In this week’s Whatever Happened To… cover story, WW got in touch with plenty of Portlanders who haven’t been heard from in quite awhile. While Marv Ross, once-guitarist/primary songwriter for local sax-rock heroes Quarterflash, didn’t exactly disappear, his life-at-current isn’t all that indicative of his rockstar past.

There have been two constants throughout Ross’ life and career, however: music and writing. I had such a lovely time chatting with Ross—and learned so much from him: what it’s like to have a #1 single, get rich quick, deal with hit-seeking record labels and, after all that, recover and move on with your life—that I’d like to share our conversation, which took place at the Bijou Cafe. What follows is my extended interview with Ross, a 56-year-old Oregon native and self-described Neil Young fanatic:

Where you were when “Harden My Heart” broke?
In those days, it was one band, per bar, per night. [Quarterflash predecessor] Seafood Mama was a real popular bar band. We made enough money in 1979, just playing bars, to buy a house. When you played four or five hours a night, it made you extremely tight, and it gave opportunities to do a lot of original material…it could turn you into an alcoholic, too, if you weren’t careful. It almost did me a couple of times. Just drinking to get through the set, ‘cause it’s a long night.

We started in ’77, and by the time we got to ’79, not that long, we were fried on it. So that was why we made a concerted effort to become a recording band. We had to figure out how to do something else, or we were gonna go crazy. We took out a loan from my dad and bought a portable recording setup and put it in the basement.

It changed my writing a lot, simplified it…“Harden My Heart” came out of the basement. We had four radio stations in this town playing a local record. It went to number one, and then Seattle caught on and it went to number one in Seattle. And then it went to New York, and we got a good write-up in the Village Voice—yeah, it was very exciting, and kind of unreal.

I tried to keep a level, realistic view that this could stop at any moment, so it was kinda surprising that it kept going up and up—and the fact that it was our first 45 out of the box!

Did you have a manager at the time?
We did. He’s now vice president for the Portland Trail Blazers. His name’s J. Isaac. He basically gave up his life for us for two years without making any money. He moved to Los Angeles, which made a big difference. We couldn’t have done it without him.

That’s an immense amount of pressure to deal with after only one record.
Yeah, [and] people really were rooting for us. Like they say, you have your whole life to write the first album; you have six months to write the second. That’s true. We were on the road for the first album for nine months straight; I was a basketcase…and then it was like, “Okay, where the next record?” [And we were like,] “Ahhh!!!!”

How long had you known your wife [Rindy Ross, Quarterflash's singer/saxophonist] at the time?
We met in high school, so we’d known each other a long time. We got married right out of high school. We were already together ten years—pretty solid, yeah.

Did you know “Harden My Heart” was a hit when you wrote it?
That saxophone line that starts the whole song, I had that much, on a guitar; it was a guitar lick. And [Rindy] said, “You know, that’s gonna make a great sax thing.” She played that on the sax, and we’d just gotten that day on this really strange effects box—now they’re considered vintage and everybody wants one. But it had a ton of compression and chorusing and echo on it. We didn’t know what were doing with it; we just bought it that day. We plugged her sax mic into it, which is not typically how they would be used; they’re usually used on vocals. She blew into the horn, and it just went into the red, just overdrove it, the volume with the sax, but it sounded like…“God.” When she laid that on there, then that was when we all looked at each other and went, “Holy shit. I haven’t heard anything quite like this.” We wanted to hear it over and over again. It was cool for awhile. I remember calling J. and saying, “I think we’ve got something really cool here.”

Was “Harden My Heart” also your first video, then?
Yeah. Geffen Records was a brand new label. Geffen had made his fortune as a manager; he managed Joni Mitchell, the Eagles and Jackson Browne, kind of discovered them and signed them to management deals. They were all on different record labels. Managers often wrestle and fight with record labels over getting a good deal for their artists. He decided rather than hassling with their different record labels for all these stars he had, he’d just start his own label, which was called Asylum Records. He made a billion dollars with them as his artists, and then he sold that company and made another billion dollars. [Later], he decided to start a new label and just called it Geffen Records. The acts he signed were John Lennon, Elton John and Donna Summer. We were the fourth act. It was surreal.

Geffen came out publicly when MTV started and said, “Videos are stupid. It’s not gonna last,” you know, the “brilliant” David Geffen [laughs]. MTV was happening and it was still kind of bizarre. I miss that time, because there were no ads on MTV. The Pretenders came out with their first hit, “Brass and Pocket,” and they had—by today’s standards, a very simple video—but we thought it was really cool. We were hoping we’d get a video. Then MTV just took off like a rocket and Geffen had his foot in his mouth. He said, “We’ve gotta do a video. Get it up next week!” They asked us what directors we were into, and we mentioned Fellini…

I just watched it this morning.
Oh God. Rindy can’t watch it. It worked. It got tons of play…flamethrowers and motorcycles. So ‘80s.

