In the 1970s, Vallecito restaurant owner Rolland Healy, 74, moved to California, joined a band, recorded an album and decided to leave.
“It was something I wanted to attempt to do, but I really didn’t have the money or anything like that to do it,” he said. “I just happened to fall in with this band.”
He’d tried out for a few other bands before meeting the Cold Touch crew, who liked his sound.
The band had a singer, a guitarist and a bass – which Healy said left a lot of room in the score for a drummer. And he said he was a “busy drummer.”
“I wasn’t sitting back there playing the high hat, the snare and doing four counts on the bass drum,” he said. “I always sounded impressive with this band because with only a guitar and a bass instrument, there’s just a lot of holes that a drummer can fill, and I was quite willing to.”
But Cold Touch struggled to gain traction, and Healy wanted more stability in his life. He decided it was time to move on, and in the next few years he fell in love and got married.
Healy and his wife settled down in Southwest Colorado after discovering the Vallecito community. They opened Vallecito Lake Country Market and found success. Healy’s days as a long-haired drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band were behind him, although he kept the long hair.
Then, in 2003, he got a call from Reed Bruemmer, owner of Splattered Records, a small label focused on reissuing hard-to-find and out-of-print music.
Bruemmer said a friend in England had purchased an old acetate – an early version of a record – featuring Cold Touch’s music. The two were fascinated by music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, before genres like punk, hard rock and heavy metal were clearly defined.
“They were still figuring themselves out back then,” Bruemmer said. “So when we heard Cold Touch, we were like, ‘Oh, this is so bizarre. It’s not really punk, it’s not really metal, it’s not really mainstream rock.’”
Bruemmer eventually tracked down the band members and asked whether they had any additional recordings.
“None of the other guys had their recordings,” Healy said. “But I have my two cartridge tapes in the back of my drawer because I keep everything.”
He was the only band member who had preserved tapes from the group’s recording sessions at Capitol Records.
He copied the tapes and sent them to Bruemmer, who pressed about 500 records. Some of the songs were also uploaded to YouTube.
“It’s very fun to have this music and an album even if it’s, you know, many, many years after they were done,” Healy said.
These days, if you stop by Vallecito Lake Country Market and ask him about his days in the Southern California rock scene, he might tell you about the time Cold Touch opened for another up-and-coming band in the Pasadena area.
The Pasadena Civic Auditorium was packed with teenagers and young adults, and the crowd responded enthusiastically to Cold Touch – a relief after months of sparsely attended gigs.
“It was the most we ever played for and the best response we ever got,” Healy said. “… We went back to our house and had a party to celebrate our great first concert. A period of time later, we found out the headliner for that night was Van Halen.”
“We had no idea who they were, and never really had heard of them,” he said.
Healy left the band and returned to Arizona about two years later. He said he had worn himself out and wanted to develop skills that could provide a stable livelihood. The music he had recorded with his band mates never got picked up, and he believed the only remaining recordings were on the black cassette tapes the studio had given him, tucked in the back of a drawer.
Healy met his wife while managing a Whataburger restaurant. Eventually, the couple moved to Vallecito and opened Vallecito Market, which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, including a large selection of Mexican food. They raised three children there, and Healy said he never regretted leaving the band behind.
If he continued drumming for Cold Touch, sure, he might have made more money, but he also might have gone broke or become a drug addict, he said.
“So much of what my life is, I actually had control over, whereas in a band – more than likely – unless you grow into a really strong commodity, you’re not going to have any control over it,” he said.
Running a successful restaurant operates on a similar principle as being in a band, Healy said.
“You’ve got to create a reason for people to come see you, and then a good reason for them to come back,” he said.
Finally getting a record printed, though, felt great. Healy said he has the best of the music and restaurant worlds. A framed copy of the record, featuring four young men with big hair, tight jeans and heeled go-go boots, is hung on the wall of his restaurant.
Healy still plays the drums, by the way.
“It’s good exercise,” he said.
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