Toodie Cole Interview (3/1/03)

GONE : First of all what are you crazy kids going to do when you grow up? You can't play rock & roll forever you know.

TOODIE: Laughs.

GONE : Can you take us way back to the beginning in the '60's. When did you first meet Fred?

TOODIE: I first met Fred when they were still calling themselves the Weeds. They changed their name after they went to Los Angelos and they signed with Lord Tim Hudson, who was a well known English disc jockey at the time. Everybody was just British crazy and he was also managing the Seeds.

GONE : What year was that?

TOODIE: That was ah '67. He was managing the Seeds at the time too so he kind of wanted them to hit this teenie-bopper market so he made them change the name to the lollipop shop.

GONE : Laughs. I always thought it was maybe slang for a house of ill repute!

TOODIE: Ha ha I don't know it could have been but he thought it sounded cutsey/nasty sounding. They all hated it but they were stuck with it. They were all signed to do the record and that album came out at the beginning of '68. It started out as kind of a covers band like everybody else. Then Fred started writing songs. Him and the guitar player Ed and Bob the bass player wrote a lot of stuff too.

GONE : Did they evolve into Zipper?

TOODIE: No, uh uh that's a completely different band. Zipper's another band he did and that was in about '74, '73/'74.

GONE : How did that Zipper album do at the time?

TOODIE: Ok. It did some local stuff but it was basically the same time as Aerosmith & Montrose. All those bands were out and happening. I don't know it was just either a bit ahead of it's time or whatever. They only played together for about a year and a half and then Fred just got totally bored with lead singing and wanted to start playing guitar.

GONE : Oh he was only singing in Zipper.

TOODIE: He was just the lead singer yeah. He just knew enough chords on the acoustic guitar to write songs and that was it but he was just lead singing before then. He started out playing bass way back when he was a kid in Vegas but he was just a lead singer for years and writing songs and stuff like that.

GONE : What sort of music were you guys listening to back then ('74/'75) ?

TOODIE: Well believe it or not the Rats happened because ah like I said he was playing in King Bee and they were sort of doing this grungey, rhythym & bluesey, swampy kind of stuff but slower and ah they happened to get a spot playing in Portland on the bill with the Ramones the first time they came through.

GONE : Was that in 1976?

TOODIE: That's about right '76 or so. '76/'77 Mick DeVille was supposed to be on the bill. They cancelled so King Bee played the opening slot. I heard the Ramones for the first time and just thought "Fuck! I gotta do something with some energy to it. This is awesome." I was totally blown away and that's kind of the whole reason that whole thing happened. There was such a hassle trying to find a bass player that Fred talked me into learning. He goes 'yeah you just give it a go and see what happens you know I think you'll really dig it, being up on stage and this 'n' that'. I thought 'yeah I'll fuck around with it for a couple of weeks . It won't work out and I'll never do it again.' It just ended up working out and like I say all three of us were learning our instruments from the get-go in that first line up with me and Fred and Rod our drummer.

GONE : I haven't heard the first two albums. Just 'in a desperate red' which I really like.

TOODIE: They are just real raw. Real raw. Anyway pretty much since then I've been playing bass.

GONE : So are those songs your singing on 'ina desperate red' some of the first songs you've written?

TOODIE: Yeah 'just a man' I think is on that one, I wrote the lyrics for that one. But you know song writing just doesn't happen to come to me and be my forte and he's very prolific. So Andrew and I are happy as hell to let him write the songs, you know figure out the parts and this 'n' that.

GONE : Fred has a big song book somewhere huh?

TOODIE: Yeah he writes the lyrics in all kinds of tablets lying around. He's got stacks and stacks of them. Shit, thirty years of it you know!

GONE : So you guys just jam out a riff and he dips into his pool of lyrics and voila a Dead Moon masterpiece.

TOODIE: Yeah a lot of them he'll just come up with a lick, and idea, a verse, a bridge, whatever and then we'll get together and see if it flies or whatever and a lot of times it will give him ideas for where he wants to go with the lyrics and whether it's going to gel. A lot of times it just ends up not going anywhere.

GONE : What happened to the Rats with respect to labels and stuff?

TOODIE: WE just did everything on our own, We had a guitar shop at the time called Captain Wizegals and that's why we used Wizegal records. We started that just to put out Rats stuff.

GONE : So the fiercely independent attitude of Dead Moon does that go right back to the lollipop shop days?

TOODIE: Well no, not to the Lollipop shop. That goes back to King Bee and all that stuff. Even the Zipper album. We pretty much kind of did that on our own. They actually recorded that in a studio but we put the covers together and all the usual. It just started out a lot of it, just doing it out of necessity and sheer economics. It was the only way you could afford to you know cut costs and what not. Then afterwards we just started doing more and more. Just because then you've got total control of what you're doing. You know the stuff gets done on time. Half of it was done really last minute and it needs to happen ASAP so it's best not to rely on someone else. Then it just became habit. I mean it's just the way we've always done things now and it's just the easiest way to get stuff happening.

GONE : Well what finally happened to the Rats and how did Dead Moon come about?

TOODIE: The Rats were together for about eight years and then after that we started messing around with kind of country punk stuff. Did a band called Western Front for awhile. I used to kind of come up and guest sing with bands. Right after that we did a thing with the drummer who's on the red album that you've got, Louie, that we called the Range Rats. Which was country sounding stuff. Original stuff that Fred wrote that was real punk edged, real fast stuff. Then we kind of got bored with that after I don't know, about a year and a half, two years, something like that. He just decided he wanted to go back to basics, go back to playing a lot of the stuff he started out with in the Weeds. That's when we got together with Andrew and we started Dead Moon. We started out just playing covers for the first couple of months and then just started doing more and more originals.

