UNTRIVIAL PURSUITS

Rip It Up, Issue 154, 1 May 1990, Page 20

UNTRIVIAL PURSUITS

The Pursuit of Happiness

A few months ago the Pursuit of Happiness got playlisted on BFM with 'Pm An Adult Now', a sardonic ode to late adulthood sung with a deadpan Jonathan Richmond-esque swagger. (“J can't take any more illicit drugs... I'd sure look like a fool dead in a ditch somewhere with a mind full of chemicals like some sort of cheese eating high school boy”).

What kind of guy writes a song like that? The fact that TPOH hail from Canada, land of prairiesand lumbeq’acks, added to the intrigue. While not exactly a monster hit, this group's debut album LoveJunkhas gathered a few discerning admirers down here so in your interests, I phoned Canada one day to speak to singer/ guitarist/songwriter Moe Berg. In the press photo he looks and gangly, with long thin hair, metal rimmed spectacles and a black leather jacket. Was Moe a nerdy adolescent?

"Oh yeah," he replies overthe line from Toronto, "It wasn't so much I was a nerd but in my high school there were the nerds and the very hip people. I didn't belong to either of those groups—l was too hip to be nerdy and too nerdy to be hip.

Maybe that explains why I became a songwriter because I had to sort of stand on the outside all the time and I tended to watch."

Have you grown up now? "I guess so but I'm never going to ever think of myself as completely grown up. That's one thing about rock n'roll, it gives you the illusion of youth even though you're not. I've always thought of myself as a kid. I sort of wish I'd lived my life differently 'cos I wish I'd done more when I was young and maybe I'd be more successful now."

He's not doing too badly fora late starter. The boy who grew up listening to the Raspberries,

Badfinger and Todd Rundgren asked for and got his hero to produce their first album. Rundgren has also produced theirsecond LP, One Sided Story, due for release in North American about now.

The Pursuit of Happiness is Moe's baby but there are five group members including two women. How do they get on in a band whose songs are about such pointedly male preoccupations as 'Looking for Girls'?

"They've always been part of the sound I've heard in my head. I totally preconceptualised the band before it even started and what I wanted to hear was a rock band with a lot of vocals to give the band a pop sensibility and I thought the best way to get good vocals is to get women in the band."

Moe says it's no longer necessary forCanadaian bands to haul themselves over the border to make it because America is starting to look to its neighbour as an untapped source of pop talent. There's all kinds of musical action going down in Toronto, giving rise to the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Alannah Myles. And has Moe, the perenially twisted adolescent singing about the hapless pursuit of love, found happiness yet? "No, I don'tthinkyou ever do and that's not the point. The point is the pursuit of happiness and doing things that move you in that direction. I think that's the most important thing."

DONNA YUZWALK