole thing running. By the mid-’80s they had gone through another country-leaning band called the Range Rats. Andrew Loomis auditioned for that one and didn’t really fit. When Fred and Toody decided they wanted to make loud rock & roll again in 1987, they called him back.
That was Dead Moon.
Fred. Toody. Andrew.
Same three people.
The name supposedly came after Fred and Toody saw a red moon driving home from Reno. Maybe that’s exactly how it happened and maybe it’s one of those band stories that gets better every time somebody tells it. Either way, it fits.
They put out their first records themselves in 1988 through Tombstone, which was not just a cool logo somebody slapped on the back of an LP. Fred and Toody had a music store out in Clackamas called Tombstone Music, and Tombstone Records grew out of that whole operation. They handled the label, mail order, records going in and out, all that unglamorous shit nobody puts in the band photograph. They also did cheap mastering and duplication work for other local musicians. “Independent” gets used to describe everybody who didn’t happen to be on Warner Bros. that week. With Dead Moon it meant something pretty literal.
And then there’s the lathe.
Fred cut his masters on an old mono Presto lathe. Not pressed the records — that’s different. He cut the lacquer, then the thing went off to a pressing plant and came back as vinyl. The story I’ve always heard, and Trouser Press printed it too, is that the old Presto had been used to cut the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.”
Is that actually the same goddamn machine?
I have no idea.
But I desperately want it to be true.
The important part is that Fred really did use the thing. A lot of those early Tombstone records are mono, and they sound exactly like Dead Moon should sound: narrow, overloaded, immediate, like the band is trapped inside the grooves and pissed off about it. This wasn’t somebody spending a hundred thousand dollars trying to manufacture “lo-fi.” It was eight-track recording, old equipment, limited money, years of knowing how they wanted records to sound and three people who did not need forty-eight tracks to get there.
In the Graveyard came out in ’88, Unknown Passage in ’89 and Defiance in ’90. That’s probably still my favorite stretch. “Dead Moon Night,” “54/40 or Fight,” “Walking on My Grave,” “D.O.A.” There’s something about those records that sounds completely outside of time. They could be garage records from the ’60s until Andrew hits something too hard, punk records until Fred and Toody start harmonizing, country records that somebody left in the rain and then plugged into a fuzz box. Trying to make them fit neatly into one category misses most of the fun.
The other funny thing is that Europe figured Dead Moon out before a lot of America did.
Music Maniac over in Germany started putting their stuff out around 1990, including a couple of compilation LPs called Dead Moon Night and Thirteen Off My Hook. That opened up a whole other life for the band. They went over to Europe in 1990 and found audiences in places like Germany and the Netherlands that actually knew the records. One of the earliest dates from that first run was at Vera in Groningen, and Live Evil came out of a show at the Longhorn in Stuttgart that August. It’s a beautiful ugly live record, exactly as it should be.
They kept going back.
That became one of the strangest things about Dead Moon if you only knew them from American record stores. Over here they were this cult Portland band whose records you found in the punk and garage bins. Over there they could go back year after year to rooms full of people who knew the damn songs. Not stadiums. Not rock-star bullshit. Just a real audience that was considerably bigger and more dependable than the one they had at home for a long time.
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.
What makes Dead Moon especially funny to write about on a site like this is what they did when Seattle blew up.
Nothing.
Or at least nothing they weren’t already doing.
They didn’t become a grunge band. They didn’t suddenly discover expensive producers. Fred didn’t put on shorts and start jumping around in front of an A&R guy. They just kept making Dead Moon records. Stranded in the Mystery Zone in ’91. Strange Pray Tell in ’92. Crack in the System in ’94. Nervous Sooner Changes in ’95. Same three people, same basic setup, another bunch of songs.
No lineup drama. No major-label makeover.
Just Fred, Toody and Andrew.
There is one Seattle artifact I especially love, though. In 1993 Sub Pop put out “Dirty Noise” backed with “Dark Deception” as part of the Singles Club. SP200. Clear vinyl. So if anybody really needs paperwork before they’ll let a Portland band through the door of a Seattle archive, there you go.
But Dead Moon never needed Seattle to validate them. That’s kind of the point.
They belonged to the Northwest underground that existed underneath and around all the stuff the rest of the country decided was “the Seattle scene.” Portland had its own history, its own rooms, its own bands and its own stubborn way of doing things. Dead Moon had more to do with garage rock, punk and the older Portland lineage than they ever did with somebody’s definition of grunge. The fact that Sub Pop put out a single doesn’t magically turn them into a Seattle band any more than this page does.
It just means the borders were never as clean as people like to make them afterward.
And while everybody else spent the ’90s breaking up, changing members, getting signed, getting dropped, suing somebody, firing somebody or announcing that the next record was going to be a radical departure, Dead Moon kept being Fred, Toody and Andrew. They made Hard Wired in Ljubljana, another live record, in ’97. Destination X followed in ’99. Trash & Burn is the newest one, and they’re still out there.
Same three people.
I keep coming back to that because it sounds almost impossible after writing about half the bands on this site.
There’s something incredibly reassuring about Dead Moon. Not because they never changed at all — nobody makes records for that long without changing — but because the basic reason for doing it never seemed to get replaced by something else. They had their records, their label, their equipment, their audience, and this strange second home in European clubs. The music business could decide Portland was important or Seattle was important or guitars were important or guitars were dead, and Dead Moon still had another show to play.
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. Dead Moon were already doing this before anybody at a major label figured out where Aberdeen was, and they were still doing it after most of those people had stopped returning Seattle bands’ phone calls.
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.
