PLUME: Were you writing in that period? What was your participation in the band?

MORANIS: We tried to write a few songs. I don’t think any of them were any good. When I got to college later on, I spent a lot more time writing - bad poetry, questionable lyrics, bizarre journal entries. I was trying to emulate James Joyce by that point.

PLUME: What was your muse during that period?

MORANIS: Um… I think I had so many muses during that period. I think everything that typically happens to someone at that age, starting out in college, is that the world was all kind of opening up to me and I was finding more and more things to be curious about. But one thing that had always been a very significant area of discovery for me was late night radio. Late night radio that I can pick up. Particularly AM again, because FM… it was early in the evolution of FM radio in those days, and the nature of the transmission signals was such that you could pick up the big 50,000 watt stations out of Boston, out of Chicago, and places even further away than that just because of atmospheric and weather conditions. I was mesmerized by big city American radio, which hadn’t really been picked up. Those formats, those styles, hadn’t been picked up by Canadian radio yet.

PLUME: How would you describe those styles?

MORANIS: Well, for me they were very advanced and sophisticated and high energy and extremely well produced. The level of tightness and excitement and energy that came through and how the formats were packaged - the jingles, the sounds of the announcers, the production quality of the commercials - were all at a level I’d never heard before.

MORANIS: Slightly less than everything I just said.

PLUME: There’s a certain cliché about Canadian broadcasting at that time as compared to American broadcasting, both in TV and radio. Do you think those clichés hold a certain amount of water?

MORANIS: At the time they certainly did. I think what leads something to become a cliché is probably just repeated truth. I don’t know where the state of Canadian radio is now, but I was there as some of it was starting to transition into more of an American sound. And of course, that gets to the root of what has been a persistent Canadian problem, culturally, is that constant sense of being so affected by American commercialism and consumerism and the degree to which that affects, molds - and in the minds of some people, taints - Canadian culture.

PLUME: How much of that defense of a perceived Canadian culture resulted in a lack of advancement in that professional arena?

MORANIS: Well I think that’s a… calling it an advancement is a subjective analysis. There are some who would say it would be regressive to go in a more commercial direction. So I’m not sure that the question holds water.

PLUME: Looking at your perception of the stations that you were comparing at that point…

MORANIS: From my perception, I found the American sound… again, we’re still talking about radio in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Right?

PLUME: Right.

MORANIS: Because, you know, that’s a very broad category of discussion and a big generalization if we go outside of radio. So I just want to be clear that we’re still talking about commercial radio and having said that, there were Canadian radio stations that were sounding awfully tight. They were buying jingle packages from American companies. There had yet to be Canadian jingle companies that would evolve in direct response. So… and back to your other point of progressing and advancing, that was the reason for that attitude of protectionism, was that they didn’t want these Canadian stations to have to buy their jingles from the American companies. They wanted to produce them at home. But what would prompt the demand at home for those jingles would be exposure and initial purchase of the very jingles that they wanted to produce themselves, if you follow. It’s sort of a circuitous thing.

PLUME: A horrible catch-22.

MORANIS: I may have repeated myself there somehow, but I’m doing my best. So again, I’m not sure that calling it an advancement isn’t necessarily a subjective way of looking at it.

PLUME: But objectively, it certainly was something that you perceived at the time as being a clear difference between what you were observing.

MORANIS: Objectively I knew what appealed to me personally, and what appealed to me personally was what I was hearing from across the border. No different than growing up in Toronto and watching television on the Canadian channels - there were very, very clear pictures of hockey and documentaries on beavers. You know, animal beavers. (laughing)

PLUME: Personally, we missed out on those things.

MORANIS: And the fuzzy pictures coming from Buffalo had I Love Lucy and Jackie Gleason and Jonathan Winters and Dick Van Dyke. And even though the picture was fuzzy I found what was behind the fuzz to be transfixing.

PLUME: Was there a protective or nationalistic spirit in how you viewed those things?

MORANIS: I was too young to feel anything other than the pleasure of watching… the pleasure and stimulation of watching and listening to things coming from across the border. And never understanding that I could ever be a part of that. Because it was something that came from another country, I felt very much outside of it.

PLUME: Was that an aspiration at that point? Did you have a desire to make it in that perceived area or you never really operated with that?

MORANIS: Well, to put it most simply, all through the 60’s, Canadian boys put down their hockey sticks and picked up electric guitars. And many had the fantasy life of wanting to be a Beatle and a couple actually got there. I went to the same elementary school as Geddy Lee, and he went on to have a stellar music career with the group Rush. Other people went to dental school. So it went from being a fantasy to a reality for some people, but for most people… and that’s not unique to Canada or my suburb, or anyplace. I think anyplace in North America, and certainly in other parts of the world, the same thing would be true. Kids grow up wanting to be astronauts and some actually get to do it and some don’t.

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