The Legend Of Cold Touch Interview

Barry Card :

I was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1948. I was raised in Montreal and Toronto in a time where you could roam the cities safely, and I loved riding the subway and playing hockey. I had one older sister, and she played a lot of music from the 50s and I really liked all the Doo Wop groups. I played trumpet in junior high school, and learned how to read music there. Later I started listening to rock bands in Yorkville Village in Toronto, like the Paupers, Steppenwolf, and thought I would give guitar a try. I started writing my own music then. I played in a blues band in Toronto with some older guys when I was in high school, and then formed my own band for a while. I left Toronto  with a group of guys in a band in 1967 and went to Hollywood. Our band was called The Road, and we worked pretty hard to make it, and we did pretty well, but got burnt out. After a couple of years we each went our own ways. I started playing session music and bounced around playing with random groups. I met a lot of rock and rollers that were there like Janice Joplin, Three Dog Night, Michelle Phillips, Screaming Lord Such, Steve Miller, Alice Cooper. Everyone hung out together and jammed together. It was an awesome time for rock and roll where everyone helped each other out.

I left music for a while around 1970 to concentrate on work and make some money. I was playing with a small trio with a drummer named Doc for a while and through him I met Jeff. We really hit it off and decided we wanted to start a band together. I then met Jeff’s brother Cliff. Jeff was a great guitarist, much better than me. He liked my voice and I became the vocalist. We had a drummer named John from the Outsiders at first, but he didn’t work out. So we started looking for another drummer and that’s where Rolland came to join the band. We all really hit it off and we started writing songs and playing wherever we could. We all had a variety of odd jobs to keep us going in between gigs. Once we got the right guys in place we thought we sounded pretty good. We all got along and our individual talents really clicked together. We were in a warehouse that we rented in Santa Fe Springs rehearsing, and Jeff said he wanted our music to make people feel like a cold hand around their neck in a haunted house. It’s a name that implies an action. Cold Touch. And that’s what we decided on. I wrote “Ride to Live, Live to Ride” when I was living in Whittier, California. Some of the guys from the motorcycle gang The Devil’s Disciples lived next door, and I thought they were pretty cool.

That was the inspiration for the song. We recorded at Capital Records in Hollywood sometime in 1974. We did the session in one day. It wasn’t long after that that the band broke up. Hard to pinpoint an exact reason, but we had been playing together for a long time, and we all just got tired of chasing success. We played some big name places like The Whisky and had a taste of the fame and success, but it always seemed just out of reach. I enrolled in classes in UCLA on a hockey scholarship, Cliff got married, Jeff went back to North Carolina, and Rolland went to Arizona. We all lost touch with each other and time moved on. Over 40 years later, In the spring of 2020, my step-daughter made an exciting discovery online. Robin Wills former member of the band The Barracudas has a blog called PurePop, and he had featured our 45 with Ride to Live, Live to Ride and Land of the Foxes on it. He had posted a great write-up about the band and was asking if anyone knew anything about them. I was so excited! My wife Colleen and I contacted Robin and he told us he had bought the record from Reed Breummer with Splattered Records. He gave us Reed’s contact info and we emailed him right away. Reed was thrilled to hear the story of the band and asked if there was any more music, and where was the rest of the band?

I had a couple of other songs on a cassette tape but that was it, and had no idea where the other guys were. I had wondered about them for years. So Colleen started doing some detective work. Through Ancestry and White Pages we first found Jeff and his brother Cliff, and then we found Rolland. It was a fantastic experience to talk to everyone and tell them that our music had risen from the dead, and that we had a guy that wanted more! We all pooled the music and photos we had saved over the years, and then sent it all off to Reed. Reed created an album cover and had the music remastered and sent it off to be pressed on vinyl. That was back in the fall of 2021. So we waited, and waited, and waited, until finally in the fall of 2022 we heard from Reed that the album was ready. Finally, after 47 years Cold Touch had an album. It is a dream come true and a tribute to all our hard work and dedication that we thought had come to naught. The music is getting some great response and that is what we always wanted. We received a photo of our record on the shelf in a record store in San Diego and that was the thrill of a lifetime. Would just like to add that I think everything happens for a reason. Maybe we weren’t ready for fame at the time, who knows. But the awesome thing is reconnecting with all the guys after all of these years and seeing so much enthusiasm. A bunch of old rockers seeing their dream come true at long last. The best thing ever.

