Whatever happened to the musicians in all those obscure ’60s garage rock bands documented on Nuggets? Some of them went on to bigger and better bands, but most didn’t. Some of them got drafted and never came back from Vietnam, some of them got married, started careers and had kids and put away the guitars forever. The more famous of them occasionally reunite for garage-rock festivals. And some of them just never stopped rocking, through band after band, decade after decade.
Oregon’s Fred Cole is one such guy. He has been tearing up stages (and his vocal cords) for over 45 years. His ’60s bands the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe produced the garage-rock classics “It’s Your Time” and “You Must Be a Witch” and then vanished, but Cole carried on through ’70s hard rock, punk, new wave, and beyond. By the ’90s, Dead Moon, the rough-and-tumble band he founded with wife Toody Cole, was semi-legendary in the Pacific Northwest. (Pearl Jam has been known to cover Dead Moon’s “It’s OK” in concert.) At a time when it seemed just about any long-haired band within a three-hour drive of Seattle could make it big, Cole insisted on cutting his records himself, on his own record lathe — as the story goes, the very same lathe on which the Kingsmen cut their version of “Louie, Louie.”
Dead Moon split up in 2006, but Cole and Toody soon formed Pierced Arrows with drummer Kelly Halliburton. Their new release, Descending Shadows, sounds looser and more restrained than the sound of Dead Moon. But look online for live videos, and you’ll see that these guys haven’t mellowed at all.
PIERCED ARROWS: Bar Pink, Wednesday, March 24, 10 p.m. 619-564-7194. $7.
Whatever happened to the musicians in all those obscure ’60s garage rock bands documented on Nuggets? Some of them went on to bigger and better bands, but most didn’t. Some of them got drafted and never came back from Vietnam, some of them got married, started careers and had kids and put away the guitars forever. The more famous of them occasionally reunite for garage-rock festivals. And some of them just never stopped rocking, through band after band, decade after decade.
Oregon’s Fred Cole is one such guy. He has been tearing up stages (and his vocal cords) for over 45 years. His ’60s bands the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe produced the garage-rock classics “It’s Your Time” and “You Must Be a Witch” and then vanished, but Cole carried on through ’70s hard rock, punk, new wave, and beyond. By the ’90s, Dead Moon, the rough-and-tumble band he founded with wife Toody Cole, was semi-legendary in the Pacific Northwest. (Pearl Jam has been known to cover Dead Moon’s “It’s OK” in concert.) At a time when it seemed just about any long-haired band within a three-hour drive of Seattle could make it big, Cole insisted on cutting his records himself, on his own record lathe — as the story goes, the very same lathe on which the Kingsmen cut their version of “Louie, Louie.”
Dead Moon split up in 2006, but Cole and Toody soon formed Pierced Arrows with drummer Kelly Halliburton. Their new release, Descending Shadows, sounds looser and more restrained than the sound of Dead Moon. But look online for live videos, and you’ll see that these guys haven’t mellowed at all.
PIERCED ARROWS: Bar Pink, Wednesday, March 24, 10 p.m. 619-564-7194. $7.
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