Gary James' Interview With Marv Ross Of
Quarterflash



Quarterflash started their musical career in Portland, Oregon and in 1982 enjoyed considerable success with a song called "Harden My Heart". That song went to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The album, "Quarterflash", which contained that song, went Platinum. Quarterflash guitarist Marv Ross talked with us about the history of his group.

Q - Marv, what is your wife, Rindy (Quarterflash's lead singer) doing these days that she doesn't do interviews? Is she just tired of answering questions?

A - Yeah. Over the course of the last forty years, or whatever it's been, she's always done all the interviews. We retired Quarterflash almost exactly this last weekend (March 21^st or March 22^nd 2019) and she just decided that was enough of Quarterflash for her. We still play as a duet, acoustic duet and she is involved in some other projects, music projects in the studio. But in terms of just talking about Quarterflash, the last show was very emotional and sort of spiritual almost, in a theatre in Portland where we started. So, it was just like she said, "You know what? I'm just not gonna do that anymore."

Q - Is this rare for you to agree to an interview then? Was she always the spokesperson for the band?

A - Occasionally we did it together. It depended on the situation. Back in the '80s, usually Rindy and I would go to radio stations while we were on tour and we would do them (interviews) together, but most of the time people who called in, wanting an interview with Quarterflash, they wanted Rindy. It made sense. She was the front person and the lead singer. That's just the way it ended up.

Q - A couple of weeks ago I was watching Quaterflash's performance at the US Festival on AXS TV.

A - Oh, yeah.

Q - I don't know if you knew they aired that particular festival.

A - I didn't, but years and years ago I received a DVD of that concert. It was fun to watch.

Q - With that many people packed in like that, I doubt if something like that would happen again.

A - Yeah. (laughs) Probably not.

Q - It's scary to look at.

A - It is scary to look at. It was scary to play at too. We flew in by helicopter, over the crowd, so that was pretty intimidating and exciting at the same time.

Q - How many people were in that audience? Do you know?

A - I think it was over 250,000. I can't remember.

Q - Was the US Festival a two day or three day event?

A - Three days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Q - What day did Quarterflash play?

A - I think we played Saturday. I'm not positive on that. It was sort of nick-named the Chick Singer Day. There was Stevie Nicks I think was that day. Missing Persons I think was that day. And us. I remember the headliner that night wasn't a woman. The very last act that night was David Bowie.

Q - Did Quarterflash lose their master tapes in that 2008 Universal fire?

A - Yes, we did.

Q - What does that mean for the band? Does that mean your earlier recordings are lost forever?

A - No. What you can't do is pull up and isolate tracks. In other words, they were the twenty-four track masters. So, if you had access to them you would be able to put them on an old twenty-four track tape recorder and in the studio you could isolate the tracks. You could change the mix. You could make them be much louder, a kick drum more powerful. The things that George Martin and his son did with The Beatles when they re-mixed "Sgt. Pepper". That's what they did. Well, they didn't have twenty-four track in those days. They were doing eight tracks. But they took the old eight track master and they would isolate the drums and then they would make the drums sound amazing. Then they would do the bass and change the bass. So, when they were all finished it sounded much more modern and high-tech. It was sort of an eye opener to hear it mixed like that. That's what we could not do. Obviously everything got mixed. Once it got mixed and went on to vinyl, CDs and cassettes, obviously there's not loss of the tracks. It's just that you can't re-mix it. You could re-master it. You master it after you mix and we have mixes, but we don't have the master. We can't fool around with individual channels.

Q - In a recent interview I did with John McEuen of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, he said tapes get very brittle and you have to be careful.

A - Yeah. After a certain age the material on the tape literally flakes off. It dries out. So, sometimes, as bizarre as this may seem, sometimes people who want to play them and get them digitalized and preserve them forever in a digital domain, they'll put them in an oven, like just an ordinary cooking oven, at low temps for like fifteen minutes and for some reason that extra heat adheres material to the tape and you can get one pass before it flakes all off and you can get it to digital. We have friends in Portland, No-Shooz, who had a huge hit with a song called "I Can't Wait", and their old master for that song, they wanted to digitize it because they didn't have a digital copy, and so they actually got the master and baked it and it worked.

Q - Good for them.

A - Yeah.

Q - What is Marv Ross Productions all about?

