Sometimes it feels like bands that embark on legacy tours are simply going through the motions to honor contractual obligations or collect a paycheck. They just run through their biggest hits, call out a thank you, and hop on a bus to do it all over again the next night in a new city.
But that’s not what Cold is doing with their “Goodbye Cruel World” tour. On June 23 at the Turf Club in St. Paul, they played a lot of their self-titled 1998 debut and sprinkled in tracks from other records throughout the set list.
This Tuesday night was Cold’s 37th stop on the 39-city tour. The show had originally been booked for April at this same venue, but had to be rescheduled after the band canceled a string of spring dates due to family health issues.
The crowd numbers seemed shy of the Turf’s 350-capacity limit, but the fans that were there—many of whom were clad in Cold concert t-shirts—did their part to fill the space with their enthusiasm for the band.
The night started off with University Drive from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I sadly hadn’t been to a show at the Turf in years and wasn’t sure what to expect, sound-wise. But the tiny room and low ceiling were no match for lead singer and guitarist Edward Cuozzo’s voice when he took on the first song by himself, and things only got better when his bandmates joined him. A few notes into their second song, my sister, whose photos you see in this story, turned to me and we both raised our eyebrows in pleasant surprise.
Next up was Sierra Swan, a multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Los Angeles but now calls Minneapolis home. She’s the daughter of Billy Swan—an accomplished musician who’s best known for being Kris Kristofferson’s rhythm guitarist for 16 years—and has been performing both as a solo artist and in groups since she was a teenager. She’s also been friends with Cold frontman Scooter Ward for decades, and has toured and collaborated not only with his band but also with Linda Perry, Ringo Starr, The Smashing Pumpkins, and many others.
On this evening, Swan performed five songs alone with a guitar, and then two supported by three members of University Drive. This is where she shined the brightest, especially on her cover of “Joey” by Concrete Blonde, which was actually a highlight of the entire show.
After a somewhat elongated pause, Cold finally took the stage. Ward was backed by Lindsay Manfredi (bass), as well as Cuozzo (lead guitar), Tony Kruszka (drums), and Angelo Maruzzelli (rhythm guitar), all of whom are also part of University Drive.
I had been looking forward to seeing how Cold would approach the material from “the red album,” as it has come to be known, and to hear the anecdotes the notoriously chatty Ward would share about certain tracks. I was not disappointed in either regard.
After the band’s opener, “Goodbye Cruel World,” he said, “This is a special tour, for many reasons. Celebrating ‘the red album’ is a big deal. It started everything for Cold, and was paramount to everything we’ve done since then. And to have Sierra Swan [along with us] is such a f–cking blessing. I love her so much.”
Later, Ward began to introduce the song “Ugly.” Seated at the front of the stage with an acoustic guitar in hand, he said, “I started writing this when I was young. I looked in the mirror, and like every other motherf–ing teenager, you feel horrible, you feel ugly, you don’t know what you’re doing, and things are f–cked up.
“However, I was born in the 1900s,” he continued, as the crowd joined him in a laugh. “Jacksonville, Florida, was real f–cking crazy back in the 1980s, and me and my friends were into some crazy sh–t.” He shared that a lot of people he knew started drinking antifreeze, and about a dozen classmates died in one year alone. “So then this song turned into, ‘the f–cking world is ugly. It morphed into something other than its origin.”
Ward said once he’d made it through his teenage years, he was growing frustrated with his band’s lack of success in the music industry. So he set a deadline for himself: if they didn’t catch a break by this self-imposed date, he would enroll in “turf school” and embark on a career managing the grass on golf courses.
“I was 26 years old, and I was ready to give up. … I’d worked on golf courses my whole life, so that was my plan,” he said. “I was going to turf school the next day.”
But then fellow Jacksonville resident Fred Durst, who Ward knew from the local music scene, called out of the blue and asked, “Are you still writing sad songs?” Ward said yes, but let the Limp Bizkit frontman know about his plan to pursue an education the following day. Durst explained that Ross Robinson was coming to his house, and he invited Ward to play for the acclaimed producer. He says he nervously agreed.
“I started playing [‘Ugly’], and I got through the first chorus, and Ross stopped me. He goes, ‘We’re good, man,’ and I go, ‘F–ck, OK, I guess that was a waste of my f–cking time. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it, I’m out. I’m going to turf school.’ And he goes, ‘No, man. You wanna come to Indigo Ranch and make a record?”
The point of the story, Ward said, is that after years of toiling, “sometimes, the world tells you you should be doing this instead of that. And I feel like it was that night for me.”
I never thought I’d be thanking Fred Durst for anything. But he recognized Ward’s talent and instead of seeing him as competition, he instead encouraged him to take his shot. I’m grateful that Durst helped kick the door down for Ward because it allowed Cold to create not only their debut album—most of which I was lucky enough to now have experienced at the Turf—but also the other great records that followed.
SETLIST
- Goodbye Cruel World
- Confession
- Give
- Suffocate
- No One
- You Got Away (duet with Sierra Swan)
- Back Home
- Everyone Dies
- Ugly
- Strip Her Down
- Remedy
- Whatever You Became
- Sad Happy
- The Switch
- Insane
- Make Her Sick
- Wasted Years