All of the sudden, did you find yourself much wealthier?
Yeah. No one’s gonna feel sorry for you, but it is odd [and stressful]. You come back home [after being on tour], and, in your brain, everything has been changing and moving so fast…and, for them, their life is the same, so when you come back there’s this disconnect with your friends and family. You have this isolating community, family [the band] that’s built on this unreal situation, and you don’t know how long it’s gonna last. We bought a sports car, and we only had it for about two months before we realized it just made us feel weird to drive it. You learn. [In regard to other bandmates’ drug problems:] It’s real easy to do the wrong thing.

One thing that all that fast success really hurts was…the band started to disintegrate pretty fast after the second album, due to people not showing up for gigs, not showing up for rehearsals, stuff like that. One member was asked to leave… The second album did pretty well, but mostly on the coattails of the first as I look back on it. The third album had some really neat material on it, but it was different; we changed directions…

People often don’t take well to that.
No, radio doesn’t. Once you are something, they really want you to stay something, at least in those days.

After that album, we took a break for almost a year. [Labels called], and we made a fourth. And that band was the most cohesive and together and suited what we were doing best. And that band, if we do a gig today—we play a few shows a year—that’s still the band we use. They all live in Portland and are accomplished players.

The fourth album that we did create, that album was a victim of when Sony bought out Geffen. They fired half the executives, so us, Cheap Trick and Aimee Mann all lost our deals in one day. Aimee and Cheap Trick were in the process of making a record, but we were done [with ours]. They actually released it in Holland and Japan, but nowhere else in the world. We tried to buy the album from the company ourselves and shop it to another label; they wouldn’t even let us do that. They said, “If you guys had a hit, we would look bad.” Very weird.

So I just kind of stared at the wall, tried to figure out what to do with my life. I got a call [in 1991] from the state of Oregon saying, “It’s the 150th [anniversary] of the Oregon Trail and we want to do a traveling show with musicians that can recreate music from 1850. It was such an off-the-wall call. I said, “Why are you calling me?” They said, “We want somebody to head it up who knows how to tour and someone who is a leader.” I started researching it and realized that a lot of the music from that era was very interesting to me. “Shenandoah,” “The Water is Wide,” gorgeous tunes from that era, so we put together the Trail Band. Such a strong left turn. But it was also such a relief to be out from under the yoke. We had so much fun—it was just a real blast—and all the pressure was off. It was like, “This doesn’t matter. We’re just playing these old fiddle tunes.” And these guys in the Trail Band are such great musicians—fiddlers, banjo players, tuba players…

You can pretty much do whatever you want [with a band like that].
Exactly, and the Trail Band has done whatever it wants; it’s don’t everything. It was a lucky break, chronologically for me. And for Rindy, too. She went back to school and got her master’s degree in mental health counseling, and now works [with that]. And I got into musicals. That show had theater elements—I wrote six monologues based on diaries from the Oregon Trail—and I got totally addicted to musicals.

How long has the Trail Band existed at this point?
This is [the Trail Band’s] 14th year together.

Did you have any idea it would last so long?
No! It was supposed to be a one-off. One tour.

How did doing research for the Trail Band play into your writing [the musical] Ghosts of Celilo?
It [feels] like almost everything [I've] done in my life has led to [Ghosts of Celilo]. I couldn’t have done it without the success we had in Quarterflash, because that allowed me to have the money to go for ten years without any income, to do that kind of a project. And the Trail Band, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have met all those Native American actors and singers. I learned so much…and wanted to share that. There’s this exotic, isolated culture just up the river from us that most of us know nothing about!

I had to go back to school to learn how to write theater. Also, composing for musical theater is so different from pop music, so that took some time to learn how to do. The real challenge was, how do you take Native American music and make it into Broadway music? It’d never been done before! So we were starting from scratch. It was very challenging; it was the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life, the thing I’m most proud of.

You were having trouble finding the lead. Did you ever think the musical might not get made?
Oh yeah. We knew it was going to be a challenge, but I didn’t think it was going to be impossible. We needed a teenage Native American actor who could sing and carry a play on his shoulders as a teenager. Very, very tall order.

Have you always been a history buff?
My mom came from—she wasn’t native, but she lived on an Indian reservation in Montana, so when we would go see that side of the family, we got to go on the reservation. That was planted in my brain as a kid. The other thing, I guess, was just music. I’m a musician, and I thought, “How does that work?” And the native musicians we worked with were so eager to share…Rindy and I both taught right out of college in the Bend area. I was a history minor [in college].

Do people who go to Ghosts of Celilo know about your history with Quarterflash?
I don’t think they care! Some of ‘em know, but a lot more don’t. “Harden My Heart” will always be what people know. It’s amazing, the kids that were in the show, 10 or 11 year-olds, know that song because it’s played on the Oldies station—or the ‘80s station—or on The Simpsons. A lot of times when people want to convey the ‘80s, they play a snippet of it.