A - Ross Productions was a company that had formed in about 1989. Maybe it was 1990. We had an apartment in L.A. for ten years and did a lot of our career stuff down there, recording. And of course our label, Geffen, was down there. We just spent a lot of our lives in Los Angeles for ten years. After the last sort of fiasco we had with Epic Records, we decided to give up our apartment and stop trying to get a record deal after a decade and just come back to Portland and establish a new life from the ground up, with us completely in control. Rindy actually went back to school and got her Masters degree in Mental Health Counseling and ended up working for Providence Hospital for fifteen years. I went into doing all these various projects. I built a studio in our house and I had a production company. Out of that came several projects, including sort of a side band. It was called The Trail Band. It was a large, acoustic band and it lasted for almost thirty years and was very successful in the Portland, Seattle, Northwest area. We recorded like thirteen albums with that band. Quarterflash went on to make three more albums after that. Then I wrote a musical which took me almost ten years. It was a fascinating experience. It won several awards. It was a big hit here in the Northwest. I became more regionally focused. That's what Ross Productions was. It was many different projects. I recorded albums for other people, produced other shows. It was sort of a catch all company that was basically a way for me to set up a business for all of the various projects that I wanted to take on.

Q - You did not start out to be a successful, touring, recording musician, did you? You wanted to be a teacher?

A - Well, yeah. Rindy and I met in high school. We played our first gig when we were Seniors in high school. We were just playing as an acoustic duet, doing Dylan and Joni Mitchell kind of stuff. So, we always loved doing that. We went through college and played just whenever we could, little college gigs, whatever we could get. We didn't want to end up just being professional musicians 'cause at that point we couldn't make enough money doing that. So, we got our teaching degrees. Rindy taught 5^th grade and I ended up teaching junior high English. When we graduated from college we immediately got jobs in Central Oregon, kind of a high desert area, and we did that for three years. We always played on the weekends. We had bands and little duet gigs, whatever we could get. But after three years of teaching we said I think this is the time. We had got quite a bit of success playing in the local area and we just decided, "Let's take a shot at this." So, we moved back to Portland and started a band called Seafood Mama. Seafood Mama was an eclectic Rock band. We played everything from Country/Rock to a little bit of New Wave to Swing music. In that band we recorded "Harden My Heart". I'd written that song for that band, recorded it in our basement and released it on an independent label. It took off and it was just one of those amazing things. Just the idea of a small, local band getting air play on our local station was hard enough on one station, but we just kept getting air play on other stations. It was obvious people went, "This sounds like a hit song." So, within six months or so it was the number one song in the Northwest and that's when Geffen Records came up to see us play, and they signed us. We changed the name to Quarterflash obviously before the record came out.

Q - Quarterflash happened when Seafood Mama and Pilot merged. Who was in Pilot? What members of the band?

A - Everybody but Rindy and I. Basically Rindy and I were heading towards sort of what became the sound of Quarterflash with Rindy being the lead singer and playing the saxophone and having this kind of Rock underpinning underneath her. The rest of the members in Seafood Mama were all Country players. There was a fiddler, a guy who sang a lot of Willie Nelson, and then there was a drummer who played very much in the style of Nashville drummers. At a certain point it just became obvious that it wasn't working. So, Rindy and I left that band and we decided to start recording. We got signed to Geffen and John Boylan was our producer, and he said, "Even though you don't have a band, let's just start recording." So, we started that first album, that album that went Platinum that had "Harden My Heart" on it, we started recording that with studio musicians. So, I had the drummer from the band Bread. I had Linda Ronstadt's bass player at the time, and also Jackson Browne's bass player, Bob Glaud, an amazing player. We had the piano player from Little Feat. So, we had a good core group of musicians that were basically playing the songs I'd written. So, it was me and these guys and Rindy playing together, rehearsing and working out the tunes. We started the album with them and of course the album took several months. So, we went back home during a break in the recording and saw this band Pilot and just flipped and said, "These guys are amazing." We started talking to 'em. We knew some of them beforehand, not very well, but we knew of them because Portland is a pretty small musical community. So we said, "Let's set up a session and see how it works if we all play together." So, that's what we did. It just clicked and we said, "Okay, we're finishing the record with you guys," and that's how we did our first album. Some of the songs feature studio musicians and some of the cuts feature guys that became the permanent members for awhile in that band.

Q - Before the record deal, you were playing clubs in Portland?

