Gary James' Interview With Ronn Moss
The Bassist For
Player



He's an actor, a musician, a singer / songwriter. In 1976 he joined Peter Beckett, J.C. Crowley and John Friesan and formed Player. Very early on in 1978 they had a hit record to their name. That record was "Baby Come Back", and it went all the way to number one on the Billboard charts. They also enjoyed a Top Ten hit with the song "This Time I'm In It For Love".

Ronn Moss is the gentleman we are talking about. His background before Player is just as interesting as being part of Player.

Q - Ronn, you've got a musical career, an acting career, and a gorgeous wife. Some guys have all the luck!

A - I am a lucky, lucky guy. There's no doubt about that.

Q - You spell your first name with two "n"s. Who came up with that?

A - It came from being a kid named Ronnie. I just dropped the ie. I thought it was kind of symmetrical to have Ronn Moss. Two "n"s, two "o"s, two "s"s. Simple as that. I have known other Ron Moss and I just decided I'm going to be in SAG (Screen Actor's Guild) and you can only have one name of the same name in SAG. So, Ronn became the choice for a number of different reasons. I just liked the way it looked and to be a little different. But that Ronnie was the beginning of it.

Q - You tour, or are going to tour as Ronn Moss's Player.

A - Yes.

Q - And Peter Beckett has his own version of Player, correct?

A - Correct.

D - Do you think that is somewhat confusing to the public?

A - No. That's why we have to do it that way, to alleviate the confusion. We have to put our names up there to differentiate between Peter and myself. If we had both been able to tour as Player, that would be a fan confusion. So, we had to legally do it by putting our names ahead of the Player group.

Q - The fact that both of you guys aren't together in Player must mean there was friction between the two of you.

A - As unfortunately happens with so many groups for the last long while, whenever disagreements came in about who owns the copyright of the name, then you wind up legally having to resolve it and many groups have had to do the same thing. Unfortunately it's a cliché now. So, we became victims to that same sort of thing. We've resolved it so we both own the copyright to the name Player and this is the way we have to use it.

Q - Your musical career started after you saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Then you taught yourself bass and drums. So, it sounds like you couldn't decide if you wanted to be Paul or Ringo.

A - Well, originally I kind of wanted to be Ringo. I made a set of cardboard drums out of cardboard boxes. The cymbals were those little round tins that my family used to get candy given to us in, those little sort of ten or twelve inch little tins with candy in 'em. I took the lid off, drilled a hole and made a cymbal out of it. But, I literally built a set of drums, that was the first couple years of my musical career. But, I realized to be able to sing, we didn't have boom microphones back then for some reason. You only had the straight up, stand up microphone stand. So, I had to put it between my legs and play the drums around this microphone stand and it became a little bit of a challenge. So, my sister brought home an electric bass one day and I basically took that out of her hands instantly. It was the end of her career and the beginning of mine. I realized I could play bass and sing into a microphone at the same time, which is a different kind of skill than playing guitar and singing. Playing bass you have all this syncopation. It doesn't follow the typical strumming a chord and singing with it. It's a bit of a trick, but I found out I was very good at it and I gravitated to the bass from that.

Q - Was your sister a musician?

A - She was going to try to learn the bass because some group, I'm theorizing it was either Buffalo Springfield or The Grass Roots, said to her, "If you learn to play bass you can be in the group." She knew all these guys back then. They were all the same age and she was hanging around the Sunset Strip groups back then.

Q - I bet she would be a great person to interview.

A - I would say to you, "absolutely", but she passed away two years ago. (2023)

Q - I'm so sorry to hear that.

A - I'm actually going to tell a lot of her story in the documentary my wife is filming now on my life. So, my sister is going to be a big part of that documentary.

Q - Was the bass she brought through the door a Hofner bass like Paul McCartney played?

A - No, it wasn't quite that fancy. It was an old, beat-up, St. George bass that she had rented. (laughs) The strings were literally about a half inch off the neck. It was God-awful to play, but it started my career playing bass and my love of bass, so I loved it.

Q - You were playing in the L.A. clubs before you were 18 or 21. I don't know how old you had to be to play bars back then. How did you do that? Did one of your parents tag along?

A - No. I was fairly tall at 11 - 13 years old and I would come in very often with maybe an older guy in the group and he would sort of walk in first and meet the owner and the rest of us kids would come in. Back during that time, yes, it was illegal for us to be in a bar, but we promised the owner we wouldn't drink, which we didn't need to. We just wanted to play music. And, he needed a band. He obviously needed the music to be there. He didn't want to chase the band out of there because of technicalities. We just kept to ourselves. We went on. We did our music and we played really well. We were young kids, but we were kickin' it back then. So, they gave us a certain latitude to keep going and we did that for years.

Q - Are you talking about the Sunset Blvd. clubs?

