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The Pursuit of Happiness
Love Junk
Chrysalis - 1988
Michael Panontin
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They were once described by Mojo writer Mat Snow as "the Toronto band who sang like hornily guilt-ridden nerds yet rocked like jocks". Whatever they were, the Pursuit of Happiness and their blistering debut single 'I'm an Adult Now' tore up the staid, country-obsessed downtown Toronto scene in 1986.
They were formed the year before by frontman Moe Berg, who had arrived in the Big Smoke from Edmonton with a handful of songs, including their two biggest hits, 'I'm an Adult Now' and 'She's So Young', already written. The group coalesced around Berg's solo acoustic act, and would include drummer and fellow homie Dave Gilby, bassist Johnny Sinclair and backing singers Tam and Tasha Amabile.
'I'm an Adult Now' was a crowd favourite at their gigs, so they scraped together $200 to record an ultra-low-budget video, cleverly shot right on Queen Street West a few hundred metres from the country's newly established music video station, MuchMusic.
"It was, 'Let's shoot a video on Sunday afternoon and hand it in to the local video station," Berg recalled in Mojo, "and maybe they'll play it on one of their specialty shows."
Which they did. A lot.
Viewers were so taken by the sight of Berg, who resembled more of a science geek than a rock 'n' roller, blasting his guitar to a backdrop of local street denizens, that they thronged to the record shops trying to buy a copy of it, which did not yet exist. So again the group put their DIY energy into getting a record out. They borrowed some money from their parents and pressed up a 12" single themselves. And then the phones started ringing.
"We're playing back in Winnipeg," Berg remembers, "and there's a phone call for us at soundcheck." The group had recently signed with Chrysalis and were on tour out west to promote the single and to ready themselves for a planned LP. "It's Todd [Rundgren]. They'd sent him the demo, and he told me what a terrible guitar player I was, what songs weren't good enough for the record. He was on board!"
The group, which by now also included singer-guitarist Kris Abbott and vocalist Leslie Stanwyck (in place of the Amabile sisters), headed down to Utopia Sound, Rundgren's recording studio in Lake Hill, NY where he had recently produced gems by the Psychedelic Furs (Forever Now) and XTC (Skylarking). Rundgren had prepped the band for the recording session by phone, so they were ready to record the minute they arrived.
On Love Junk, Berg and Rundgren's team-up was almost alchemical, delivering plenty of tunes that somehow managed to straddle that fine line between classic seventies power pop and the meddlesome dross of the MTV-era eighties. It included a glossier re-recording of 'I'm an Adult Now' that was initially banned on MTV for its drug references and pangs of adolescent lust ("I can't even look at young girls anymore / People will think I'm some kind of pervert"). But the song was eventually added to rotation, furthering the band's exposure worldwide, including in faraway Australia (where some folks down under put a different twist on the lyrics, singing along to a more self-deprecating "I'm on the dole now").
Berg's guitar chops check off all the right power-pop boxes, from those simple/facile Kiss riffs ('Hard to Laugh', 'She's So Young') to the poppy chords of Cheap Trick ('Looking for Girls'). Mostly, though, Love Junk really soars when Berg's infectious melodies break out, as they do on the brilliantly catchy follow-up single and college-radio hit, 'She's So Young', and on the perky 'Down on Him'.
Love Junk was enormously successful, achieving platinum status up here in Canuckistan and shifting some 125,000 units south of the border. The group persisted well into the nineties, with acclaimed records and sold-out shows. Though they have never officially broken up, and Berg has even left the door open to a future reunion, the Pursuit of Happiness have not really been heard from since their 1995 set The Wonderful World of the Pursuit of Happiness.
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