I was unsatisfied with the output of amixer especially the formatting, so I fixed it to my satisfaction. THEN, I tried to add color!!! dum-de-dum-dum. Here is the bash command:
amixer | egrep -i "simple|%" | sed s/Left:/"Left: "/ | sed s/Mono:/"Mono: "/ | sed s/control/" control"/ | sed s/"\'\(*\)\'"/"\'^[[1m^[[31m\1^[[0m\'"/
Please note the adjacentcy of single and double quote marks. It is 7 spaces after Mono:, 2 before control, and 2 after Left:. The ^[[xxm where xx is 1 for bold and 31 for red color.
If someone can tell me why it won't color up AND how to get it to color up I'd really be thankful.