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| Fellini, MFs. |
For at least the tenth time, a band cannot be a one-hit wonder if they release two hits. And that label falls all the way off if they’ve got three Top 20 hits, plus three more in the Top 100...
The Hit
“It wasn’t a personal story – just made it up. The chords are simple but voiced so as to make it sound more complex than it is. The whole song is really the groove which we called a shuffle in those days. Rindy came up with the sax line. The whole thing was written in less than a week and recorded in our basement for the Seafood Mama version. It sold 10,000 copies in Portland and Seattle and was the key to us getting signed to Geffen records.”
“The lyrics describe a situation where the singer finds strength to leave her man and is determined to do it without getting all emotional.”
- Rediscover the 80s, 2021 interview with songwriter/guitarist Marv Ross
I don’t always get a solid, detailed telling about how a band developed their hit, but I found really solid material of Quarterflash’s, “Harden My Heart”; if nothing else, I know what to call its tres-80s rhythm structure. To pick up the stray name referenced in the quote, Seafood Mama was Marv and Rindy Ross’ original band - less a pure (adult-oriented) rock band than Quarterflash and one that included Marv Ross’ violin teacher as a regular member – and the “Portland” referenced in that quote is Portland, Oregon. The version of the single that everyone knows was re-recorded at Sausolito’s famous Record Plant under the hand of John Boylan, a legendary producer (he helped stand up The Eagles) and, in Marv Ross’ telling, an all-around great guy.
The Rosses worked with session musicians on the first pass at Quarterflash’s debut album, but, when they returned to Portland to take a break between sessions (Geffen gave ‘em a long leash), they bumped into another local band called Pilot, did some playing together and heard good chemistry. So they kicked out the session guys and finished recording the album with Quarterflash’s original line-up.
Marv Ross, who did nearly all the songwriting for the band, borrowed the title, “Harden My Heart” from a collection of poems a friend had passed on to him; he only took the title and, to his credit, he paid his friend for the title. I remember the video from watching it on MTV, but its “Fellini-esque concept” went over my head (just caught up). One final bit of trivia on Quarterflash’s break-through single, this one from Classicbands.com:
“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.”
The Rest of the Story
Marv met Rindy Ross in their junior year of high school at Portland’s Madison High School. They started dating for a couple years before playing music together and made an attempt at normal lives before getting into the business – e.g., both earned degrees and taught in Central Oregon for several years (she taught fifth grade, he taught junior high English). After finding some success playing Oregon’s high desert circuit, the Rosses returned to Portland to make a serious run at starting a band. Seafood Mama, formed in 1977, was the result/their third band (the second, fwiw, was Beggars Opera).
They did pretty damn well just gigging up and down the I-5 corridor between Portland and Seattle, making a living, even buying a house. Marv set up a recording studio in their basement, which they used to record their demos. A local label called Whitefire picked up “Harden My Heart” and released it as a 45-rpm with a song called “City of Roses” on the flip-side and, somewhere around that time, the former became a regional hit, got regular air-play and Seafood Mama became a big, local deal – to the tune of a live one-hour special that aired on KOIN TV (this is just a 15-minute glimpse, but Quarterflash got another one-hour special (and a much nicer set-up) a year later and I found the entire show). By the time Geffen came calling, Rindy and Marv had already disbanded Seafood Mama to pursue a new direction. When it came to changing their name, they went with Quarterflash, a phrase they borrowed from a book at Boylan’s house. Its origin: “In the early 1900’s, Australians would refer to newcomers to the country as being “one quarter flash and three parts stupid.”
Geffen handed them a hefty advance – Marv pegged it at one hundred grand – and left them to it. I covered the basic story above – e.g., first session guys (e.g., the drummer from Bread, a bassist who’d played with Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, then the members of Pilot – all of which ended in the original, hey-day line-up of Rindy, Marv, Jack Charles (guitar), Rick DiGiallonardo (keys/synths), Rich Gooch (bass), and Brian David Willis. Quarterflash wrapped up the album in 1980 and Geffen released it, but, before their eponymous debut album even took off, the label threw them onto a touring bill with label-mates, Loverboy, aka, the deep-end:
“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.”
The Hit
“It wasn’t a personal story – just made it up. The chords are simple but voiced so as to make it sound more complex than it is. The whole song is really the groove which we called a shuffle in those days. Rindy came up with the sax line. The whole thing was written in less than a week and recorded in our basement for the Seafood Mama version. It sold 10,000 copies in Portland and Seattle and was the key to us getting signed to Geffen records.”
“The lyrics describe a situation where the singer finds strength to leave her man and is determined to do it without getting all emotional.”
- Rediscover the 80s, 2021 interview with songwriter/guitarist Marv Ross
I don’t always get a solid, detailed telling about how a band developed their hit, but I found really solid material of Quarterflash’s, “Harden My Heart”; if nothing else, I know what to call its tres-80s rhythm structure. To pick up the stray name referenced in the quote, Seafood Mama was Marv and Rindy Ross’ original band - less a pure (adult-oriented) rock band than Quarterflash and one that included Marv Ross’ violin teacher as a regular member – and the “Portland” referenced in that quote is Portland, Oregon. The version of the single that everyone knows was re-recorded at Sausolito’s famous Record Plant under the hand of John Boylan, a legendary producer (he helped stand up The Eagles) and, in Marv Ross’ telling, an all-around great guy.
The Rosses worked with session musicians on the first pass at Quarterflash’s debut album, but, when they returned to Portland to take a break between sessions (Geffen gave ‘em a long leash), they bumped into another local band called Pilot, did some playing together and heard good chemistry. So they kicked out the session guys and finished recording the album with Quarterflash’s original line-up.
Marv Ross, who did nearly all the songwriting for the band, borrowed the title, “Harden My Heart” from a collection of poems a friend had passed on to him; he only took the title and, to his credit, he paid his friend for the title. I remember the video from watching it on MTV, but its “Fellini-esque concept” went over my head (just caught up). One final bit of trivia on Quarterflash’s break-through single, this one from Classicbands.com:
“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.”
The Rest of the Story
Marv met Rindy Ross in their junior year of high school at Portland’s Madison High School. They started dating for a couple years before playing music together and made an attempt at normal lives before getting into the business – e.g., both earned degrees and taught in Central Oregon for several years (she taught fifth grade, he taught junior high English). After finding some success playing Oregon’s high desert circuit, the Rosses returned to Portland to make a serious run at starting a band. Seafood Mama, formed in 1977, was the result/their third band (the second, fwiw, was Beggars Opera).
They did pretty damn well just gigging up and down the I-5 corridor between Portland and Seattle, making a living, even buying a house. Marv set up a recording studio in their basement, which they used to record their demos. A local label called Whitefire picked up “Harden My Heart” and released it as a 45-rpm with a song called “City of Roses” on the flip-side and, somewhere around that time, the former became a regional hit, got regular air-play and Seafood Mama became a big, local deal – to the tune of a live one-hour special that aired on KOIN TV (this is just a 15-minute glimpse, but Quarterflash got another one-hour special (and a much nicer set-up) a year later and I found the entire show). By the time Geffen came calling, Rindy and Marv had already disbanded Seafood Mama to pursue a new direction. When it came to changing their name, they went with Quarterflash, a phrase they borrowed from a book at Boylan’s house. Its origin: “In the early 1900’s, Australians would refer to newcomers to the country as being “one quarter flash and three parts stupid.”
Geffen handed them a hefty advance – Marv pegged it at one hundred grand – and left them to it. I covered the basic story above – e.g., first session guys (e.g., the drummer from Bread, a bassist who’d played with Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, then the members of Pilot – all of which ended in the original, hey-day line-up of Rindy, Marv, Jack Charles (guitar), Rick DiGiallonardo (keys/synths), Rich Gooch (bass), and Brian David Willis. Quarterflash wrapped up the album in 1980 and Geffen released it, but, before their eponymous debut album even took off, the label threw them onto a touring bill with label-mates, Loverboy, aka, the deep-end:
“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.”
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| Actual cultural reach... |
Quarterflash didn’t take long to find their feet, and, once they got them under, they hit an impressive stride. The album did really well, climbing to No. 8 on Billboard’s album charts, and with more than “Harden My Heart” to carry it: “Find Another Fool” went to No. 16 and “Right Kind of Love” to No. 56. They followed it up with 1983’s Take Another Picture – carried by another hit, “Take Me to Heart” (No. 16. Fer crissakes) – and even before that, they recorded the theme for the 1982 Henry Winkler/Michael Keaton fish-out-of-water pic, Night Shift (which was cute; Shelley Long as a prostitute...wild), and another one of their songs (“Don’t Be Lonely”) slipped onto the soundtrack for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (again, fer crissakes).
The tours/concerts got even bigger, with the capper coming with an appearance at the 1983 US Festival, where they arrived by helicopter, played in front of 250,000 fans and shared the stage with acts like Berlin, Missing Persons, U2, Stevie Nicks and, capping their day, David Bowie. Quarterflash also landed an opening spot on Elton John’s Jump tour. They landed it because he was also on Geffen, but Marv Ross recalls Elton John treating them extremely well – buying them champagne at the beginning of the tour, letting his roadies help them with sound/line-checks, and inviting them to a dinner at his Manhattan apartment after the tour wound up. They also got thrown into some hysterical mismatches – e.g., opening for Motorhead on short notice or, in an episode that shows how much labels think about music, getting thrown on tour with Sammy Hagar, who super-starred/generally pulled weird shit on, despite, or perhaps because Quarterflash had the hotter album (per Marv Ross: “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?”).
Quarterflash rode fairly high until their third album, Back Into Blue (1985), basically flopped. Then again, that kind of worked out for everyone: Charles and DiGiallonardo left after Take Another Picture, Geffen got antsy, and the Rosses wanted to do some other things. And, on a broad level, they did. They reformed Quarterflash off-and-on starting in 1990 – which went better some times than others – but, after the first reunion flopped, Rindy earned a masters degree in Mental Health Counseling and spent 15 years working in Providence Hospital’s system. Marv, meanwhile, stuck with music and got involved with the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail. He formed an outfit called The Trail Band (with Rindy), a project that stuck around for a couple decades and released 13 albums. He was sufficiently steeped in Oregon history that he wrote the musical Ghosts of Celilo, which did pretty well and won several awards. When Marv Ross talked to Classicbands in early 2019, Quarterflash had recently, finally disbanded; Rindy had stopped giving interviews and seemed very much done with the whole thing.
The Rosses still perform together and they’re still married and, near as I can tell without much fuss. All in all, they strike me as very normal people who happened to write a massive hit.
About the Sampler
I don’t know how many repeat readers I get for this series, but, to repeat something I’ve said many times before, I didn’t care for a large chunk of the popular music that came out in the 80s – and Quarterflash played in what I’d call the A.O.R. mild-rock sound (think Little River Band...if that helps), which had its own special idiosyncrasies and flourishes (e.g., the echo vocals in “Find Another Fool”). Spotify’s Quarterflash repository only included their three albums for the early 80s, plus the product of their 2013 reunion, Love Is a Road. And that one’s kind of funny, because it sounds very different from the ‘80s stuff...and, for me, it’s their best material, and by some distance (see bias above). To fill in the rest of the playlist with the songs not already linked to above, and by album:
Quarterflash: “Valerie” (shuffle beat/very 80s guitar) and “Cruisin’ With the Deuce” (Marv on vocals, shuffle beat still in effect)
Take Another Picture: “Take Another Picture” and “Eye to Eye” (the latter, especially is lousy with A/R touches/“relevance” updates)
Back Into Blue: even more A/R drunk, with synth-forward singles like “Walking on Ice” and “Grace Under Fire,” and the calypso-inspired “Come to Me,” all of which really gets your mind to thinking about what was popular in 1985.
