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Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Portland music historian can be forgiven for letting Zipper slip through the cracks. After all, there’s so much of Fred Cole’s music to keep track of (and thank goodness for that!)—from the 1960s psychedelia of the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe, to the glorious, shambling rock he made with wife Toody in the bands Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows up through the end of Cole’s life in 2017. The Portland DIY legend’s musical DNA is all over this city’s garage, punk, and rock ’n’ roll bloodstreams.
Yet there is a slab of heavy-truckin’, boogie-ready, fret-shrieking hard rock that’s unlike anything else he ever made. It’s simultaneously one of the most mainstream things Cole attempted and the foundational starting point of his no-compromises DIY ethic.
Zipper, the only record released by the eponymous band, turns 50 this year—and in a cooler alternate universe, you could easily imagine these jams blasting out of a Camaro 8-track or the four-piece band headlining the Pontiac Silverdome.
But Zipper is a little too raw, a little too fiery and fierce, a little too real to have displaced Grand Funk Railroad or Black Oak Arkansas from any FM rock rotations.
Zipper formed in the early ’70s, sometime after Fred and Toody’s attempt at homesteading in the Yukon for a year. Upon the couple’s return to Portland, they opened a music instrument store called Captain Whizeagle’s, providing a new hangout spot for local musicians.
Within the scene, Cole teamed up with guitarist Jim Roos, bassist Greg Shadoan, and drummer Lorry Erck, forming Zipper with Cole’s lyrics and concepts at the fore. The band functioned as an all-cylinders live unit, with Roos’s guitar capitalizing on the dominant traits of ’70s shag-carpet rock. Cole, too, attempts to replicate the banshee shriek of singers Robert Plant and Ian Gillan—a de rigueur style for all hard rock bands of the era—but doesn’t quite have the voice to pull it off. Instead, he ends up creating the blown-out falsetto that became the hallmark of Dead Moon years later.
The Zipper album is defiantly handmade. Recording locally at Recording Associates, 500 copies were pressed up on Cole’s invented Whizeagle Records label, with the band spending long hours assembling the cardboard jackets with masking tape, ensuring no two copies were identical.
The sound is raw, loud, and brash, but not necessarily punk. Rather, it’s deliberately libidinous, designed for Friday nights, deafening bars, and sweaty local dances—full of aggression without anger, with one boot on heavy metal’s driveway and another in the front lawn of soulful R&B.
Roos’ riffs are king here, providing the rocket fuel for Cole’s inflammable melodies. “Let It Freeze” amps up the hook of the Beatles’ “Come Together” into a bluesy, ominous stew, while “Born Yesterday” is second cousin to the Stooges, featuring hatchet-simple power chords and a trash-rock veneer. “Bullets,” meanwhile, is full of borderline-gross innuendo (the “bullets” are sperm, y’see?) that’s almost dumb enough to circle back around to being clever again. “The Same Old Song” and “Worry Kills a Woman” are gentler, even if the lyrics don’t quite rise to the level of being enlightened—it was the ’70s, after all. But those two tracks in particular showcase Cole’s undeniable sense of song structure, with R&B bones poking out beneath the fuzzy guitars.
And then there’s “Face of Stone,” the album’s relative epic, and the Zipper track that most clearly opens a window onto the Fred Cole we’ve come to know. Starting with a horror-movie guitar arpeggio, it’s slow, creeping, and full of dread, with an impressionistic story told in iron-gray tones. At the song’s end, it leaps into double time, providing release but no real relief. If it’s far more self-consciously dramatic than the no-frills pow of Dead Moon, it also feels like the Zipper song where Cole is least influenced by ’70s hard-rock tropes.
Zipper eventually folded, with Fred and Toody becoming inspired by the punk movement to form the Rats, and, later, Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows. The album has been re-released several times, appended with extra tunes from Zipper’s aborted second album, although it appears to be out of print again.
Perhaps the album’s 50th birthday is a golden opportunity for Zipper to hit fresh ears: It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of Northwest music, uncovering the connective tissue from the spooky psych of the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe, to the garage-punk style that Fred and Toody Cole embodied.
Related: Fred Cole passed from this temporal plane in 2017. If he was still with us, he would be turning 77 on August 28. In celebration of the legendary rocker’s life, Toody Cole, Los Hackals, and the Reverberations are throwing a bash at Crystal Ballroom, more info here.
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Ned Lannamann
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