A - I'm talking about every bar and every club in L.A. and even South of L.A. in Orange County. We went through all of them. Gazzarri's, The Rainbow, The Whisky. I can't even think of all the names back then. There were a lot of small bars. A lot of small clubs. And we literally played all of them.

Q - What years are we talking about?

A - Start me out at 12 years old because I was playing professionally at 12 years old.

Q - When you would play, let's say, The Whisky, would Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin have been in the audience that you would know about?

A - Not that I would know about. It's possible. It's very possible. I got to meet Jim Morrison when I was around 14.

Q - He asked you for directions. Tell me about that.

A - There's a lake called Malibu Lake. It was set up by some actors back in the 1920s. It was a round, oval shaped lake in the Malibu Hills, inland from the ocean. A friend of mine's father had a cabin there and we were rehearsing. My 14 year old band was literally rehearsing there. We're playing in the lake and we see a white Shelby Mustang coming around the top road, around the top of the lake. The guy comes up behind us and yells down. I run up the hill and sure enough, it's Jim Morrison. We're talking 25 year old Jim Morrison. Pristine. The image we all have of him, shaven, clean, long dark hair, clear eyed and focused. It was just that 25 year old Morrison we first saw when we became aware of The Doors. And he had this blonde girlfriend with him. He asked for directions and I said, "It's about four houses down on the right." I expected him to just drive off. He chatted me up for like twelve minutes. "What are you guys doing?" "Rehearsing." I wanted to say, "Do you want to come sing with us?", but I didn't have the guts to say that to him because the car was still running and I knew he wanted to go to his friend's house. But, I thought afterwards why didn't I just even ask him? All he had to do was say, "No, thanks. I got something to do." But, it was very special to meet that guy. I also got to stand in front of Jimi Hendrix, literally about four feet away from him as he played at U.C.L.A. in a rehearsal hall. This is another one of my sister's stories that I'll tell in the documentary; two hundred people were only allowed in this small rehearsal room on the campus of U.C.L.A. to come and see Jimi Hendrix do one final concert before he did his first tour of Europe. He wanted to do one final show. So, word of mouth on the campus and you got to see Jimi Hendrix. My sister went to U.C.L.A. in the film department. So, she asked me if I wanted to go and I brought my 14 year old band's guitarist and the two of us stood right in front of Jimi Hendrix, literally four feet away from him. The stage was only about two feet high and he did the whole act for us, burned the guitar. He did everything for us. It changed my musical life to see that guy play in front of us like that. It was so frickin' loud.

Q - And Janis?

A - I never got to see Janis live. I was definitely aware of her. She was an amazing, unusual singer, but I never got to see her live. My 14 year old band got to play with Peanut Butter Conspiracy, live onstage. We got to play with Jefferson Airplane, with Taj Mahal, back in those Love-Ins. We used to call 'em Love-Ins in the park. We would literally play on the back of flatbed trucks in the park at Griffith Park.

Q - No doubt about it Ronn, you were in the right place at the right time with the right stuff.

A - These guys were 25 years old back then. We were 14. They were looking at us like, "Holy shit! Those guys actually have it going on. You guys are really good." We really put a lot of effort into it. It was obvious music was the way we should go.

Q - At 16 you produced an Ike And Tina Turner concert in L.A. What does that mean? Do you mean promoted?

A - We actually, physically promoted and produced the show at the Rose Palace in Pasadena. It was really a nice venue actually. It was a covered, indoor venue that a lot of concerts were held at that we rented. We rented the venue. We put up the stage. We put up the lights. We did everything. And then we sold tickets. There were about twelve of us, I'm gonna say. Ten or eleven of us were 16 years old or so. There was one 25 year old guy that acted as the figure head because he was old enough to be legally able to do that and we literally did all the leg work and everything to actually, physically put on the show. That's hiring security, a lot of us became security as well, and we did that for several different acts that came through there. It was a great time. It was a really interesting time. I know I had to be 16 because I physically drove myself to the venue. I remember that. So, I know I was 16 years old.

Q - What a well-rounded education you have in the music business.

A - Yeah, well it felt like something that I also wanted to do because my father was a music producer, a music concert producer, not a music producer. He was an impresario and he would not only sell the tickets for music venues around California, but he would also produce shows and civic light opera and ballet and all the musicals that happened around California were done through my dad. I kind of had a feeling for it.

Q - I guess so.

A - I thought that would probably be my business, but I decided to go heavier into actually making music myself.

Q - Are you any relation to Jerry Moss, the "M" in A&M Records?