Cliff Lee :

Born May 1950, Newport News VA. One brother, Jeff and sister Susan. We had classical and broadway musicals my parents liked so early exposure, got piano lessons starting at years old. Took some lessons a classical guitar. No groups before Cold Touch. Came to California after graduation from UNC Chapel Hill to offer help to my brothers music dreams. That was the winter of 1973. They needed a bass player so Barry taught me how. Barry and Jeff met and soon after I showed up and got involved. I don’t remember much about the naming of the group, but it seemed to fit and helped create our vision. We envisioned a super light show and Jeff especially worked hard to create one with a podium and flashing lights. We also painted our faces. Can’t remember our first performance. I thought we recorded at Capital Records and Gold Star. We played at The Starwood, The Whiskey, Pasadena Auditorium and about another eight or ten places. Can’t say why no one happened to hear us that could sign us but it didn’t happen. We changed drummers several times until Rolland came along. Crazy that no one came along to give us a nudge. Now it’s visualizing what could have been. We lasted as long as we could until we couldn’t keep it going. Barry and Jeff wrote around fifteen, or twenty great songs. Too bad they didn’t get out there for rock and roll fans to enjoy hearing them as much as we enjoyed performing them.


Jeff Lee :

I was born on January 5, 1948 (Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday) in Newport News, Virginia. My brother (Clifton Lee – Bass Player) was born about two years later on May 11, 1950. We had a relatively normal, but very good, childhood, and we often listened to the music my father was continually playing on our High- Fidelity record player which was mostly Rodgers and Hammerstein type stuff like: South Pacific, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, etc. It wasn’t long, however, before we began to start listening to people like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and the Rock and Roll of the day. (We never did care to much for Elvis though, except for “Hound Dog”, we did kind of like that one though.) Obviously, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came out, everything changed and we “latched” on to the English invasion. I was actually playing folk guitar at the time, but I quickly got me a part-time job at a near-by convenience store and saved up enough money to buy a Hagstrum electric guitar and a Vox Pacemaker amplifier. My younger brother (Cliff) began to get into keyboards as he started playing the piano, we had in the living room. I then got into a small band in High School called the “Barons” which played Beatle and Rolling Stone covers at High School Open-House events, and at small local parties. Then a fellow guitar player friend of mine called me up and said: “Lee, you have got to come over now and hear this guitar player, he’s incredible!” It was Jimi Hendrix.

He completely blew my mind, and that’s when I said to myself, this is what I want to do, and it is probably Hendrix, more than anyone else who has influenced me the most in the style of music that I play, along with other types of Heavy Metal bands like: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Guns and Roses, etc. I played in a small band in High School in Raleigh, NC, called the Barons that did Beatle and Rolling Stone covers along with Chuck Berry songs like: “Johnny Be Good”, “Memphis”, etc., along with songs like “Twist and Shout”, ”House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, etc. From Raleigh I moved to San Francisco for a while in 1967 and became a hippie until the flower-power thing sort of fizzled, at which time I moved to Los Angeles and met the lead singer of Cold Touch: Barry Card. It was at a recording session for a demo record which went pretty well and about two and a half weeks after the session Barry called me and asked if I wanted to start a band with him, to which I immediately replied yes because his voice on the demo record did really sound good and I could tell that he could sing the power metal type of songs that I wrote. So, my brother, Cliff, who had just come out from Raleigh, went with me over to Barry’s house, and we all three decided to form a band, and that was the start of Cold Touch.