A - Yeah. Portland and Seattle. We were probably equally in both of those cities. They both had a really good club scene in those days. This would've been in the mid to late '70s. So, you could make a really good living playing if you were a popular band and we became a popular band. We made enough money. We bought a house. We were two musicians gigging and to buy a house?! That would never happen today, certainly not in our town. But there was just that much work and there was just that much money in playing the clubs in those days. And so, yeah, that's exactly right.

Q - You wrote "Harden My Heart", correct?

A - Yeah.

Q - How long did it take you to write that song?

A - (laughs) It didn't take long at all. It was one of those wacky things to where I think it was probably three days maybe. It happened real fast. I had a friend who wrote poetry and he handed me tons of papers. He was hoping I would turn one of 'em into a song or something and there was nothing in there for me. One of his poems was called "Harden My Heart". And I said, "That's the one thing that sort of caught my eye and ear." I said, "You know, that might be something. I'll add it to my list." I always kept notes of possible titles. I have always kept a running list all of the time. So, that was on my list and I was playing this melody that ended up being the sax solo that started the song. I actually wrote that on guitar. That thing was going to be a guitar lick originally 'cause I'd written it on guitar and it sounded real cool. Just in my basement, playing it myself, saying that "Harden My Heart" phrase is perfect right where the chorus lands. I called the guy and said, "I'm gonna use this thing. I'll pay you some money for it." He said, "Absolutely. Sure. That's great." So, it was done in three days and we recorded it really fast. We figured out not to use a guitar on that lick and Rindy played the saxophone lick instead of the guitar. We ran it through this sort of Korsing unit I guess you would call it, and I accidentally had it dialed up to ten. I just bought the thing. I didn't know how to use it. She just played into it and it was this total... like the sax was distorted, half out of tune, weird kind of sound that came out of the box. God, that's a great sound! So, it was sort of by accident, that saxophone sound that we started the tune with. But yeah, it happened real quick.

Q - When that song charted, when it became such a big hit, how did life change for you?

A - Well, life had changed already pretty dramatically because just getting a record deal, and I got a publishing advance. We were doing well in the bars. It was sort of you never knew what was going to happen next kind of thing. So, all of a sudden, to get signed with Warner Bros. on the basis of "Harden My Heart", "Find Another Fool" and "Right Kind Of Love", the first three singles... I had those demo in my basement. Warner Bros. Music heard those and said, "We want to sign you to a publishing deal," and they gave me an advance. I'd never seen money like that. That was a big one. They gave us a budget for the record which was a hundred grand, which is relatively small these days. I don't know what budgets are nowadays. By the time Michael Jackson was making records a few years later, a hundred grand was nothing. But at the time it was "Wow!" We could afford to get an apartment in L.A. and go down there and start working at the legendary Record Plant with John Boylan, who produced Boston, Linda Ronstadt, and put The Eagles together. We were working with a legendary producer in Los Angeles at the Record Plant. Before the record was even released, it was sort of like a combination of, "Wow! Is this really happening?" Part of it was anxious. Boylan was great. He's sort of considered sort of the father of the Los Angeles sound, having put the Eagles together. He worked with all those kind of names of that era. He lived in the Canyon of course. He was so great. Ten years older than me. He was really experienced and very intelligent, calm, easy going guy, but at the same time had a lot of success. He said, "Why don't you just stay at my house in the Canyon. You don't need to get an apartment if you don't want to," and so we did that for awhile. He made the process really wonderful, so it wasn't stressful. But everything had changed. By the time it came out, Geffen threw us out on tour with Loverboy right away, before the record even got going. So that was a big change too. All of a sudden, instead of playing bars where you might have 1,200 people, we were playing with Loverboy in colleges and hockey rinks. So, we jumped up to that 8,000 to 10,000 people kind of thing. That tour was a real eye opener for us. We made a lot of changes. The when we saw the record was really taking off, that was wonderful. We had never had anything happen like that before. "Harden My Heart" was really going up the charts and the album was really doing well too. It wasn't just a 45 hit. Radio stations were three or four cuts into the record, deep. So they said, "We're putting you out with Elton John." So, in just a very short amount of time we went from not knowing what the hell was going on, then we're with Loverboy and Elton John. We did a whole summer with Elton. That was his Jump tour. He was on the same label. He was also on Geffen. So, by the time that tour ended our life was pretty crazy. But, it began to feel more normal.

Q - Linda Ronstadt and Elton John must have been pretty easy to get along with. Am I right about that?