A - This ties back to when you asked me why do I spell my name Ronn. The other Ron Moss is in fact Jerry Moss' son. Ron kind of followed me in my acting career early on. My friends in my acting class would call me two weeks later and go, "Ronn, you're not going to believe who came into the class two weeks after you left. Another Ron Moss!" And it was Jerry Moss' son. He was aspiring to be an actor, but we knew that he couldn't actually use the name Ron Moss in S.A.G. because you can only have one actor with that name. And I finally met him. We met in Cheviet Hills on Halloween night, years ago. I hear some guy call my name across the street. He goes, "Ronn Moss!" I go, "Yeah." He goes, "Ron Moss." So, we literally met in the middle of the street, shook hands. This was the first time we met after years of kind of knowing of each other. Jerry Moss actually came to one of my last performances in a club called Vibrato, on top of Benedict Canyon, or, excuse me, Coldwater Canyon. A beautiful club owned by Herb Alpert's daughter. It's owned by Herb, but she runs the club. So, I did a solo night there and Jerry Moss was in the audience and he was very sweet. He gave me a wonderful critique and good advice on my music and my performance. He was very astute with that and I was very honored to have him in the audience. I'm surprised more people didn't ask me about my association with A&M Records based on the fact that we were on RSO Records, Robert Stigwood. If Player had been on A&M Records everybody would have gone, "Okay. Well we know how that happened." But, that's not really what happened. So, meeting Ron Moss, Jerry's son and meeting Jerry Moss, it was a big honor.

Q - Have other interviewers asked you about your name and possible association with the "M" in A&M Records.

A - They haven't actually asked me. You're the first.

Q - I like to be the first.

A - You are, and you're astute enough and obviously researched enough to look at things like that.

Q - Player toured with quite a few big names. People like Heart and Eric Clapton. How did these people treat you? Were you treated pretty good?

A - We were treated wonderfully with everybody. They were all very nice. We had one instance where Eric Clapton pulled the plug on us in Vegas because we were getting too good of a response. But, we let that go and we wound up enjoying the tour a lot. Heart was great. Boz Scaggs. Gino Vanelli. Little River Band. We really enjoyed them all. We made some great friends along the way on all of them. It was so much fun. People always ask me, "Ronn, do you like acting more or do you like doing the music more?" I go, "Why not do them both? I can do them both." But, there's really nothing like playing for twenty-five thousand people in a Rock 'n' Roll concert in a big hall. There's no feeling like that. I've done theatre. Stage theatre stuff where people are sitting, watching a theatre piece and it's not the same as an actor. Playing music is just a whole different grade of energy. Now, I combine the two. I do the music for the films that we are going to be producing.

Q - You also played bass in Cher's band in Los Vegas. I've been told that's a highly sought after gig. The best players in L.A. want to get that gig. Why would that be? Does she pay her musicians well? Does she treat you well?

A - I just thought it was a quiche thing to do, to go to Vegas for several weeks and play in Cher's band. I had friends in the band. I knew the Musical Director. He was the one that recommended me. It became a fun thing and I actually enjoyed hanging around Cher. She and I would go out and go over to the hotel next to us and see Joan Rivers play. We had a lot of fun stories with that. It just became a fun thing to do. She had all those dancers back then and all the people imitating her and imitating Bette Midler and a slew of other people. Most of 'em were guys dressed up as women. But, it was a great group of people. Very creative group of people and it was a fun thing to do. We were still kids and it was fun.

Q - Did Player ever tour Australia?

A - Player only actually got to tour Australia with me much after the original Player was already done. It was just myself and Peter Beckett. I brought the Player band over to Australia for the first time 'cause Player never got a chance to go outside of the United States before that. We toured for a month or so in Australia and then that was pretty much it. That was the end of it. But Player never got to go to Europe or any other place. We had offers and we had to unfortunately turn them down because one of the members of the band was English and he didn't have his proper Green Card and visa and all that stuff. So, we didn't know if he'd be able to get back into the United States. So, we technically couldn't leave to do those tours. It was too bad. I think we could have made a lot of great music overseas and opened up a whole new market for ourselves.

Q - I ask because you're well-known in Australia because of some kind of an acting gig you had.

A - Some kind of acting gig, yeah. It went of for quite a long time. They've embraced me there and tried to make me an Honorary Australian. I like Australia. In fact, I'm looking forward to going back and doing another tour. It's been several years since I've not been able to go there.

Q - You're also a photographer. What are taking photos of?

A - For me, I've always liked portraits. I'm not real big on still life or landscapes. I like portraits. I like people. I like seeing what's behind their eyes. So, I got very good at taking all my friends' acting resume pictures and the commercial shots. I would do it pretty much for free because all my friends, when we were younger, couldn't really afford to have high price pictures taken. So, I had all the gear. Just buy the materials needed to do it and you'll have your pictures. I did that for a lot of people, (laughs) back then. And I just got enamored with cameras. I've always loved cameras and that's where I'm taking my love of making movies. It just seems like a logical step to make my own movies and do the music for those movies and stay creative in a visual way and a musical way. So, that's my path.

Official Website: RonnMoss.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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