Not quite sold out

“We’re selling out,” says Fred Cole, smoking a cigarette in a much lived-in tour van before a show at Slabtown one evening. “We’re gonna sign to Sony next week. We’re going big time. Toody’s got a red mini skirt, Kelly’s got a silver jumpsuit, and me, I’m gonna go with rhinestone cowboy boots.”

“Don’t give me any ideas,” says Toody Cole, sitting shotgun. She and her husband, after almost 20 years as the backbone of Portland’s seminal, much adored Dead Moon, hardly missed a beat following that band’s break up before forming Pierced Arrows in 2007.

Don’t call it a reunion—Dead Moon’s corpse was hardly cold when Fred and Toody recruited Murder Disco X’s Kelly Halliburton to drum for a new project. It can be described only as a logical extension, or a damned good reason for some of Portland’s most iconic musicians to keep doing what they do best. Halliburton, whose father played with Fred Cole in Albatros in the ’70s, has deep roots in the Portland punk scene and brings the group an exciting energy.

In a city with a rotating and elusive roster of bands, the Coles have managed to play their stripped down, raucous garage-country-punk for two decades, shed one band and start fresh with another, all to impressive degrees of success.

“A lot of things change, but it’s just kind of cyclical,” Halliburton says. “The people at shows, or trends in music, or styles or the kind of people that come to the shows and the reasons they come to the shows. Everything will be really good for a while, then a year later it will be dead and it’s just kind of a matter of weathering those changes and just being consistent and doing what you want to do.”

The enthusiastic reception they’ve experienced as Pierced Arrows here at home can perhaps be attributed to the fact that they are a constant truth in the often dynamic currents of local music. It isn’t stale, but then again it isn’t the latest “it” sound either. On the road, however, there are still venues to humble them, as was the case with a show in the Mexican border town, Mexicali.

“The flyer for the show was the biggest image of any of us that’s ever been produced, you could literally see it from the other side of the border,” Halliburton says.

“[The banner] was probably 25 feet wide by 60 feet long,” Fred adds. “It looks like, my God, King Kong is coming to town.”
The irony that such a large advertisement would be used to promote an ill attended show in the upstairs ballroom of a Mexican strip club is not lost on them.

“We kept thinking, ‘Oh, here come some people,'” Fred says, “and it would be a guy and like six or seven girls behind him and they’d go into a little room. An hour later, they’d come out and go back downstairs to the strip club.”

After playing to a minimal audience, the promoter, along with his promised financial compensation, was nowhere to be found. Pierced Arrows was left to crawl back across the border with nothing but their equipment and the monstrous banner.

“The customs guys loved it,” says Fred, finishing his last cigarette before getting ready for the night’s show. But for someone who has spent the last 20 years touring the world and doing what he loves, it’s all with a grain of salt.

“Do we look like we work real hard?” he asks sarcastically before drinking the last of his beer. “I’m wiping my eyebrows right now ’cause we work so hard.”