Marv and Rindy Ross scored pop stardom with Quarterflash, flamed out, then found their true musical path

The question had become such an urgent concern across the country that a syndicated newspaper column -- the Pop Scene Answerperson -- led with it in January 1982.

“Who sings ‘Harden My Heart’?” a Massachusetts reader asked Barbara Lewis, the Answerperson. “It sure sounds like Pat Benatar, but it’s not on any of her albums.”

Lewis set the reader straight: the song, which she pointed out was “taking the rock world by storm,” did not come from the well-known Benatar but from a new, Portland, Oregon-based group called Quarterflash, led by the married team of Marv and Rindy Ross.

“Harden My Heart” soon surged into the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 -- and its stay on the chart would last six months. All these years later, it lives on, a pop classic, featured in movies and TV shows, in a Grand Theft Auto game and the Broadway musical “Rock of Ages.”

The song proved to be Quarterflash’s sole big hit, securing them the dreaded One Hit Wonder tag. By the end of the 1980s the group’s label had cut them loose.

But for Marv and Rindy, that wasn’t the day the music died -- it was the end only of a thumpingly dramatic overture. The truest high notes were still to come.

***

That rush of success Quarterflash enjoyed -- selling some 2 million copies of their debut album, touring with Loverboy, Sammy Hagar and Elton John -- never quite sank in.

“I couldn’t believe any of it was happening, honestly,” Rindy says now, 40 years later. “For six months, I was a deer in headlights.”

And no wonder. Just a few years before, Rindy and Marv had been teaching fifth grade and junior high school, respectively, in rural Oregon. An even more recent memory had them struggling to land gigs at Portland’s larger music clubs, like Earth Tavern and The Last Hurrah.

When they finally did get the opportunity to play a popular Rose City venue, Rindy recalls, “We had to call all our friends and beg them to please come down to prove we could fill the room.”

At the time, club owners’ reluctance to give the band a shot was understandable.

For starters, the group wasn’t called Quarterflash. Instead, the ensemble that first started playing Marv’s song “Harden My Heart” carried the somewhat dorky name Seafood Mama.

And Seafood Mama wasn’t even a pop band. It wasn’t clear what it was. Marv and Rindy had created their own, oddball niche that had very little to do with the sleek disco or driving rock that most clubgoers wanted to hear.

“They were swing music -- old-timey, Bob Wills stuff, with a fiddler,” says guitarist Doug Fraser, who later joined Quarterflash. “Kind of country swing music.”

Kind of.

John R. Smith, whose own eclectic band Nu Shooz formed in Portland at about the same time, says Seafood Mama’s music “was an interesting blend of styles. They had a fiddle player, [with] Rindy on alto saxophone, so they could hit a lot of different textures. And it was intelligent music, levels above ‘hippie music’ -- you knew that these people were into Americana, but also R&B.”

Yes, that’s a good description. And yet, still, it doesn’t quite capture the sound.

That’s probably because you had to see them live to get it. Or not get it. Or sometimes get it.

“There were no guardrails, and we liked that,” Rindy says. “Marv’s writing was so diverse, and, playing live, it just worked. If you didn’t like one of our songs, that was OK, the next one might make you go, ‘Oh!’”

Guitarist Jon DuFresne first heard about Seafood Mama when Blaine Moody, the bassist in DuFresne’s hard-rock covers band, announced he was moving on.

“He said, ‘I’m going to go play with these schoolteachers,’” DuFresne recalls. “‘They write really good songs.’”

Schoolteachers?

DuFresne, curious, went to see Moody in his new gig -- and was surprised his former bandmate had made the jump.

“We were looking to the Stones and The Clash [as influences], and here were these hippies, about as granola as you could imagine,” he recalls. “It was a foreign world to me. They were so damn wholesome.”

But while Seafood Mama wasn’t his kind of thing, DuFresne recognized they knew what they were doing.

“Oh, they could play,” he says. “They could definitely play.”

***

Orinda Carter grew up in a blue-collar household in Northeast Portland.

Music infused the home -- her father had scored a college band scholarship, she says, but then World War II arrived, ending his brief tenure on campus.

Now and again in the years that followed, Rindy recalls, he’d bring out his saxophone and play, “which we all loved.”

Rindy and her sister would sing together while doing the dishes after dinner, and “I loved kind of being a ham in school,” she adds. “If there was show-and-tell, for me it was always a song, and I’d rope in other kids.”

By high school, she’d decided her gift was that she “heard harmony,” and so she dreamed not of standing at center stage but being a backup singer.

