Coolidge briefly attended Brown University, where his father founded and taught in the music department, before dropping out and traveling to Los Angeles.
In 1967, Coolidge moved to San Francisco and joined David Meltzer's band, The Serpent Power, as a drummer.
In 1969, Coolidge produced 17 one-hour programs of experimental audio pieces by himself and others for KPFA, which establish his interest in the sonic properties and materiality of language.
He would later elaborate this in a statement he provided for Paul Carroll’s anthology The Young American Poets: “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency / Opacity.” Often associated with the Language School[2] his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies, Coolidge often finds correspondence in his work.
[3] Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills.