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more photosFrom left, Devon Karl, Buck Shearer, Gus Hulstein and Randy Vance make up the current incarnation of Jones Road. Another band called Jones Road found success in Bend in the mid-1970s, and some of its members went on to form the hit '80s band Quarterflash.
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
A road twice traveled
2 Bend-based groups find inspiration — and band name — on Jones Road
By Ben Salmon / The Bulletin
Published: December 01. 2009 4:00AM PSTA few months ago, Marv and Rindy Ross of Portland were leaving the Soba restaurant in downtown Bend when they spotted a poster advertising a gig by a band called Jones Road.
The Rosses haven't lived in Central Oregon for more than three decades, but the poster stirred not only memories of their own Bend-based band called Jones Road, but also curiosity about the origin of the current band's name.
“We just freaked,” Marv Ross, 58, said in a telephone interview. “Because, I mean, it's been 30 years ago or whatever, but we used to have posters all over. Jones Road posters were everywhere in town.”
The couple did some research and learned that there was, in fact, a band called Jones Road playing in town that week, and they wondered if this band was purposely referencing their long-gone outfit, or if they were unaware of the name's history in town. When they got home, Marv tracked down the MySpace profile of the new Jones Road and sent the group a message.
On the other end, Randy Vance, of Bend, was shocked to find out about his band's sudden, coincidental history in Bend.
New band, familiar name
Vance's version of Jones Road is only about 6 months old, formed after its leader moved back to his hometown of Bend in 2005, intent on playing music for people.
“I turned 30 this year and I was like, well, it's either now or never,” said Vance, a loan processor for a mortgage company and a 1997 graduate of Bend High School.
He had fronted a band called No Rest For The Wicked while living in Arizona, but started fresh upon his return to Central Oregon, playing open-mic nights and solo gigs and, eventually, seeking band mates who shared his musical vision.
Through online ads, past connections and friends of friends, Vance's band came together earlier this year, with Devon Karl on bass, Buck Shearer on guitar and Gus Hulstein on drums. The quartet went right to work, jamming at Vance's home on Jones Road in northeast Bend and honing a sound that's a mix of acoustic-driven rock, bluesy Southern boogie and the gruff alt-rock of the mid-1990s.
Think earnest post-grunge superstars Seven Mary Three and Creed, or Christian rockers Third Day, and you've got the idea.
With the music coming together and gigs on the horizon, the quartet needed a name. They found their inspiration just beyond Vance's front yard.
“We were sitting there thinking, ‘What are we going to come up with for a band name?' And ... we're like, ‘Well, why not just Jones Road?' Because that's where we hold our practices,” Vance said. “So we decided to call ourselves Jones Road.”
Within days, the band set up a MySpace profile — www .myspace.com/jonesroadband — and started filling it with information. Vance even went so far as to get “Jones Road” tattooed on his arm.
And that's when he got an e-mail from Marv Ross about another band that once called itself Jones Road.
Vance's first thought?
“I was like, ‘Oh, we've got to change our name,'” he said with a laugh. “And I'm like, ‘Oh, it looks like I need to get a tattoo covered up, too.'”
A blast from the past
Marv and Rindy Ross have a long history of making music in Oregon. They're currently members of The Trail Band, which formed in 1991 to play music from the Oregon Trail era and has toured a popular Christmas show in the Willamette Valley for the past 16 years.
Most famously, they were core members of Quarterflash, a Portland-based pop-rock band whose self-titled debut album sold more than a million copies in the early 1980s on the strength of a couple hit singles, most notably “Harden My Heart.”
Before Quarterflash, though, the Rosses lived in Bend from 1973 to 1976, where they worked as teachers; Rindy taught fifth grade at John Tuck Elementary School in Redmond, and Marv was a remedial reading instructor at what was then Cascade Junior High in Bend. They had played in a band with friends at Western Oregon University, and wanted to continue making music in their new town.
So the Rosses began playing as a duo at The Family Tree, an upstairs place on Wall Street run by “a bunch of hippies who started a jewelry shop that sold all kinds of counterculture stuff,” Marv said.
The Family Tree specialized in vegetarian food and had a stage where local musicians could play, he said.
“There was no money in it,” Marv said. “We would pass the hat.”
It was at The Family Tree where the Rosses met two other musicians, one from Kansas who was traveling the West, and one from Estacada. The two men had just met the day before, Marv said.
“The four of us sat down and started playing some music and said, ‘Let's form a band,'” he said.
That band practiced at the Rosses' home, a small house on a ranch owned by Lily and Dean Hollinshead in northeast Bend. Their home is now the Share Croppers House museum, and the ranch is now Hollinshead Park, located just a few hundred feet from Randy Vance's home.
They named their band after the street that ran past the property.
“We lived on Jones Road there at the Hollinshead Ranch, so that's how the name just popped up,” Marv said. “We always kind of joked that it wasn't a very good name back then, because ... it just sounds like an old dirt road or something, but we went with it.”
The original Jones Road did quite well during the three years the Rosses lived in Bend. They played The Family Tree and The Palace (on Bond Street, where Soba is now), and they spent the summer of 1975 as the house band for The Inn of the Seventh Mountain — now Seventh Mountain Resort — which Marv said “was quite the scene at the time.”
Over the years, their band mates came and went, but the regular gigs around Central Oregon made the Rosses better players and more confident in their ability to make a living by making music. It was that steady success that motivated them to move back to Portland and form another band, Seafood Mama, that eventually became Quarterflash, Marv said.
“We always loved music,” he said. “And I knew that Rindy was really, really good. As we went along and we saw some of the other bands that were doing well and coming over from Portland to play in Bend, we thought, ‘Well, we can do this.' So we decided to give it a shot.”
Passing the torch
More than 30 years later, the Rosses don't want the guys in the new Jones Road to change their band's name, and they certainly don't want Randy Vance to cover his tattoo.
Marv Ross wrote in peace, mainly to satisfy his own questions and to pass along encouragement to Vance and his band mates.
“It turned out to be a random, one-in-a-million thing,” Marv said. “The main thing was I was just curious as to if they'd heard of the band, but I thought it was great that there was another band called Jones Road no matter how they got their name.”
Marv told Vance via e-mail that he and Rindy had never recorded as Jones Road or copyrighted the name, and he gave the new band the old band's blessing. He ended his initial correspondence by declaring “Viva La Jones Road!!”
In the months since, Vance seen evidence of just how memorable the Ross incarnation of Jones Road was to people who've been in Bend for decades.
“They were pretty well known,” Vance said. “It's funny, because I've had a couple different people e-mail me saying, ‘You guys aren't the real Jones Road. The real Jones Road was back in the '70s in Bend.'”
Vance's band is proud of its connection to the Rosses, and they've added the story to their MySpace page. But identical names aside, they're determined to give their version of Jones Road a life of its own.
“Our main focus is not being a one-trick pony and making all of our music sound the same, so we make it a point to have ... different sounding songs,” Vance said. “We're all about putting Bend on the map as far as good, original rock music.”
Ben Salmon can be reached at 541-383-0377 or bsalmon@bendbulletin.com.
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