Love Is a Road: which, again, totally different sound palette, something you’re more like to hear on indie-adjacent radio. “More” has most aggressive sound/politics (pretty damn overt, very Portland), but I thought they did better with “I Can’t Help Myself” and “I Want You Back,” and one pretty damn smart “Adios (The Funeral Song)” comes closest to an actual like for me.
The tours/concerts got even bigger, with the capper coming with an appearance at the 1983 US Festival, where they arrived by helicopter, played in front of 250,000 fans and shared the stage with acts like Berlin, Missing Persons, U2, Stevie Nicks and, capping their day, David Bowie. Quarterflash also landed an opening spot on Elton John’s Jump tour. They landed it because he was also on Geffen, but Marv Ross recalls Elton John treating them extremely well – buying them champagne at the beginning of the tour, letting his roadies help them with sound/line-checks, and inviting them to a dinner at his Manhattan apartment after the tour wound up. They also got thrown into some hysterical mismatches – e.g., opening for Motorhead on short notice or, in an episode that shows how much labels think about music, getting thrown on tour with Sammy Hagar, who super-starred/generally pulled weird shit on, despite, or perhaps because Quarterflash had the hotter album (per Marv Ross: “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?”).
Quarterflash rode fairly high until their third album, Back Into Blue (1985), basically flopped. Then again, that kind of worked out for everyone: Charles and DiGiallonardo left after Take Another Picture, Geffen got antsy, and the Rosses wanted to do some other things. And, on a broad level, they did. They reformed Quarterflash off-and-on starting in 1990 – which went better some times than others – but, after the first reunion flopped, Rindy earned a masters degree in Mental Health Counseling and spent 15 years working in Providence Hospital’s system. Marv, meanwhile, stuck with music and got involved with the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail. He formed an outfit called The Trail Band (with Rindy), a project that stuck around for a couple decades and released 13 albums. He was sufficiently steeped in Oregon history that he wrote the musical Ghosts of Celilo, which did pretty well and won several awards. When Marv Ross talked to Classicbands in early 2019, Quarterflash had recently, finally disbanded; Rindy had stopped giving interviews and seemed very much done with the whole thing.
The Rosses still perform together and they’re still married and, near as I can tell without much fuss. All in all, they strike me as very normal people who happened to write a massive hit.
About the Sampler
I don’t know how many repeat readers I get for this series, but, to repeat something I’ve said many times before, I didn’t care for a large chunk of the popular music that came out in the 80s – and Quarterflash played in what I’d call the A.O.R. mild-rock sound (think Little River Band...if that helps), which had its own special idiosyncrasies and flourishes (e.g., the echo vocals in “Find Another Fool”). Spotify’s Quarterflash repository only included their three albums for the early 80s, plus the product of their 2013 reunion, Love Is a Road. And that one’s kind of funny, because it sounds very different from the ‘80s stuff...and, for me, it’s their best material, and by some distance (see bias above). To fill in the rest of the playlist with the songs not already linked to above, and by album:
Quarterflash: “Valerie” (shuffle beat/very 80s guitar) and “Cruisin’ With the Deuce” (Marv on vocals, shuffle beat still in effect)
Take Another Picture: “Take Another Picture” and “Eye to Eye” (the latter, especially is lousy with A/R touches/“relevance” updates)
Back Into Blue: even more A/R drunk, with synth-forward singles like “Walking on Ice” and “Grace Under Fire,” and the calypso-inspired “Come to Me,” all of which really gets your mind to thinking about what was popular in 1985.
Love Is a Road: which, again, totally different sound palette, something you’re more like to hear on indie-adjacent radio. “More” has most aggressive sound/politics (pretty damn overt, very Portland), but I thought they did better with “I Can’t Help Myself” and “I Want You Back,” and one pretty damn smart “Adios (The Funeral Song)” comes closest to an actual like for me.
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