She ended up in the spotlight anyway.

“When I met Rindy, she was already playing gigs,” Marv says. “Doing Joan Baez songs, Bob Dylan. She was amazing.”

Marv took a twistier path to a life in music.

From a young age he wanted to be a writer, and he frequently holed up in his room to pen what he now calls “bizarre” short stories. His mother encouraged this creativity -- she’d put the stories on the refrigerator for the whole family to see.

Then the Beatles arrived in the U.S., and Marv, 13 at the time, had to have a guitar.

He and Rindy met in English class when they were juniors at Madison High. Their ancient, close-to-retirement teacher was just going through the motions, it seemed to them. As the teacher droned one day, Rindy mindlessly looked across the aisle at this floppy-haired boy. He caught the gaze, and they rolled their eyes at the same time.

That moment was enough to prompt Marv to ask her out.

They discovered they had a lot in common: a love of music, sure, but also their working-class families (Marv’s father was a plasterer) and their interest in becoming teachers.

Most important: “We laughed a lot together,” Rindy says. “We had a very similar sense of humor. That was always so important to me.”

They played their first show together, at the American Museum at Burnside and Third Avenue, while still in high school -- even though Marv had convinced himself he was tone-deaf. Rindy tuned his guitar for him after cringing while watching him try to do it.

They did not set off for New York City or Los Angeles after graduation. Neither of them heard stardom calling.

Marv had earned a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. His goal: to become a professor, teach Shakespeare.

But the political passions of the day got in the way. After the shocking Kent State shootings in May 1970, he helped organize a student protest that shut down the Puget Sound campus for a day. He soon learned that his scholarship had been pulled.

Was it because the administration now viewed him as a radical?

“I can’t think of any other reason why,” he says.

Without the scholarship, he couldn’t afford to stay at the private college, so he joined Rindy at the Oregon College of Education, now Western Oregon University, in Monmouth.

They married in 1971, and after they graduated from OCE, they landed teaching positions in central Oregon.

Marv and Rindy started their first band, called Jones Road (they lived on Jones Road in Bend). They played on weekends for fun.

Jones Road featured covers of John Prine, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. “For a while I really was Joni,” Rindy would admit. “I tried to copy her every inflection.”

Maybe so, but she and her band eventually found their own identity. Marv had begun writing songs, inspired by the “quirkier songwriters” out there: Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Dan Hicks. The band embraced some jazz and Western swing and even the burgeoning “L.A. sound” epitomized by the Eagles. This eclecticism didn’t produce the most commercial music, but people seemed to like it.

“We began to think, ‘Oh, my gosh, people will actually pay us to play,’” Rindy says.

Adds Marv: “So we decided to take a shot.”

Rindy called her parents one night and said, um, she and Marv were quitting their jobs to try to make it as musicians. “Just this enormous silence on the line,” she recalls. Then, finally: “You’re what?”

Marv and Rindy pushed forward anyway. But again, they didn’t set out for New York or L.A.; they still didn’t hear stardom calling them.

They moved back to Portland and formed Seafood Mama, the name lifted from an old jazz song. Marv played guitar and Rindy had taken up the sax, her father’s instrument. They were joined by Moody on bass, Morry Woodruff on drums and Bruce Sweetman playing violin.

Portland in the late 1970s was still a smallish, industrial city, and it was struggling. Surface parking lots and porn shops dominated downtown. You could rent an apartment almost anywhere in the central city for next to nothing.

And yet the music scene was booming. There wasn’t a recording industry in town, but Portlanders poured into clubs night after night.

“It was like Liverpool in 1962,” Doug Fraser says, only half-joking.

Seafood Mama was different than all the other bands in town. The swirling of genres, of old and new. And the pretty, cherubic Rindy not just singing -- the girl’s traditional role in a band -- but ripping off powerful sax licks like Clarence Clemons.

Women would approach Rindy after the band’s shows, grinning, agog that she could be front and center with that masculine instrument.

“They see me playing horns that men usually play, and they’re glad,” she told The Oregonian.

Rindy’s musical universe continued to expand. Joni Mitchell remained an inspiration, but now she also name-checked Ella Fitzgerald, Bonnie Raitt and Rickie Lee Jones.

She admitted the biggest influence on her work, however, was a man: her husband.

“His lyrics tell a story,” she said in an early interview. “He’s gotten really good with lyrics I can relate to as a woman.”

Writing songs was Marv’s passion, not Rindy’s, but he wrote for her: her voice, her experience -- and so it was very much a collaboration.

