Moe Berg

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.

“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.

ST. ALBERT IN SONG

Moe Berg claims he can only come up with one song he wrote that was inspired by St. Albert specifically. On the B-side of Theresa’s World lurks a minute and 40 seconds of rockabilly angst called Bungalow Rock. It’s about himself–like most of his songs–and his feelings growing up:

Well, it’s five o’clock Friday, and I just got paid. I get into my car and drive into my grave, Oh, oh, to my suburban home! Tonight I’ll get my baby, and we’ll do the Bungalow Rock!

Got a lumberjack shirt, I got a Trans-Am, too I do everything my girl and my friends tell me to. When I’m oh, oh, in my suburban home! Tonight I’ll get my baby, and we’ll do the Bungalow Rock!

We end up at the bar, spill the beer on my jeans I yell “rock ’n’ roll!” Don’t even know what it means. Oh, yeah, I’m a suburban moron! Tonight I’ll get my baby, and we’ll do the Bungalow Rock!