Never Say Die

Fred Cole downshifts, his old Ford Scottsdale heaving as it veers off a county road onto an overgrown path leading back to the home he shares with his wife, Toody. Cole is a big man with a broad set of shoulders, long graying hair, and sad, Labrador eyes—the right side of his face marked with a crescent and skull tattoo. Though we are only about 30 miles east of Portland, Ore., the closer the truck gets to Cole's home, the more it feels like the middle of nowhere. The yellowed fields are vast, and moss-covered firs loom large overhead. It's a world apart from the Fred Meyers and Shell stations pockmarking the Clackamas freeway exit a few miles back. This path to the house is walled on all sides by creeping blackberry bushes, which scrape against the side of Cole's truck as he pulls in.

"I was talking with this agent in New York City," he says over the roar of the engine. "And the agent says, 'I've had so much trouble with these BlackBerries.' I says, 'Well, have you tried this Crossbow shit? You just spray it on the blackberries and it kills them all.' Agent's like, 'What the hell are you talking about?' I says, 'Crossbow! It'll kill all your blackberry bushes!' Turns out, he's talking about those fuckin' personal organizer/cell phone things, and here I am thinking he's having problems with his blackberry bushes."

He pauses to ponder the insanity of the exchange and shakes his head with a grin.

"But the Crossbow shit really does work," he adds.

If Fred Cole is unaware of the technological advances of late, he can be forgiven. He's never needed any to get by. Though he's a 59-year-old grandfather of seven, the guy is hardly out of touch. For the last 20 years, Cole has fronted Dead Moon, one of the most revered underground bands in the Pacific Northwest, whose extreme DIY ethic and wild brand of bare-bones rock and roll have made them an icon to many a Seattle music luminary.

Mention Dead Moon to Seattle's rock deities, and you'll get an uncannily positive response. To anyone familiar with the trio, it's a band that can do absolutely no wrong. Krist Novoselic of Nirvana calls them "the real Northwest rock." Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder counts them among his favorite bands. And Steve Turner of Mudhoney places singer-guitarist Cole on the same playing field as Neil Young. But mention the name Dead Moon to most people, and you'll doubtless be met with a shrug. Dead Moon are barely, if ever, spun on the radio and have never been signed to a major label—selling very few albums. But Dead Moon inspire an unparalleled loyalty among their fans.

"I want to know everything about them," says Love as Laughter frontman Sam Jayne, who cited low attendance at Dead Moon shows as his reason for leaving Seattle. "I want to know what they do all day when they're not on tour. I want to know what Fred Cole eats for breakfast."

Fred Cole is a Tacoma native whose music career dates to 1964 with a band called the Lords. They released one single, "Ain't Got No Self-Respect," before disbanding. His next band, the Lollipop Shoppe, landed opening slots in California for the Animals, the Doors, and Big Brother and Holding Company with Janis Joplin, among others. Their one single from 1968, the garage-psych scorcher "You Must Be a Witch," was released to mild acclaim—yet they disbanded in the same year (the single, however, landed on Nuggets, the legendary box set of psychedelic rarities). Today, holding that track up to anything by Dead Moon, you can see the raw rock and roll journey Fred Cole was about to embark on. Over the next several years, Cole would marry Toody, homestead in the Canadian Yukon, purchase the 22-acre property in Clackamas, build a house there from scratch, raise three children, open a guitar shop in Portland, build another, bigger house, also from scratch, remodel rental properties in Portland, open another guitar shop in Clackamas called Tombstone Music as well as a general store bearing the same name—all while playing in a succession of Northwest punk bands, including Zipper and the Rats (with Toody as bassist).

In 1987, however, Fred and Toody, along with drummer Andrew Loomis, started the band they would become best known for: Dead Moon. The goal was simple: strip rock and roll to its barest, most skeletal essentials. If people liked it, they liked it. If they didn't, fuck 'em.

"Anybody can be doctored to the point of no return," says Toody Cole of Dead Moon's music. "That's why we don't use reverb or any effects on the vocals. It's raw, it irritates a lot of people, but it's real. You can feel the emotion in our music, and it's not buried under layers of crap."