An ’80s rocker—who is almost 80 years old—is keeping a punk rock legacy alive.
Before The Black Keys and The White Stripes made fuzzed-filled rock jams radio-friendly, the band Dead Moon was combining loud, abrasive guitars with angsty, vocal screams to craft punk-rock anthems. Raucous chant-filled gems like “Walking on My Grave,” “Diamonds in the Rough” and eponymous rager “Dead Moon Night” became hymns for the underground scene. While the band didn’t achieve mainstream success, it inspired acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and others.
In 2026, Toody Cole—the bassist, vocalist and co-founder of Dead Moon—is the only living member. (Drummer Andrew Loomis passed away in 2016, and Toody’s husband and bandmate, Fred Cole, passed in 2017.) Cole, now 77, is currently on tour, performing Dead Moon classics and punk picks from her various projects. You can catch Toody Cole and her band on Saturday, July 11, at Pappy and Harriet’s.
“I’ve been to Pappy and Harriet several times,” Cole said during a recent phone interview. She performed at the iconic venue with Pierced Arrows (Fred and Toody Cole’s post-Dead Moon band) and as an acoustic duo with Fred. “I’m real familiar with it. There are a bunch of ex-Portland and Seattle people who have bought houses in Yucca Valley, and Jay Martin (from Portland) just started a record shop there in town (Up on the Sun Records).”
Cole has found that the love for Dead Moon’s 30-plus-year-old material is stronger than ever.
“We just came back from doing a festival in Sweden, then four shows in Finland, where I haven’t been since Fred and I were there with the duo over 10 years ago, and everybody there was just like, ‘It’s so nostalgic,’” Cole said. “A lot of the people who come (to the recent shows) either were there back in the day themselves, or their parents or brothers and sisters were, but everyone’s really still familiar with all the songs—singing along, getting teary-eyed, remembering being younger, and it does the same for me performing them. The songs Fred wrote are honestly very amazing and pretty timeless, so they hold their own, even though most of them are 35 to 40 years old.”
Cole said the mix of original Dead Moon fans and younger generations is not a new phenomenon.
“That’s kind of always been the way of things, even back in the ’90s,” Cole said. “People were bringing their kids to our shows, especially in Europe. I’m not surprised, truthfully, now that there’s a lot of stuff that you can download and make mixtapes—or whatever the equivalent is now on Spotify—and all that kind of stuff. The music’s out there, and it’s getting downloaded, and kids are listening to it. It’s just great seeing a wide range of different ages in the audience—a lot more younger, honestly, than older. It’s very encouraging.”
Dead Moon has been discovered by a lot of younger fans in the last 15 years through Skate 3, a skateboarding videogame featuring a packed soundtrack of underground rock.
“We played a festival in Boise, and there were a bunch of kids there who had heard—they call it ‘I’m Not Ready,’ but it’s actually called ‘Diamonds in the Rough’—and it happens to be on a skateboard video game,” Cole said. “The songs have been used by a lot of extreme athletes … for over the last 20 plus years.”
During Cole’s solo shows, she handles the bass and vocals, and even sings the songs originally sung by her late husband. It’s a process she describes as “really complicated.”
“A lot of the (songs) are just songs I always wanted to cover, or songs I already was singing lead vocals on when we recorded them, so those ones were easy, but we’re slowly adding a few more—doing ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ and ‘Going South,’ which were added recently,” Cole said. “I’m working right now on ‘Kicked Out, Kicked In,’ ‘Kids Are Kids’ and ‘I Hate the Blues,’ and I’m hoping I can get ‘Don’t Burn the Fires’ down, but that one’s really been a bear. I’m trying to add a few more that I’ve always wanted to cover, and just working on the ones until I can get it down … to the point where I’m happy with it. The ones that have just proven to be too difficult to do or to handle, I’ve let go, but there are a lot of them I wish I could just pull out of the hat—but it’s not that easy.”
Cole still sounds good—equivalent to her original vocal takes, in fact—and she also nails the raw, snarling vocal delivery of her partner.
“My voice sounds very similar, believe it or not, to Fred’s,” she said. “Singing songs the way he was singing them, I’m able to do that, so I can’t imagine anybody else covering it truthfully and having it sound like Dead Moon.”
Her recent tours came about by happenstance.
“Mississippi Records, (a record store in Portland that is) reissuing all the Dead Moon LPs, had a 20th anniversary party for the store, and had asked me to put something together,” Cole said. “I did it with a couple of local guys—not the guys I’m playing with right now—figuring it was just going to be that one-off. Social media being what it is, we did the show, and everybody posted this and videotaped that, and whatever, and it was like the word was out: ‘Oh, Toody, now that you’re back playing again …’ I’m like, ‘What? Who said I was back playing?’ It just kind of snowballed from that and took on a life of its own. We’re playing quite a bit this year.”
At age 77, Cole still performs a killer stage show—so catch her live while you can!
“I don’t know what I’m going to want to do next year, but I’m happy to fill all the dates that we’ve got going on this year, and go back to Europe a couple of times,” Cole said. “It’s been as much for me personally, to go back and revisit a lot of places that I miss. We went back to Australia and New Zealand at the beginning of this year. For me, it’s been having a chance to … reconnect with the new audiences and people who have been lifelong friends. I have no idea what’s going to happen next year.”
There’s a lot of irony in being an old punk, but what better way to sum up life than a lyric from “Diamonds in the Rough”: “I’m not ready to let go.”
“It’s the same in your head,” Cole said. “You look at yourself in the mirror and go, ‘Holy fuck, what happened?’ Above and beyond that, I got the mind of an 18-year-old, maybe further back than that. I enjoy the challenge at this particular point, and as long as I enjoy doing it, I feel like I can do it well. There comes a point in everybody’s life when you just aren’t able to do what you used to be able to do, so I’m getting closer to that.
Toody Cole and her band is set to perform at 9:30 p.m., Saturday, July 11, at Pappy and Harriet’s, at 53688 Pioneertown Road, in Pioneertown. Tickets are $27.72. For tickets and more information, visit pappyandharriets.com.