“In general, I was his editor,” Rindy says. “Marv tends to write 20 verses to get three or four. I’d winnow it down; I’d tell him: Here’s what got to me.”

Marv relied on this input, saying simply: “I trusted her completely.”

The collaboration clearly worked, for more and more people kept showing up at their gigs. By 1980, just two years after forming, Seafood Mama was a guaranteed draw anywhere in town, any night of the week. John Wendeborn, The Oregonian’s pop-music critic, heralded them as “one of the most refreshing groups around.”

***

One song changed everything.

Marv took the phrase “harden my heart” from a poem a friend wrote. The rest was all Marv -- with Rindy’s help, of course.

“Harden My Heart” does sound like a Pat Benatar song, and yet not quite. It has the urgency, the proud feminist swagger, but maybe there’s self-loathing too -- “I swear I’ll never, ever wait again” -- or at least emotional exhaustion. Love isn’t a battlefield here. The war is over, and the singer clearly has lost.

Music lovers found it relatable. They also found themselves humming it -- all the time. It was the perfect earworm.

Recognizing they were onto something, the band decided to produce a cheap, quickie single.

Rindy listened to it and said they shouldn’t put it out -- it “sounded too rough.” She was overruled.

Their new manager took the record to radio stations around Portland, as well as stations in Eugene and Seattle.

“And they played it!” Rindy says. “We couldn’t believe it.”

Seafood Mama already was a popular regional band. Now it became a Pacific Northwest phenomenon.

“Every show, they packed the club, with lines out the door,” remembers Fraser, who was playing with another local band, Jon Koonce’s Johnny and the Distractions. “It seemed to me they were shocked by how quickly this was happening to them.”

“I think my dad finally got onboard when we were interviewed on his favorite radio station, KEX,” Rindy says.

Soon record-label reps started doing something they’d never done before: they came to Portland.

All of this proved the end for Seafood Mama. Marv’s songwriting had been slowly moving more toward “urban rock,” as he called it, and so the band changed much of its lineup, bringing on Jack Charles on guitar, Rick DiGiallonardo on keyboards and Rich Gooch on bass.

“I didn’t want to be country rock anymore,” Marv says. “All that ethos of pastoralism -- I was done with it.”

So they rebranded, briefly as True North and then as Quarterflash -- the name coming from a slangy, early 20th-century description Australians had for new arrivals in the country: “one quarter flash and three parts foolish.” Geffen, the hot new label, snapped them up and hurried them into a recording studio.

The label gave the band a big launch, and “Harden My Heart” blasted up the charts.

“Everyone in Portland was stunned by the speed of their success,” Nu Shooz’s Smith says. “But they were such nice people that you had to be happy for them. And man, Quarterflash was tight. Woo!”

Well, maybe not everybody had to be happy for them.

After all, Quarterflash wasn’t the quirky, shaggy band of hippies so many Portlanders had fallen in love with. The new look was even more of a tipoff than the music’s evolution: shiny, tight outfits for Rindy, a leather jacket for Marv, and both of them with teased, blown-out hair they would laughingly call their “power helmets.”

“Something’s happened in the transition to the big time that just doesn’t ring true,” The Oregon Journal’s Karyl Severson wrote, adding that Rindy “seems to be trying desperately to qualify for a place in the ranks of Pat Benatar and Debbie Harry, and it’s not a fair contest.”

The Benatar comparison again. It would begin to grate.

“I can’t see why people say I sound like her,” Rindy snipped at a reporter.

Whether she sounded like Benatar or not, the new band’s timing was excellent. The cable music-video channel MTV had launched in August 1981; Quarterflash’s self-titled debut album arrived a month later, along with a “Harden My Heart” video featuring Rindy running around in a low-cut black leotard.

“The early ‘80s were a pivotal couple of years in our culture,” points out DuFresne, who moved on from the covers band to Billy Rancher’s The Unreal Gods. “The birth of MTV was like the coming of the Beatles. Everything changed. The Rosses were astute enough to transform themselves into an MTV pop band.”

Marv and Rindy wouldn’t put it like that. Marv was following his songwriting muse, he insisted, and that just happened to take them to glossy pop at the moment when everyone wanted glossy pop.

At any rate, Quarterflash was a hit.

The Los Angeles Times enthused that Rindy had “a sultry, punkish style.”

Closer to home, The Oregonian said the Quarterflash album was “not only a credit to the band’s talent, it’s going places.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer called the new LP “crisp, crackling pop hokum” -- a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but still, good vibes overall.

Others took more aggressive shots at the group, dismissing the album as a cookie-cutter job that had “nothing to say.”