A - Yes, Linda and Elton were great. Linda really kept to herself. So, we hardly ever saw her. She was very shy. But her band at the time was a legendary band, Andrew Gold, Waddy Wachtel. They were so nice to us. They were fantastic. They gave us a sound check and helped us with ideas. Maybe you ought to try this or try that. Or, move this here or there. They were just so experienced. They were great. Elton was great too. The very first night we played with him was Red Rocks, which is an intimidating venue. You're outside and it's almost like there's a giant ladder in front of you. It's a very strange venue to perform in. Anyway, we were performing there and came in on the very first night. He gave Rindy a gigantic bouquet of roses and he gave each of the guys champagne and said, "I see this tour as a package between you, an up and coming band, and us. Here's how it's gonna work. For the first ten days you get a sound check and you get yourselves dialed in and you work on it 'til you get it perfect. Then after ten days, all you do is get a line check." That means you just make sure your mic is working. You're sure your guitars are working. You don't do a real sound check. He's very professional and very gracious. At the end of the tour he invited us to his apartment in New York. He had his chef cook us a meal to say thank you. The last show was at Madison Square Garden. Yoko Ono was there. John Lennon had died long before that and Elton and John were very close. He had written a song called "Empty Garden", which was one of the singles off his album at the time. It was a very powerful, emotional experience to be involved in that. In less than a year from when we'd released the record, here we are in Elton John's New York apartment, having dinner with him and hearing him tell stories about The Beatles. It was probably the best experience of performing I've ever had, touring with him that whole summer.

Q - Besides Linda Ronstadt and Elton John, you toured with some groups you didn't necessarily have a good experience with. So, you were on bills with acts that didn't treat you so good. It was a mismatch then?

A - Yeah. There were a few. When your talent agency goes, "You're on tour," or you have a bus and you're booked a month in advance at least, but occasionally you have a hole in your tour where you have three days off. Well, financially that's a killer 'cause you've got buses and trucks and you gotta pay everybody anyway. So, sometimes you would get a call from somebody saying, "Can you drive 800 miles and play this gig with so and so." Motorhead was one of the bands we played with. Total wrong combination. Great band, but just so different from us. It was real challenging to play those kinds of gigs. Luckily we didn't have too many of them. I think the hardest tour we did was with Sammy Hagar 'cause he was in his Red Rooster era and it was all 14 and 15 year old boys. Again, Sammy was on our label. He was also on Geffen. Obviously an amazing talent and a great performer. He just let his roadies jam on his instruments while we were waiting to go onstage. So, a lot of times we never got a sound check. He basically just crapped on us in terms of being able to have time. Then when we came back to Portland, what was really weird is he had a song on his album, and I can't remember the album. Maybe it had "I Can't Drive 55" on it. He did a cover of Janis Joplin's "Piece Of My Heart", and on the album he used a saxophone player to play the solo instead of him playing a guitar solo. It wasn't Rindy. But he said to Rindy, "You play sax. Would you mind learning the sax solo and playing it every single night?" So, Rindy said, "Sure. I'll do that. If you want me to do that, I'll be happy to do that." So, Rindy learned the saxophone part note for note. We would all get on the bus after the opening set and Rindy would have to hang around 'cause the song came in three quarters of the way into Sammy's show. She had to hang around every night and play it. The weird thing was that our album was going crazy at the time and Sammy's wasn't doing very good. So, there was this weird tension going on in that regard. When we were coming back to Portland it was our first time back to Portland since "Harden My Heart" became a national hit. There was a lot of expectation at the Coliseum and we were excited to come back home. Rindy gets a message from Sammy's road manager saying Sammy doesn't think it's working out that good that Rindy's playing saxophone. (laughs) So, he doesn't want her to come out, which was really cheap. He knew when Rindy walked out, people would go nuts because in Portland she was a gigantic star 'cause we'd been playing for years years here and had a lot of success. But it was also weird that he shorted the stage for us. So, we walked out and instead of having fifteen feet front of stage, before the front, the apron, we're down to four feet all of a sudden. We could hardly move onstage. He moved all his band's gear so far down that the opening act didn't have any room. So, our drummer was almost on top of Rindy while we were playing. It was just weird. There was a lot of ego shit going on all the time in the music business. I'm sure Sammy is a great guy and a wonderful person. God bless him, but it was just one of those things. Really? Do we have to play these weird games?

Q - You recorded you last album for Geffen in 1985 and then they dropped you. Why did that happen?