The main thing that made me want to form Cold Touch was Barry’s voice, which was a powerful male voice that could sing the Heavy Metal songs that I liked to write and play in a live concert. Also, Barry wrote some really good songs where some were Heavy Metal like I wrote, and some were more commercial that I thought would go well on albums, and help sales later on. As for the name: “COLD TOUCH”, it simply, just sort of materialized one day at practice because we all agreed it would somewhat describe how we wanted to affect our audience with the show we wanted to do and the type of music we wanted to play. The first time we got together was at a warehouse in Santa Fe Springs, CA., where both Barry and I lived for a while, and I personally really liked how things sounded at our first rehearsal. Soon after that Barry got us our first gig, I believe it was at the Starwood in Hollywood, and we did pretty good, but the drummer we had named John, from Texas, was into “Angel Dust,” and we eventually had to let him go. It was too bad too because he was really a good drummer, but we didn’t want anything to do with drugs, or alcohol, so we eventually got Rolland. We recorded some songs at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. Two of which were: “Ride To Live, Live To Ride” and: “Grease Paint Widow” around the latter part of the 1970’s. These two songs came from a show we had called: “The Theater of the Mind”, where the first part featured a downtown background with two female dancers (dressed like hookers) standing beside two lampposts on either side of the stage with projectors showing glowing neon signs moving sideways across the stage as the streetlights turned different colors (red, blue and white) with a giant neon sign with light blue letters that flashed “COLD TOUCH” in the background, playing to songs like: The Hustler, Red Light Lover, Sidewinder woman, Derailed Ladies, Land of the Foxes, Levander Woman, She’s Waiting for You, Blue Jean Queen, Big City Blues and Grease Paint Widow.

In the second part of the show, we had a cross, about 4 feet high that glowed and pulsated red and fired a giant flash of white light at the audience as smoke began to fill the stage as demon faces and hell-fire was projected on the screen behind us. The songs we played included: Earthquake, 666, Rock and Roll Star, Fox Hunt, Ride to live, Live to Ride and Secret City, as the venue was filled with jagged spots of light dancing violently on the ceiling. In the third part of the show, we went into a more ethereal motif with strobe lights flashing from either side of the stage and crazy faces from the projectors dancing behind us as we played songs like: Fire Child, Sorceress, Lost and Lonely Child, Faces in Your Mind, and The Journey, as we ended the show with everything going off at once, totally dazzling the audience every time we got everything to work out properly. It was really too bad we could not have gotten some more songs from our show recorded because they really embodied the spirit of Cold Touch. Yeah, in the up-and-down, back-and-forth, of things we did lose some of the recordings we made. As to why they never got produced, I would have to blame most of it on the prominence of the “Disco Craze” in Los Angeles at the time. Our show and music were tailored to a somewhat more intellectual crowd, and although we were looking for it, we never found, “our” audience that would really appreciate the “Theater of the Mind” type of show we did, or the original style of music that we performed. To have Reed Bruemmer reissue some of our songs on an album called: “Ride To Live, Live Too Ride” forty years after we recorded them, is like going into another dimension for me. It makes me really happy that I was a member of Cold Touch and makes all the sacrifice that I did for the group worth it, and believe me, it does really make me proud!

The History of COLD TOUCH

As told by Cliff Lee (bass player) and Jeff Lee (guitar player) It all started as I was driving to a music store in Hollywood from Sierra Madre, where I lived, to buy tickets for the Janis Joplin performance at the Kaleidoscope on Sunset. My brother Cliff was in route on his way from Raleigh, NC to California with his dirt bike because of the places they had out here in the desert for him to ride it. After purchasing the tickets, I went over to the musicians bulletin board to try and find someone to jam with and a guy named Doc tapped me on the shoulder and said, what do you do? I said, I play guitar too which he replied, Are you any good? I told him I had played a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stone songs in rock bands in my high school, but I was really into Hendrix. He then told me that He played drums for this group he was in and that they needed a guitar player to do a demo record. He then invited me to a practice session at a studio somewhere in Hollywood. When I got to the practice session I found out that it was actually a recording session and that we were going to do two songs: Who Do You Love by Bo Didley, and another song they had just written called: ;Six Feet Under. This is where I met Barry (the lead singer) and Howie (the bass player). But Howie must have been under the spell of some kind of drugs, or something, because he quickly and quietly went to sleep and Barry had to play the bass part to the songs as we recorded them. They were both really easy to play, so I had no problem with them and with Barry’s voice they both came out sounding pretty good. I was impressed.

