Morgan Freeman Is Leading Us Down A Path To Economic Ruin

That headline is more than some sensationalistic ballyhoo. It’s more than some flimsy, baseless caterwauling from someone possessed by the spirit of a carnival barker, newsstand tabloid, or Republican pundit.

No, I fear that, sadly, there is considerable truth behind it.

Like many people, I too have been a fan of this award-winning thespian, but I now realize that I might have been lulled into a false sense of admiration.

I used to look at him as a kindly fellow – compassionate and wise. I mean, if he wasn’t offering rides to cantankerous, elderly women, you might find him engaging in the much-needed rehabilitation of falsely convicted criminals or – great Gotham! – lending logistical support to masked vigilantes wishing to rid our cities of such criminals.

(of course, lily-livered, bleeding heart types would rather that we not rid our streets of falsely convicted wife-killing bankers and, instead, target bankers who merely engage in casual games of multi-billion dollar three-card Monte)

The existential threat posed by Morgan Freeman to America came to my attention weeks ago, but it didn’t really register until this morning when I saw his most recent commercial for Visa before I’d ingested enough caffeine to think straight.

(oftentimes things only make sense when you don’t really think about them)

In this commercial, calming images of undersea flora and fauna fill the screen accompanied by the soothing strains of The Moody Blues’ Tuesday Afternoon.

Then, you hear the earnest voice of “the only guilty man in Shawshank,” asking, in an accusatory manner, “When was the last time you went to the aquarium, with your daughter, on a Tuesday?”

Sure, it sounds like a lovely way to spend the day after Monday. One of the finest aquariums in the country is a two-hour drive away and, though I have no daughter, the way some of my co-workers squeeze out offspring of both sexes as though it was a bodily function, I could likely borrow one…

But this is exactly what Morgan Freeman wants me to do. In other words, he is promoting not only truancy, but he is espousing a fiscal policy that encourages absenteeism from work.

This would all be well and good for aquarium barons, fishmongers, and oceanographers who would likely see profits that would make those of Exxon be mere pocket change, but at what cost?

Well, the rest of the economy would fall into a death spiral. If people were relaxing at aquariums instead of engaging in the daily grind of commerce, consider the revenue lost simply by those treating bleeding ulcers, intense malaise, and depression.

And the cost would extend to the next generation who – instead of learning how to take tests at a level that places them smack dab at mediocre compared to the rest of the world – would end up as ichthyologists or marine biologists.

Fortunately, today is Sunday and I suggest we all give Morgan Freeman (and his dubious, probably Socialist economic theories) the finger and head to the aquarium today.

Moonpools & Caterpillars – Sundays
from Lucky Dumpling

Joe Jackson – Sunday Papers
from Look Sharp!

‘Til Tuesday – On Sunday
from Welcome Home

The Pretenders – Everyday Is Like Sunday
from Boys On The Side soundtrack

A Long Time Since I've Spent Time With Uncle Vic

A lot of bloggers have taken time the past few days to offer their thoughts reflecting on music and events of 2008. I had no intention of doing so, but, inspired by a series of posts over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, I have instead found myself reflecting on the music of 1980.

On the precipice of my teen years, music had little appeal to me during that year. It was occasionally background noise, but, at most, my scant interest was prompted by my peers. Then, on the first day of 1981, I happened to tune into Cincinnati’s Q102, a popular Top 40 station, where they were counting down the top 102 songs of 1980. They ran the countdown three times that day and something prompted me to tape as much of it – commercials and DJ chatter included – as I could.

Although I had missed much of the music on those tapes throughout the actual year, I listened to them repeatedly through the early months of 1981. And, as I caught up on the musical landscape of the previous year, I began to pay increasing attention to the new year as well.

For the next several years, until I discovered the left of the dial artists I could only hear on 97X, it became a personal tradition to listen to the top 102 on Q102, filling countless hours of blank cassettes with songs.

It’s possible, although unlikely, that those tapes from that countdown of 1980 are buried somewhere in the closet of my childhood bedroom at my parent’s house. If they are, those cheap cassettes are probably unlistenable, having oxidized over time and already worn thin by the innumerable times I played them as a kid when I had no idea how much music would matter to me over the next three decades.

I’d be most curious to find an actual chart of Q102’s top songs from that year. I do remember that #102 was a novelty song, Space Invaders, about the phenomenally popular video game by an act called Uncle Vic – a song which I haven’t heard since then. And, at the other end of the countdown was Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall (part II).