How does it feel to be known as a “one-hit wonder,” so to speak, to have “Harden My Heart” be the thing you’re known for?
It’s okay. It doesn’t bother me too much. I don’t think about it too much. Quarterflash opened a lot of doors for me. “Harden My Heart” was the hit, but [Quarterflash] tackled a lot of interesting stuff. I’m really proud of that first record.

Does [Ross' company] Ross Productions exist mainly for the Trail Band and Celilo?
Developing other artists is something and I enjoy, and working with kids, which goes back to my [roots in education]. [I also work with] PlayWrite Inc. Bruce Livingston [the program's executive director] started it. It’s an avenue for troubled youth, high school age…ask them to write a play about themselves, and they couldn’t do it. But, for some reason, ask them to write a play about a tennis racket and a bear, and it goes through a different door in the brain, and they let stuff out. They have to know that these stories about their families; it seems so obvious. I went ahead and developed the next thing—how to turn those plays into musicals. It’s fascinating, those kids have no idea they’re writing about [themselves]. They’ll even slip and say “I” sometimes instead of their character’s name when describing what they want. That’s something I’ve been involved in a lot. That is also part of Ross Productions; there’s an educational part. I’m going to Fishtrap this year, a writer’s conference, to teach songwriting to kids. That’s part of what I do, [and part of what] Rindy [does], too.

What do you think you’d be doing now if you hadn’t received that call from the state of Oregon?
I really don’t have any clue..the thread that runs through everything for me is that I would have been writing something. I’d still be writing, whether anyone cared or not. It’s just part of who I am. And music…music’s so magical…

When I was [young], if you could become a musician, that was the best thing you could do. My generation, those people—Bob Dylan and Neil Young—maybe if they were born today, they would have wanted to be something else, filmmakers probably or something like that. There was sort of a silly naivete to thinking that we could change the world. And those songs were so good, you probably had a feeling that…maybe they can. They can transport you. By the time we hit the ‘70s, we realized that was a silly dream. There was this moment in time where you felt like that was as good as it’s gonna get in life, to do something like that. So people like myself were pulled into it. I wasn’t particularly talented as a musical kid at all; I had no musical background or training.

How important was it for you to be successful when you started out in music?
We wanted to be successful, but I don’t think we needed to be successful to be happy. If you need to have that attention—there are people out there who are like that; we toured with Elton John, and he’s very much like that, and he’ll never give it up. Even in a small room—he’d come into our dressing room…and hold court—he had to entertain us. There’s a little bit of sadness to it.

[Ross and I then got talking about music in a more general sense—what we like, what we've been listening to lately. The following story came out of that.]
I actually wrote a song with [Burt Bacharach] for Ron Howard’s first film [Night Shift]. It was Shelley Long’s first movie, too. He was contracted to do all the music for the movie. Ron Howard loved Quarterflash, so Ron really wanted us to do a song for the movie. He said, “Why don’t I have Burt Bacharach write the song and you guys record it?” I said, “You know, we’re kind of doing our own thing.” [Then I thought,] “But it is Burt Bacharach, and I’d be silly not to hear what he has written.” So, Rindy and I went to Burt Bacharach’s house. He was married to Carole Bayer Sager, very famous lyricist; they’re now slit up—he’s had like six wives. We went to their house up in the Hollywood hills. The whole house, everything—[except all his Grammies]—was white. The carpet was the whitest white, all the couches, everything. It was just weird; it hurt your eyes when you walked in. It was a very modern looking mansion.

In the middle of his [piano] room, he had Pac-Man and a Ms. Pac-Man [cocktail-style video game machines] facing each other. He and Carole Bayer Sager were addicted to Pac-Man. [Right then and there,] she started playing a game! Burt said, “Let’s play them the song.” He had clearly listened to “Harden My Heart,” which has a shuffle. He had written the song with this shuffle, but with all his chords. He turned the shuffle into kind of that Bacharach bounce. I was thinking, “Okay, we can rock that out. I can get rid of that bounce and turn it into a groove.” He starts with the chorus, and it’s got the title of the movie in it, makes perfect sense, “On the night shift/ dah dah dah.” When he gets to the verse, I’m listening to him sing it and trying to read the words on the paper, and it doesn’t make any sense: [something like] “blinky and winky and inky.”

Those are the Pac-Man characters.
Exactly! His wife had written these lyrics about Pac Man. I mean, only in Hollywood. So, I’m thinking, “This is not gonna work.”

[This is where my tape-recorder ran out of tape, but here's how the story ends, mostly paraphrased:] I rewrote the lyrics, and Howard and Bacharach were both happy with the end result. Bayer Sager “hit the roof.”

Marv and Rindy now:

Links:
Quarterflash’s allmusic page
The Trail Band
Ghosts of Celilo
Ross Productions

Top photo: Quarterflash back in the day—Rindy with the sax, and I believe that’s Marv in the shades, though it’s hard to tell (based on other photos, he appears to have had short hair at the time); bottom photo: Marv and Rindy now, both taken from Google image searches.