TO HECK WITH FAME: WHERE DID RICK MORANIS GO?
By Gerry Flahive
(This article was originally published in the Globe and Mail on October 18, 2005 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/to-heck-with-fame/article18250436/)
In these dark and troubled times, the world cries out for something that artfully expresses how we all feel, something that deftly captures our sense of dread, but also, maybe, just maybe, our hope.
How about a cover of a 1962 Hank Snow song, performed by ex-McKenzie Brother Rick Moranis?
Remembered and respected for his versatility and sharp wit as a writer and performer on SCTV, and as an engaging movie star in big-budget Hollywood movies such as Ghostbusters and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Toronto-born Moranis is one of those rare entertainment-world celebrities who seemed to simply stop being celebrity-ish. Where did he go?
As strange and un-Ashton Kutcher-ish as it seems, he just stayed home — in New York — to raise his two kids. And now, about 10 years since he last appeared on the big screen, Moranis, 51, has written, sung and recorded — in friend Tony Scherr’s basement in Brooklyn, using an eight-track analog tape machine — a hilarious, sometimes touching and perfectly crafted country album, The Agoraphobic Cowboy. For someone who declares that he wasn’t interested in performing any more (just for the record, one of his fan sites was forced to squelch a maliciously spread rumour several years ago that he was dead), he certainly seems to be having a lot of fun performing on this one. He’s also not actually agoraphobic, and I’m pretty certain he’s not a cowboy, for that matter.
In 13 songs, Moranis perfectly demonstrates country music’s seeming ability to absorb virtually any subject matter — in his case, everything from political chicanery ( Four More Beers) to a desperate desire to be kept up to date ( Give Me the News), from alcohol and love ( It’s the Champagne Talkin’) to animal testing and human organ transplants ( Oh So Bucco), from stalking ( Press Pound) to acronyms ( SOS, an entire song made up of acronyms, from CIA to FBI). The pieces draw on bluegrass, rockabilly and folk sounds, and blend them with Moranis’s tight satirical and topical writing (also seen in the occasional op-ed humour pieces he writes for The New York Times).
With references to opera singer Beverly Sills, the George Foreman grill, Viagra and even his own unlikely status as a country crooner (“I ain’t from nowhere near Kentucky, no right to sing them southern blues/ I’m from Toronto, snowy city, from a neighbourhood of Jews”), he uses the timeworn tools of C&W songwriting and musicianship to create an album that both Nashville purists and Toronto comedy clubbers will relate to.
But it’s the song I Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere that may be the paranoid-with-good-reason anthem we’ve all been waiting for. A brilliant riff on I’ve Been Everywhere (a song identified most strongly with Hank Snow and Johnny Cash), it provides an endless list of home comforts, FedEx-available medicines and security devices that make not leaving the house so seductive:
Perimeter, motion, doggie door, mail call
Peep hole, Avon, wireless, strobes on.
PIN Code, keypad, relay, pepper spray,
Homebase, interface, three-zone, plug ‘n play.
Infra-red, photocell, squad car, decibel,
Choppers up, sonic boom,
Activate the panic room.
The album went up for sale on his site RickMoranis.com (run through Artistshare.com, a platform for musicians to distribute their recordings) earlier this month.
Moranis says some of the songs have been picked up by college radio stations, and he’s starting to get media calls from outlets such as USA Today and The New York Times. But don’t wait for the billboard for it across from Wal-Mart.
As sharp, dark and inventively funny as these songs are, it would be a mistake to think of them purely as spoofs, or to underestimate Moranis’s affection for the genre. And those who are surprised to see the man who voiced Barney Rubble from The Flintstones movie singing songs that would probably get him some affectionate back slaps and a couple of free beers if he sang them in a roadhouse in Oklahoma or Alberta might not immediately remember that Moranis performed lots of musical pieces on SCTV and played one of the leading roles in the movie version of the musical Little Shop of Horrors.
“It’s not like I said, ‘I’m going to write myself a country and western album,’ says Moranis. “I’m not trying to jump-start anything — I’m not trying to become something I’m not. I had an idea, one that could have been done in another form, but it seemed to fit best as a song.” Despite his early days in the 1970s as a Toronto FM rock-radio DJ, in recent years he had largely been listening to classical music on his Manhattan apartment radio. But in the background, his daughter “had been listening to a lot of non-commercial music, bands like Widespread Panic, The String Cheese Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band” and the blends of traditional and alternative caught his ear. “Now, all these years later, I’d rediscovered country and bluegrass through my kids. I wrote a couple of songs and sang them to friends over the phone. I ended up with about a dozen. It wasn’t planned.”
Moranis resists the tendency to mock the cornball image that country music has often had in mainstream culture. “Country music encompasses so many different kinds of music — at one end, big commercialized songs by people like Tim McGrath and Faith Hill, at the other, traditional folk and rockabilly — that it is unfair to categorize it all in negative terms. You could call every song Gordon Lightfoot recorded a country song. Early Buddy Holly tunes owed as much to country as to rock ’n’ roll. They weren’t overproduced.”
Despite being someone who grew up in the sixties and admits that if he hadn’t done comedy he would have had a rock band, Moranis didn’t turn to rock music to marry his musical interests with his comedic skills. Maybe rock just isn’t good at being funny, the movie This Is Spinal Tap notwithstanding (the humour there is about the music). “There is just as much of a tradition of humour in country music as there is on Broadway. There wasn’t much humour in popular music when Motown and the British Invasion arrived on the scene.”
Moranis is thoughtful and honest when it comes to the question of his long absence from the public eye. “Performance for me was always just a vehicle to get the writing out. That’s how I ended up acting — I never enjoyed it, that’s why I stopped — it was creatively unfulfilling.” The calls from Hollywood stopped after a few years because they realized he would just say no. “I’m not interested in acting. I don’t miss the process, and how precious it’s supposed to feel, but how empty it was for me. I don’t miss being on camera. Many of the movies I was in were far from my sensibility.”
Apparently old thinking dies hard. “Some people at one of the big record labels wondered, when they heard my songs, “Where is the movie this music is from?”
Can we expect to see The Agoraphobic Cowboy follow in the footsteps of Abba and Billy Joel and Elvis and work its way onto Broadway? “Someone said to me, ‘This would make a great musical.’ But I don’t want to do it, let someone else do it.” Unless it’s a roadhouse calling from Fort McMurray? “If somebody wants me to perform, call me and we can talk.”
One of Moranis’s most memorable characters on SCTV was VJ Gerry Todd, a pre-MTV music-video devotee who stayed indoors, broadcasting, commenting and running his own control panel from a cheesy studio. A cheerful enthusiast who seemed to love the process as much as the music. Maybe Gerry — and Moranis — was just ahead of his time.
HONEY, I SHRUNK MY CAREER
Rick Moranis hasn’t been in a theatrically released feature film since 1996’s Big Bully, in which he played (what else?) a nebbish writer picked on by his childhood nemesis (Tom Arnold). Since then, he’s mostly done voice work in various animated projects.
What a change from his peak period of celebrity:
First box-office extravaganza: Ghostbusters (1984), released a year after The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew
Follow-ups: five comedic projects that furthered his quirky-nerd image in 1985 and 1986, including Brewster’s Millions
Unforgettable as Dark Helmet in Spaceballs (1987)
Reprised his role as Louis Tully in Ghostbusters II (1989)
Made Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), the first of four Honey, I projects
Teamed up with Steve Martin for Parenthood (1989)
Signature buddy role: Barney Rubble in The Flintstones (1994)
