From a home-modded Guild Thunderbird to the lathe that cut “Louie Louie”, Fred and Toody Cole’s gear was as bare-bones as their records.
Fred Cole, his wife Toody and drummer Andrew Loomis formed Dead Moon in Portland, Oregon in 1987, and for the next 19 years they wrote, recorded, pressed and toured almost everything themselves. Along the way they built a fanatical following in Europe long before most of America caught on.
Fred had been at it since 1964, when he cut his first single with The Lords in Las Vegas. By the time Dead Moon came together, he and Toody had already played in The Rats and were running their own guitar shop, Tombstone Music, which they kept going for 30 years. The shop gave its name to Tombstone Records, the label that put out most of the band’s catalogue.
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Fred Cole
Fred’s guitar was a 1960s Guild Thunderbird, an oddball offset with the asymmetrical headstock and the built-in kickstand on the back. Only about 150 were made between 1963 and 1968, and Fred’s didn’t stay stock for long. He painted it red, added black stripes and a custom pickguard, stripped out the original tremolo, bridge, pickups and controls, and fitted a Bigsby with a roller bridge and a single bridge humbucker.
Reports are mixed as to what pickup Fred installed in his Thunderbird, with some claiming it was a DiMarzio X2N and others swearing blind it was a Bill Lawrence XL500. Whichever it was, the Thunderbird stayed with Fred through Dead Moon and into Pierced Arrows, the trio he and Toody formed after the 2006 split.
Fred ran the Guild straight into a red tolex Marshall JCM800 2203 head and a 4×12 cabinet, the iconic red amp matching his hand painted guitar.
The only pedal in the chain was a tuner, so the amp and that single humbucker did all of the work. With nothing between the guitar and the speaker, there was nothing to smooth Fred’s sound over and that’s how he liked it.
Toody Cole
Toody’s main bass was a red late-1960s semi-hollow Vox teardrop, which she favoured for its shorter scale and how easy it was to play. It’s the same distinctive shape Bill Wyman made famous with The Rolling Stones.
When she and Fred moved to stripped-back duo shows in later years, Toody switched to an old Kay bass from their Range Rats days. As she pointed out in an interview with Clrvynt, she couldn’t play the Vox sitting down.
Toody stuck with Ampeg, using both a V-4 and an SVT head with an Ampeg 4×12 cabinet live, and swapping in a VHT 2×15 cabinet on European tours. Both Coles sang through Shure SM58s.
Andrew Loomis
Loomis kept his drums as lean as the rest of the band’s gear, mostly playing a kick, snare, hi-hat, floor tom and a single ride cymbal. The small kit gave his playing a driving, almost primitive thump. Loomis tragically died of cancer in March 2016, aged 54.
The lathe
Fred recorded most of the band’s albums in mono on an 8-track in a home studio above the couple’s music store in Clackamas, just outside Portland. He then cut the master lacquers himself on a 1954 Presto mono lathe, a present from Toody for his 39th birthday, which turned out to be the same machine that had cut The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of “Louie Louie”.
Before it reached the Coles, the lathe had been sitting in pieces at Portland’s Rec Recording, and Toody told The Vinyl District that Fred spent a year trying to convince the studio to sell it to him. The band tested most songs live before committing them to acetate. “We hated recording, and we hated spending a lot of time on doing recording,” Toody said, and that impatience is why the records sound so immediate. It also gave nearly the whole catalogue the same sonic fingerprint, from 1988’s In the Graveyard through to 2004’s Dead Ahead.
The legacy
To the heartbreak of his fans, Fred Cole died of cancer in November 2017, aged 69, a month after Portland proclaimed 5 October ‘Dead Moon Night’. Toody still runs Tombstone and looks after the Dead Moon catalogue, and since 2023 she’s been back on stage with Kelly Halliburton, the drummer who played the band’s final shows.
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