A - We left. It had run its course and the reason it had run its course is the woman who signed us... I think when we signed on to that label there were five artists. It was a brand new label. Geffen had left the recording business and gone and done some Broadway work. He produced Dream Girls and stuff like that. And then he got bored with Broadway and decided to come into the record business and started Geffen Records and hired Eddie Rosenblatt from Warners to run it. When he came back, he signed Elton, John Lennon, Donna Summer, Peter Gabriel and I think we were literally the fifth act that he signed. He didn't personally sign us. He had an A&R staff of course and the A&R people do the hiring or do the talent seeking or whatever you want to call it. There was a woman named Carol Childs who he had on his A&R staff who was the person who actually came to Portland and saw us, Seafood Mama, and said, "This is the band I want to sign. I love you guys. This is what I'm looking for." So David said, "Well, okay Carol. That's your baby." Carol worked with us real closely. She was really involved with me in terms of the songs. She was really great. She had a great ear for singing, for hearing songs. We did great with the first two records and the third album, she started having issues with Geffen. Half way through the third album, which had all kinds of complications, she left Geffen. So, we were without anybody. And by then the label had gone from like six acts when we first started to being like sixty acts. So, all of a sudden you're in competition with all these people and you don't have an A&R person that signed you. You don't have the person who believes in you 100%, who is no longer at the label, and we could see the writing on the wall. We were signed to John Kalodner and he was a legendary A&R guy. Kalodner was really into Heavy Metal and Hard Rock and we'd go have a meeting with him and he was clearly not interested in anything we were doing. It was sort of like, "Okay, let's ask to get out of our contract," 'cause we had another album coming. We had a four album deal and we just said, "Here's what's going on." So, we came up with a compensation package and we walked. We started shopping ourselves to other labels and eventually ended up on Epic.

Q - When you left Geffen, five years went by before Quarterflash reunited. What were you doing in those five years? How were you able to make a living and generate money?

A - Well, luckily we'd made a lot of money from the first two records. The main advantage of being the songwriter, even if the album doesn't recoup. Typically the way it works, a band makes a record and let's say they get a $100,000 budget. They spend $100,000. Until they make that $100,000 back by the record selling, nobody makes any royalties except the songwriter. The songwriter starts getting paid from the first record that's sold because it's a separate royalty and then the recouping royalty. Luckily, having written all the songs except one on a Platinum album, gave us financial freedom to take some time off and figure out what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives. After three records like that, the third one being so disappointing, I was fried. I just decided I wanted to do something else with my life. I got involved with the Portland Trailblazers, which is our N.B.A. basketball team in Portland. They were hugely successful and looking for someone to do their half-time entertainment and put a new sound system in and bring in wireless technology for their performers at half-time. It was the era of the very first jumbo scoreboard that came down with the studio screens on them and I was pretty hip to that stuff. I came in and made a presentation to them and got hired. So I took a whole year off and worked with the Portland Trailblazers. It was a fun year. They almost made it to the finals. Great time. But by the time the year ended I started getting back into thinking about writing. Rindy was the same way. So, we just eventually started putting together the songs that we were trying to work with. We got kind of waylaid because the whole year was wasted because we thought we were going to be on MCA. We had done a bunch of work with them. I had worked with a management team we thought they're going to be our new manager, and that fell apart. The relationship with MCA fell apart pretty quickly and so that was a whole year wasted with them. We kind of just slowly stretched out and finally Rindy said, "I'm gonna call Don Greerson." He really revitalized Heart's career and Tina Turner's career and turned them around and everybody talks very highly of him. So, we called Greerson and he said, "Yeah. You should come and visit me." So, I went to New York and we ended up signing.

Q - As we speak, you and Rindy are playing out as a duet?

A - Yes. We have two projects. One project I did is with a guy named John Koonce, and another guy named Doug Frazier. So, we just put this out, it's a CD called "Koonce Ross Frazier". I wrote all the songs. We put out a video of an Americana tune called "I Won't Sing Here Anymore", and it's gone viral. So, it's over 100,000 views already. You can check that out on Vimeo. Just type in Koonce, Ross, Frazier. "New American Blues" is the name of the CD and we just released a second video and a lot of people are playing it too. It's really interesting. It's a great record. I'm real proud of it. So, we're working on that. It's just independent. On our own. Ross Productions is the label. And Rindy and I are working on a duet album which is more acoustic. Not as much Rock. It kind of harkens back to the early days when we were first performing together.

Official Website: www.Quarterflash.net

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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