Spotlight Arts & Culture
Bungalow Rocker National music legend Moe Berg recalls his suburban upbringing BY MIKE ROSS
MOE BERG DOESN’T remember
much about St. Albert, frankly because there wasn’t much here to begin with. “When we moved into our crescent on Grandin, it was brand new. There were still lots that hadn’t been developed. It was just being built up,” he says. If you wanted to do anything aside from grocery shopping you had to go into Edmonton. There was the Klondike Inn and the Dairy Queen–everybody remembers the Dairy Queen–and that’s about it. St. Albert only exploded after Berg moved to Toronto in the early 1980s. He found fame and fortune with his band The Pursuit of Happiness, and its massive 1986 hit I’m An Adult Now. With renewed interest in the band owing to the 30th anniversary of their debut album Love Junk, the band returns to perform at the Edmonton Rock Music Festival in Hawrelak Park on Friday, Aug. 16. 30 T8Nmagazine.com
“We never broke up,” Berg says, so you really can’t call this a “comeback.” The singer and guitarist has visited family and friends at least twice a year since he moved, so he’s seen St. Albert grow in six-month increments from sleepy town into booming city. “Part of me wishes it had been more like that when I was a kid, but I’m happy I grew up when I did, when there weren’t a lot of distractions.” His creative development occurred inside a bubble. He describes his childhood as “very idyllic,” despite the fact he and his four siblings were abandoned by their father when he was seven years old. Fred Berg was a country singer. Moe has a happy memory of his dad letting him strum an open-tuned acoustic guitar during a living room jam. When dad left, “we soldiered on,” Berg says. In the summer, Mom would open the door in the morning and let the kids roam free, calling them in for lunch or
dinner and bedtime. She never had to worry. The kids played street hockey in the winter. Not many times you had to stop the game (“Car!”) in their quiet cul-de-sac. “You could just be a kid–and not have the same sort of pressures that my kids have on them,” says Berg, a married father of two. “We just played, played music, talked about records, and that’s what life was.” His first exposure to live concerts came from school dances. Even in junior high schools back in the day they’d have live bands. “And I was in awe of all of them,” recalls Berg. His records were a big influence: The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Ramones. He says, “When I first heard The Sex Pistols I thought I was going to lose my mind, it was just so amazing.” A couple of friends brought over a UK copy of The Sex Pistols’ 1977 single Pretty Vacant before it was released in Canada.