However, about three days after the session, Doc called me up and sounded upset and irate which really surprised me. He was so negative and weird in the later dealings I had with him that I finally had to call Barry and tell him that I could not possibly work with Doc, but that I really liked his singing. Barry agreed with me and we decided to let Doc go and see what other possibilities might work out. About two or three weeks later Barry called me and said that Doc was already in another group so he wouldn’t bother us anymore and that he wanted to start a band with me. By this time Cliff was here with me in Sierra Madre and I asked him if he wanted to go to Whittier with me to see Barry about forming a band. When we got there Barry said: Well, we need a bass player and a drummer, to which Cliff replied: I would like to play bass. I immediately told Barry that Cliff was an excellent keyboard player able to play songs like: Maple Leaf Rag etc., and was very familiar with music theory. Barry agreed and we then got a drummer named: John from Texas who had played with the: Outsiders on a song called: Time Won’t Let Me. He had a double bass set which I really liked and could put down a really good Ginger Baker type rumble-beat. It sounded really good on one of the songs I wrote called: She’s Waiting for You, but John and his girl friend from Texas, were really into Angel Dust and had some other weird problems, so we had to get rid of him. It’s too bad because he showed a lot of promise with his power drumming and I knew that this is exactly what we needed for our music.

We then went out and got Rolland as our drummer who worked out really well, and that’s when we started playing some real live dates. We moved into a ware house in Santa Ana where we practiced, and where Barry and I lived for a while, as we began to put together a concert set of songs we wanted for our performance. This is also where I built the light show we had which featured: a large 3ft. x 4ft. cross that glowed bright red and exploded with a flash of 20, 100-watt flashbulbs, two lampposts that glowed red and blue, floor lights, tower lights, and two projectors that showed scenes of revolving fire, flying demon's faces and made it look like an earthquake was happening. We played the Whiskey twice (once with Ronnie Montrose), the Starwood twice (once with John and once with Rolland as our drummer), the University of Riverside with Rory Gallagher, a gym in Whittier with Blues Image, at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Golden West Ballroom, an audition in Compton, and the Pasadena Civic, plus several other places I can’t remember. I would say about 12 to 15 places altogether. The Pasadena Civic was our best show. We had songs that Cliff and I had written entitled: Fire Child and She’s Waiting for You, Sorceress, Grease Paint Widow and Faces in Your Mind and The Journey, which all came off pretty good. I really enjoyed paying Barry’ songs which were: Blue Jean Queen, Ride to Live, Live to Ride, Red Light Lover, The Hustler, Derailed Ladies, Land of The Foxes, 666 and the one I enjoyed playing the most was this G power cord thing called: Earthquake. I went down into the audience right after the show ended at the Pasadena Civic and talked to several kids who had been in the audience.

They all said they really liked the show and two of the guys said they wanted to know where we were going to play next so they could bring some friends to see us. I really believe that was the pinnacle of our performances and it would have been great if someone had come up to us and offered us some money and a tour because we were really ready to go. However, Disco - John Travolta - Bee Gee’s Scene permeated L.A. at that time and most of the people there were not into the Theater of the Mind - Heavy Metal Power Music type of experience that we performed. What we really needed was to find audience, meaning, people on an intellectual level that could enjoy good, innovative, power rock music with a mind-bending light show that went from a street scene with women standing by lampposts, to living through an earthquake, to a trip through Hell with fire and demon’s faces flying across the stage. I even designed a prop that looked like Barry made entirely of flash-paper that made it look like he exploded in to a fire ball at the end of the show. Every now and then Cliff and I will reminisce about the wonderful times we had playing the songs we wrote with Barry and some of the crazy things that happened to us. We all gave it all we had and even though we didn’t make the big-time, we stayed true to ourselves and if given the chance, I don’t doubt that we could have put together a show that would have been light-years beyond anything else that was out there. I think it would have been a lot of fun, not only for us, but also for all of those people who saw us. What I can’t believe is that COLD TOUCH is still around after forty-five years? Well, we must have done something right!

