Loud Fast Lady with Toody Cole

Loud Fast Lady catches up with Pierced Arrows' bassist about “retirement” and her marathon rock career

By Beverly Bryan
Published: August 14th, 2009 | 7:00am

The rocknroll bands that guitar player Fred and bassist Toody Cole have played in together over the years inspire gushing reverence in rock fans and critics alike. The couple is legendary for their independent M.O. and the white heat of their performances as Dead Moon and, since 2007, Pierced Arrows. D.I.Y. decades before it was a catch phrase, the Coles self-recorded and released music on their own label, Tombstone Records (Fred literally cut records on a lathe.) Oh, and, at 60, they are proud grandparents.

Part of the Cole’s legend is their general coolness. Toody confirms it all immediately with her warm voice and easy manners on the phone, punctuating each story she tells with staccato laughter. They’ve closed the music store and the general store that they ran for years and now rent out the property. “At this point, we’re basically retired and all we’ve got to do is deal with music and the website,” she explains. “We’re retarded,” Fred mutters from the peanut gallery. Toody cackles.

Fred started his recording career as a teenager in the early ‘60s, with a band called the Lords. Toody met Fred when his band at the time, the Weeds, found its way to her native Portland. They married in ‘67, both 18 years old, but Toody didn’t begin playing music until ’80, when Fred convinced her to learn bass and form a punk band with him called the Rats. The pair went on to form Dead Moon with drummer Andrew Loomis in ’87, building their formidable reputation with 15-some-odd albums before breaking up in ‘06.

They returned in ‘07 as Pierced Arrows, with new drummer Kelly Halliburton. The new band matches Dead Moon’s dark garage intensity with the same kind of clinging melodies and naked emotion — and even more conviction than before.

Almost 30 years in, Toody seems to just be hitting her stride. She sang lead vocals on a few songs in Dead Moon, but she sings her most arresting leads on the first Pierced Arrows LP, Straight To the Heart (Tombstone, 2008). On the group’s second release, Descending Shadows — for which Pierced Arrows just signed a deal with Vice Records for release in early 2010 — she sings more frequently, and louder than ever, confidently trading verses with Fred. Fred writes the songs, but that doesn’t mean the lyrics aren’t personal for Toody. “At this point, we know each other so well that he’s pretty good about writing things for me to sing,” she says.

Touring and recording to no end has inevitably burnished their sound, and now it seems that these “retired” underground heroes are surfacing. “One of the things that really amazed us the most with this particular band is that we’re reaching a much younger audience. One of the cool things for musicians who have been at it for a long time is that we’re getting some kid who is finally old enough to get into bars, who has heard of Dead Moon, or whatever, but hasn’t had a chance to hear anything,” she explains.

Playing with the Black Lips and other young garage rock revivalists helps. The current vogue for the ‘60s garage sound is a matter of course to Toody. She sees it as part of a cycle she’s been observing at close range since she was a teenager. “In the ‘60s, we were going back to the ‘40s and the ‘50s. The British explosion was inspired by all the black blues players. Everything is cyclical, it always is. Whoever is coming up young, they’re going to be going back in history and create their own style off of that.”

If anything, retirement for Toody and Fred means upping the ante. In October of last year, they ran the Portland Marathon with their son, Weeden. “It was just one of those things we both wanted to accomplish at some point in our lives and decided the year we turned 60 we were going to do it,” she states. This might seem incongruous to those who watched them playing keno and drinking whiskey in the documentary, Unknown Passage: The Dead Moon Story, but Toody and Fred both ran and played sports in high school and ran road races with all of their three children while the kids were growing up.

This is not to say that the documentary creates a false impression. “We’re in the back of the pack, smoking cigarettes when they shoot the gun off and everybody’s looking at us like that’s so un-PC,” Toody relates with ill-concealed amusement. All the Coles took over six hours, jogging and walking, to finish, but Toody beat Fred’s time by 15 minutes.

Pierced Arrows went on tour almost immediately after the marathon, and the trio’s approach makes running the Portland Marathon look like a mall walk. They’ll tour Northern Europe through September and the U.S. a week later through October. Then it will be back to the southern half of Europe beginning in November.

For Toody, even when touring gets old — and it does get old — performing always makes up for it. As she sums it up: “It’s just a passion. It gets in your blood. Once there’s people out in front of you, you just go.”

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Pierced Arrows official site

Pierced Arrows MySpace

Vice Records