Here are some of the songs I remember in between those two songs…

The Dirt Band – An American Dream
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band under a truncated moniker with Linda Ronstadt adding vocals, An American Dream was one song which was quite familiar to me. It seemed to be on constant rotation on the jukebox of the bowling alley where my friends and I spent numerous hours loitering and playing pinball during the winter months of 1980. It’s promise of a getaway to warmer climes had a distinct appeal to those of us mired in the Midwest.

The Cars – Touch And Go
I was familiar with The Cars because of Let’s Go, but, I must admit, that song was better known to me in the version appearing on my younger brother’s copy of the Chipmunk Punk album. As for Touch And Go, I found Ric Ocasek’s vocals on the song to be a bit menacing at the time and, now, I’d consider it to be one of that band’s more underrated hits.

Olivia Newton-John – Magic
Although I wasn’t overly familiar with the songs of Olivia Newton-John at the time, like my friends, I was enamored with her from Grease. I still haven’t seen the movie Xanadu (on which the soundtrack Magic appeared), but I did know Magic. A good portion of our family’s vacation that summer had been spent at our aunt and uncle’s cabin in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania. I recall that every time we piled into the car during that trip, I was guaranteed to hear Magic on the radio. To this day, the song still sounds like summer to me.

The Pretenders – Brass In Pocket (I’m Special)
Had I been a serious music fan in 1980, I would have well known The Pretenders from their much heralded debut album which caused quite a stir. I don’t recall even knowing Brass In Pocket until I heard that year-end countdown, but I do recall that I immediately “got” it.

The Zap

It wasn’t the cleverest of names, but it was so generic that it now strikes me as endearing. It could have been any arcade in any small, Midwestern town in 1983, but it was all ours.

Our town wasn’t unlike the one in the movie Footloose (undoubtedly a major reason why that flick was such a mammoth success). Of course, we did have a bowling alley, a public pool, and probably a dozen bars – the ratio of places to drink to our population had to be equal to the average town in the UK. Any (all) of those establishments might have been verboten in Footlooseville.

For the couple of years during which The Zap existed, though, it was pretty much the hub of my friends and my world. It was the dingy command center for our plots, plans, and schemes in a minimally remodeled building that had housed a beauty salon and an auto repair garage

Not that we required much. The Zap had refrigerated air and concrete floors, providing cool in the humidity of summer (although it also was frigid in the winter). It had video games and pinball machines. And it had a jukebox.

The jukebox is one rite of passage that I’m grateful I am old enough to have gotten to experience. The jukebox was common to us all, but there was also specific etiquette of which you were familiar if you were a regular.

It also had to be one of the earliest financial dilemmas we faced as kids – burn through your limited funds playing Defender or Robotron or selecting a few more songs on the jukebox.

I think I usually opted for more music. So, here are a few the songs that emptied my pockets and kept me from notching stratospheric scores on Asteroids.

The Pretenders – Back On The Chain Gang
I didn’t know much by The Pretenders aside from Brass In Pocket and…maybe that was it. But it was easy to fall in love with this song. It was wistful yet defiant. It sounded so hopeful, but it was a hard-earned hope.

Golden Earring – Twilight Zone
As classic rock hadn’t been invented in 1983, I’m not sure if I was familiar with Radar Love, but we all knew Twilight Zone, the song by Golden Earring that wasn’t Radar Love.

But my friends and I certainly loved Twilight Zone. The whole dark undercurrent of the lyric welded with that driving music made the song a universal favorite at The Zap, cutting across all social lines and musical divisions.

Chris DeBurgh – Don’t Pay The Ferryman
My friend Brad used to go spend a couple weeks with his father in Arizona every summer. Upon his return, he would awe us with cassettes of songs he had taped off the radio stations “out there”(it was quite an exotic trek to us). There was a lot of New Wave and songs which we wouldn’t hear on our stations ’til often months later.

Anyhow, I remember hearing Don’t Pay The Ferryman on one of those cassettes. Like Twilight Zone, it had a mysterious, dread-filled lyric. As for DeBurgh, I always thought he kind of resembled Dudley Moore which gives the song a slightly comical bent to me now.

Billy Squier – Everybody Wants You
During my junior high/high school years, Billy Squier was a rock god to most of my hometown’s kids. Of course, he was toppled from that exalted position as minor deity by the infamously bad video for Rock Me Tonight. (I’d include a link, but if you’ve read this far, you know the video)

But when Emotions In Motion came out, he was still cool and Everybody Wants You was constantly playing from a radio or car stereo. In fact, DJ Mark Sebastian from Q102 in Cincinnati played the damn song repeatedly one night on his shift (like for an hour or something, I can’t exactly recall). There was considerable water-cooler talk at school the next day following that stunt.