Marv admits the bad reviews hurt. He thought he had a lot to say. He and Rindy wondered if some critics only bothered with the singles -- “Find Another Fool” followed “Harden My Heart” up the charts -- before calling it a day.

“Just listen to the record,” Rindy told one reporter.

Not that the couple had much time to stew over slights. They were on the road for weeks and weeks, opening for big stars, pinching themselves to make sure all this really was happening.

They were backstage someplace on Elton John’s “Jump Up!” tour when a rep from the label showed up to present them with their platinum record -- the first one an Oregon artist had ever earned. They ended up in a storage room in the back of the auditorium.

“They kind of kept it quiet, because Elton’s album wasn’t doing so well,” Marv says.

When they posed for a photo, holding the evidence of the prized sales distinction, they were standing in front of a phalanx of garbage cans.

Back in their home city, meanwhile, Quarterflash had reached mythic status. A Portland band at the top of the charts! Touring with Elton John! How was this possible?

People kept asking Fraser, a longtime friend, what Marv and Rindy were really like. He started telling them that of course success had gone to their heads, that now even the couple’s pals had been instructed to “avert their eyes” when the Rosses entered a room.

This was a dumb joke, Fraser acknowledges. But it worked, at least among those who knew Marv and Rindy, because the couple truly seemed incapable of stereotypical rock-star obnoxiousness.

“They never changed,” Fraser says. “You never saw any drama with those guys.”

Yet there was some drama, slowly building.

***

In the midst of Quarterflash’s stunning, out-of-nowhere success -- the platinum record, the tour with Elton, the reviews in national magazines -- worries about the next album had taken hold.

The debut LP had been out for just a couple months before Geffen execs started asking when the band would be ready to start recording the follow-up, and which song on it would be the next breakout single.

“They saw me as a guy who wrote hit songs,” Marv says, and that stressed him out. “I never self-identified as a guy who wrote hit pop songs. I just happened to write a 4-minute song that was hook-y.”

Trying to write another hook-y hit, he discovered, wasn’t easy, like chasing a ghost.

Quarterflash’s sophomore effort, 1983′s “Take Another Picture,” saw a couple of songs inch their way up the Billboard chart -- “Take Me to Heart” made it to No. 14 -- but the album’s sales lagged far behind its predecessor. There would be no backstage platinum-record presentation this time.

Marv and Rindy kept the momentum going as best they could. The band appeared on Dick Clark’s iconic “American Bandstand” -- on the same episode as an up-and-coming singer from Michigan.

Madonna, interviewed on air by Clark, declared that her ambition was “to rule the world.”

The Rosses surely thought their ambition was more attainable: to get back to the top of the charts.

An attempt at reinvention came in 1985, with “Back Into Blue.” Music writer Rick Mitchell called the album a “hardboiled, high-energy departure from the familiar dark and moody Quarterflash sound.”

The band didn’t get to play Madison Square Garden with Elton this time. Mitchell caught up with them at the Jackson County Fair; they bounded onstage in 100-degree heat, the beer-buzzed crowd hooting and whistling as Rindy’s sweat-soaked shirt stuck to her body.

They were still with a major label, still getting support in the studio and from the publicity department, but they saw where things were headed.

“What kept us sane was each other,” Marv says. “And that we weren’t 21. We were in our 30s. The fact that we’d been together for a long time before we had success mattered. Our priority wasn’t being stars or money. It was each other.”

“Back Into Blue” ended up being another step backward -- it sold about 250,000 copies, about half as many as “Take Another Picture.” Five years before, Marv and Rindy would have rejoiced at a quarter-million copies sold, but 1980′s expectations were long gone.

Geffen had seen enough. Quarterflash slunk over to Epic.

Their new label wanted the band to be “the next Heart,” Rindy told The Oregonian in 1990. “It was going to be all corporate rock songs that someone else was going to find for us.”

They resisted, and they won that battle. For their fourth album, “Girl in the Wind,” they would do their own songs.

After weeks in the studio, they felt good about the results. They believed they had a winner.

But just days before the album’s scheduled release, a shakeup upended the label; their chief cheerleader at the company was among those sent packing.

“All of a sudden the Rosses went dark,” says Fraser, who had joined Quarterflash after “Back Into Blue.” “They just disappeared. I didn’t hear from them for a week. Finally, I get ahold of Marv. ‘We’ve been dropped,’ he tells me. ‘There won’t be an album release.’”

Fraser hung up the phone in a daze. “It was devastating,” he says.

“Girl in the Wind” never was released in the U.S.