Rolland Healy :

I was born in Houston Texas on June 21, 1951. My father was a preacher and a professional college student with a certificate in psychology. My mother loved playing the piano, singing, cooking and raising her family. Since I was a young boy, I wanted to live in Colorado. I loved the look of it and the feel. My father was born and raised in Fort Collins, and we were there occasionally. I started playing drums in the seventh-grade band in Las Cruces New Mexico in 1963. I played in school bands in Banning California thru 1966. In 1967 we moved to Douglas Az where my dad was head counselor at Cochise college and my mother worked for Phelps Dodge. My parents bought me a Ludwig drum set that I had wanted for some time and the border of Mexico was 50 yards behind my bedroom with a one wire fence that you could step over and desert. I was able to pound those drums and played to records of the time I listened through headphones, and it became my nightly escape for hours. I was in Douglas for 2 years of high school and two years of junior college. Larry and Jim became my friends and first band mates. I moved to mesa Az. For 2 more years of college and continued playing daily. As soon as I graduated from Arizona State in 1973, I went to California looking for a band. I sat in with a piano player and two studio musicians in one day. The next day I played with Jeff, Cliff and Barry who were Cold Touch. I had a double bass drum set at this time and they wanted that. We each liked what the other did musically. We blended well with our personalities and desire to succeed and so we began. We put together a concert in a hall outside of some town in a recreation area in the spring 0f 1974. We booked an opening high school rock band. We played second with a show that was developing with props and face make up that they had said was part of the band back to the beginning of 1973. The main act for the night was Blues Image and they brought with them Spencer Davis. The concert was not financially successful. We tried again in a concert hall in (La Habra I think). We head lined it and it also went nowhere.  We did get to play the whiskey and put cold touch on the wall and the Starwood and was well received. There were some other performances which are vague in my mind.

In January of 1975 we were asked to open a show at the new Pasadena civic auditorium. We had developed a show with props and light show developed by Jeff and music that was put together by Cold Touch. The building was packed as the lead band was a Pasadena favorite Van Halen who was not famous yet. We were well received and told by many we put on a great show. It was very encouraging evening. It was we assume where some people who worked for Henry Mancini saw us and invited us to his office. Jeff and Barry went, and they offered us a two-day recording session at Capital Records. I remember looking up at the sign on the building and being amazed we were there. I have a hard time remembering any details of the experience. We recorded the songs live with vocals and added some guitar, other vocals and sax by Rashid Ali, Barry’s brother-in-law who played with little Richard and other black artist in the 1950’s. We did this in two days and went home. We were each given cassette tapes of the finished product a few days later. Due to whatever we never heard from Mancini’s people and eventually parted ways and I went back to Arizona. I didn’t think much more about it until one day I received a phone call asking if I was Rolland Healy, who used to play in the band “Cold Touch”. Then things started to come together after forty-seven years. I ran and owned some restaurants. I managed a Whataburger in Tempe Arizona met and married my wife, Diane.  Quit Whataburger did our restaurants with my wife. We had three kids, Raelynn, Schyler and Kalland. Then in 2001 we moved to Vallecito Lake Colorado where we opened Vallecito Lake Country Market and La Comida Ranchera restaurant. We all are living in the area, and I have an expanded my DW drum set I still play. I thought of the past occasionally, but never dwelled on what if. I was living where I always wanted to live with my wife, my daughter my two sons and my granddaughter Willa. All currently in Vallecito Lake. We all at times have fed thousands of people who kindly have appreciated our efforts. As I say famous in song and story, sang about late at night around campfires by campers who wish we delivered. I wouldn’t trade what I have experienced and have for any what if. However, talking with Jeff, Cliff. And Berry and seeing an old picture of us on an album cover and listening to a professional recorded album on a stereo system or on headphones and playing to it and hearing it in my truck on a CD is very entertaining. To all that helped this happen and those who enjoy, or not enjoy hearing the music Thank You.

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