GONE : What covers were you playing?

TOODIE: Oh Parchment Farm which we still play every once in awhile. The time has come today, Play with fire, some Everly Brothers, some Buffalo Springfield. All kinds of different shit. A lot of it was just to get the feel of one another and this 'n' that. Then we switched over to originals really fast cause we put that first album out right at the beginning of '88. We started in '87 I think, September '87.

GONE : Have you toured the entire United States now?

TOODIE: Oh yeah several times. The only state we haven't been to is Florida. I don't know why. It's kind of out of the loop and there's not much going on there.

GONE : Do you guys make an ok income out of Dead Moon?

TOODIE: Andrew is. We've got other things going on ourselves. We've got businesses and stuff like that which for us works great because we can pick and choose when we want to tour. We're not stuck with having to tour constantly just to keep alive.

GONE : Does Andrew do some of the business side of Dead Moon?

TOODIE: No! He just comes and drums! Shows up when he's supposed to.

GONE : You can't ask for more than that from a drummer.

TOODIE: No uh ah and he's happy as a clam. It's all he's ever wanted to do and he's single so yeah. Piece of cake. Laughs.

GONE : What about Europe? You seem to have quite a following over there.

TOODIE: On the continent yeah. Especially you know Germany, Holland and up in Norway. We usually go to Greece every year too.

GONE : Did you first hear bands like the Hellacopters by playing in Scandinavia?

TOODIE: Well we first saw them when we played at a festival in Holland. It's great to see them doing so well. They've just had to tour their brains out over the last few years which is kind of what it takes. It's such a full on job if you want to do something like that..

GONE : Are you very up on the NZ scene?

TOODIE: Fred and I are terrible at keeping up with what's going on. Andrew's the one that listens to music like gangbusters. He can pretty much do chapter and verse on just about anybody ever, anywhere on the planet. Past and present.

GONE : I love the lo-fi aesthetic of Dead Moon . I can't understand people who are hung up on production values and shit like that. As you'll see tonight I'm a song and dance man. I'm not a musician and don't understand how super-technical musos and wannabe sound engineers can actually enjoy music when they ignore the sheer human energy and emotion busting through.

TOODIE: No you're right. I never do either. I think that must be a curse, they can't just kick back and enjoy it. It's only rock & roll!

GONE : Ok well what do the next 15 years hold for you guys?

TOODIE: The next 15 years? Jesus I don't now if I can think that far ahead. ` We've pretty much just been kind of going a year at a time and taking each year as it happens. Since we're at the beginning of the year now it already seems like everything's booked and you already know where your supposed to be. Once we get back, like I say we're going to do some recording. We're going over to Holland in April to do a special show in Harlem outside of Amsterdam for a club that's been open for forever. There gonna have this big demolition last kinda gig. There gonna rebuild it but that takes like a couple of years. We're going down to Sanfrancisco to play at a thing they call Noise Pop that they do every year that's like an indoor festival they do down there for like three days. We'll [probably wait and go back to Europe in the fall. Probably September/October.

GONE : You've never been tempted to alter the sound? Maybe add another instrument.

TOODIE: Not really.

GONE : You'd start another band if you wanted to do that?

TOODIE: Well we've been together for so long and people have asked us and it's just no. If any of us decided to call it a day and flag it that would be it. There is no way we could replace any one of the members and still call it Dead Moon.

GONE : How many gigs must you guys have played? Thousands?

TOODIE: Oh yeah easily.

GONE : Any gigs that just stand out?

TOODIE: Oh man. This New Years eve we just played at the Tote (Melbourne) was fucking awesome. That's one of the most fun gigs I've played in quite a long time.

GONE : How long did you play for?

TOODIE: A couple of hours pretty much every night over there.

GONE : What's your longest set ever?

TOODIE: A couple of times in Europe, especially on the first couple of tours in '90 & '91 we played three, three and a half hours. It was a pain. It was brutal ! If we were playing really slow stuff maybe.

GONE : What is the scene actually like back home in Oregon?

TOODIE: Oregon's pretty much like New Zealand. Portland's the biggest town. It's about the size of Auckland maybe a bit bigger now. There's a few other towns but there's not much rock & roll going on there. Portland is pretty much the only town we play in Oregon. There is a great music scene in Portland. You know Seattle is close enough and there is always enough going on up there.

GONE : I guess it's like anywhere. When a band from a scene makes it there are usually other bands in the scene who could have had similar or greater success if they had worked as hard or had the breaks.

TOODIE: Oh yeah in any scene. I don't know some times it's either a matter of luck or working real hard. I mean it took a long time for us to be accepted to the level that we are in Portland and half of that happened because we'd gone to Europe and we'd come back and it was like 'Yeah well somebody else thinks your not half bad so yeah, fuck yeah!' They kind of look at you a bit differently than if you'd stayed at home. If you're just home grown they kind of just like take you for granted. The other thing is that once you start touring your not home that much. We probably only play 5 or 6 times a year in Portland these days.

GONE : So it's always a big deal and you always have new songs for them.

TOODIE: Yeah exactly.

GONE : Hey Toodie thanks for the interview I think the tapes about to cut out.

TOODIE: Sure. No problem.