“We got over it, but it was tough,” Rindy admits. “I think it’s the best singing I’ve ever done on a record, and very few people have heard it.”

Marv and Rindy took it as a sign. They decided they wouldn’t try to sign with another label. They were 40 years old -- it was time to pack away the rock-star dreams.

Marv and Rindy had done well during their years in the big time, but thanks to the music industry’s notoriously lopsided new-artist contracts, they weren’t fabulously wealthy. Stepping off the rock-star carousel, they’d actually have to make a living.

Rindy went back to school, earning a master’s degree in counseling. She’d spend 15 years in the field in the Portland area. Marv started his own small production company.

The adjustment back to everyday life, it turned out, wasn’t hard. Which surprised no one who knew them.

“They are essentially normal people in a business that thrives on abnormality,” their guitarist Jack Charles said in 1984, when Quarterflash was still near their peak popularity.

Marv and Rindy’s shared sense of humor -- that key attraction for Rindy back when they were 17 years old -- surely helped, their ability to look at the absurdities of life and roll with them.

And it’s not like they gave up on music. In fact, after their label kicked them to the curb, Marv says mostly what he felt was relief.

“I just followed my bliss after that,” he says.

His best work, he believes, followed.

In 1991, The Oregon Trail Council hired Marv to write a music-driven play, based on diaries from trail pioneers, as part of the official celebration of the Trail’s 150th anniversary.

“I wrote the play to be like ‘Our Town’ -- very small,” Marv said when “Voices from the Oregon Trail” opened at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in 1993. But his Oregon Trail experience didn’t stay small.

Marv also launched The Trail Band, an 8-piece ensemble featuring the penny whistle tweeting, the spoons clickety-clacking, and Rindy often taking the vocals. The band toured the region with their old-time American music, collecting adherents at every stop. A Christmas show became an annual tradition, and soon the band, as Marv and Rindy’s bands always did, evolved, jumping forward in time to music of the 1920s and ‘30s.

The Trail Band’s audience is niche but dedicated. One longtime fan enthused online that she had been going to Trail Band concerts for years, and that Marv’s original song “What We Left Behind,” sung by Rindy, always “brings me to my knees.”

Next came an even more ambitious project: Marv’s “The Ghosts of Celilo.”

The stage musical revolved around the impact of the Dalles Dam, which caused the 1957 flooding of Celilo Falls, obliterating one of the region’s most sacred Native American sites.

After he spent more than a decade on the idea -- including interviewing tribal elders, studying musical theater at Portland State and working with Indigenous artists -- Marv’s show debuted at the Newmark Theatre in 2007 and received rapturous reviews.

The show stunned Marv and Rindy’s old friend Doug Fraser: its ambition, its emotional wallop, how different it was from anything Marv had done before.

“What kind of guy decides he’s going to learn how to write a play on a subject like that?” he says. “And goes to school for it? He’s very dedicated.

“A great thing about the Rosses is they don’t look back much,” he adds. “It’s almost like they had this huge interrupt -- having a hit record -- and then just went back to doing what they’d always been doing.”

***

Marv and Rindy are both 70 now, and they’re still doing what they’ve always been doing.

A couple years ago Marv found himself writing songs about getting older, and about what was going on in the country, and he realized they were specifically from a male perspective.

“I guess I had saved up a lot of male emotion, feelings, anger, conviction,” he says.

These were not songs for Rindy, and so former Portland rocker Jon Koonce stepped in. When Fraser joined the effort, the new group became Koonce-Ross-Fraser.

Their self-produced album, called “New American Blues,” is a bare-bones but powerful work, infused with longing and regret, rage and sentimentality.

Late in 2019, they shot a video for the song “I Won’t Sing Here Anymore,” about evangelical Christianity losing its way.

The video spread rapidly on social media, which surprised Marv.

“I thought it was a dark little tune,” he says.

Rindy, by the way, didn’t feel left out. “It was fun for me to see Marv write for a man,” she says. And she sings backup on the album -- her teenaged ambition finally realized.

At the Oregon Music Hall of Fame’s October ceremony at the Aladdin Theater, “New American Blues” won Album of the Year honors.

So what’s next for Marv and Rindy Ross as the world starts to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic? Portland’s First Couple of Pop, as they were once dubbed, have decided to keep it simple: intimate house concerts, just the two of them and a guitar, which is how they first started playing together in high school, more than 50 years ago.

“It’s so much fun,” Rindy says. “I feel like we’ve come full circle.”

-- Douglas Perry

dperry@oregonian.com

@douglasmperry