Minnetrista man played with ‘The Underbeats’
by Bill Vossler
When Raymond Berg, now 83 and of Minnetrista, played guitar and sang with “The Underbeats” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they fronted for several well-known musical groups, playing The Underbeats’ songs at concerts before the main attraction came onto the stage.
All of those groups became well-known. “We were the front band for Sonny and Cher in Duluth, The Dave Clark Five in St. Paul, and Jan and Dean at a packed St. Paul Auditorium. Mostly teenage girls, and I can still hear their screams in my mind to this day.”
But The Underbeats rarely actually met the groups, Raymond said. “Sonny and Cher whisked in and whisked out, and so did the other groups.”
Except for the Everly Brothers.
“Don and Phil were already big at the time when we fronted for them at the main ballroom in Mankato. Afterwards we partied with them, and found them to be great guys. In fact, our lead singer, Jim Johnson, always got a raspy voice from singing, and sprayed his throat with lidocaine to numb it so he could keep singing,” said Berg. “Don told him, ‘Don’t ever do that. It will wreck your voice. Here’s what I do. I suck on a cherry cough drop.’ It worked, and Jim was ever thankful for that. And to this day, as I sing, I still follow that cherry cough drop advice. So Don and Phil Everly were really humble guys. We played a good number of their songs, and sang them too. The Everly brother harmonies are fun. They were a big influence on The Underbeats and me.”
And influences on many other music groups. “Major musicians, like the Beatles and others from the United Kingdom said the Everly Brothers were the foundation for their vocals.
Everybody wanted to sound like the Everly Bros. In the U.S., even Simon and Garfunkel tried to emulate them at first until each group found their own voice.”
When Raymond was 15 the Bergs lived in Brooklyn Center. “My mom had a beautiful voice, and sang in a local VFW Club. One day Peggy Lee came in and heard her, and said she had to audition for Lawrence Welk.”
Which she did. Welk asked her to join. “But her father, my grandfather, didn’t want her to, and she felt she would be on the road too much.”
“A year later,” Raymond said, “like other 16-year-old kids in the early days of Rock and Roll, I wanted to play guitar, and sing like Jimmy Rogers, ‘Honeycomb,’ or the Everly Brothers ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream.’”
He finally got a guitar. “But I had no idea how to play it. I must have driven my dad crazy with the chinka chinka.”
That all changed at 21. “I went out to celebrate being 21, and able to drink. I pulled up to a local liquor store in Brooklyn Center in the Chevy I had customized and called ‘Thumper.’ When I came out, a guy was admiring the car. He was a guitarist and knew someone looking for a guitar player. I said I was interested though I didn’t know much about playing guitar yet.”
At Jim Johnson’s house, Raymond also met Doni Larson and Rod Eaton. “Then we practiced in Doni’s parents’ home, and named ourselves ‘The Underbeats.’ Four months later we played our first gig. We played an eclectic mix of songs, along with many Everly Brothers and Chuck Barry tunes. People liked the songs and our unique style, so it just caught on.”
Regular Gigs
Danceland was a large dance hall half a block off Lake Minnetonka. “We Underbeats played there regularly. A great spot.”
So great that the Rolling Stones played there, and possibly wrote a song there too. “I heard that after Mick Jagger couldn’t get some product at a local drug store, he wrote the song that ended, ‘If you can’t always get what you want, sometimes you get what you need.’ At that time the Rolling Stones were just starting, so people didn’t appreciate what they were singing, because they were so different from our rock scene.”
Danceland was built on raised pilings near Lake Excelsior. One night The Underbeats were playing one of their popular songs, called “Foot Stompin’.” Raymond said, “That was really popular with the kids, who stomped the floor to the beat. But the soil underneath was soft, and couldn’t take the pounding from the floor above, so the floor began to sink. It sagged a foot deep, 20 feet long. The girls screamed and ran,” Raymond said, “and the boys thought, ‘Cool!’ An inspector and the owners of Danceland crawled under and inspected it, and said it was fine to keep going. So we did.”
Different Directions
At this time, while attending college as an engineer draftsman during the day, Raymond said, “I was playing with The Underbeats at night. When our son was only a year old, they wanted me to leave him and travel to California. So in the summer of 1965, I gave notice that I was leaving the group, and started doing drafting work in engineering.”
Shortly, he joined Wiley Murphy of the First Great Onion group, playing the blues. “We played downtown at local bars. One night in 1969 our group left our main equipment in the Red Baron, which burned down. We lost everything, except my guitar, which I had taken with me. So that was the end of that band.”
In 1970, he joined a Bloomington horn group called Happy Daze. “I played bass guitar with them. We dressed in wildly colored outfits and tails, just like Paul Revere and the Raiders at the time.”
While playing at the Radisson South Hotel, Raymond had a realization. “After enduring nothing but lame claps after each song, I thought if I had to face this for the rest of my life, I would go absolutely crazy. I knew then I didn’t want to play for a living. Especially not something like this. So I got out of the music scene altogether.”
He did a variety of jobs, working as a consulting engineer, with industrial air motors, real estate land sales in Colorado, real estate in Minnesota, then financial services. “For five years I built huge full-service car washes with 80 workers, cleaning 1,200 cars a day. But in 1991 came back into financial services.”
In 2004, he had to get back into music, as The Underbeats received one of Minnesota’s highest music awards, induction into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame. “After 30 years, The Underbeats reconnected to perform at the Medina Ballroom. I told Jim Johnson we should practice. ‘I don’t think we need to run through them,’ Jim said. So we practiced for about 30 seconds, and then started playing--like the proverbial riding a bike.”
Afterwards was surreal, Raymond said. “We were signing autographs. I said ‘Here we are all about 63,’ and doing autographs for people that are close to our ages. I’d never had an opportunity like that. But here we were, and had a lot of fun.”
More Doors Open
Raymond decided not to attend his 50th high school class reunion. “The tenth one was boring. But my wife Suzanne said ‘If you don’t go, I’m still going.’ At a planning meeting we re-met everyone after about 50 years. They said they had everything planned, except for music.”
He said he played guitar. “They said, ‘You’re in charge of music.’ Five other classmates joined us, and we did an entire rock and roll review at the reunion.”
Three or four sang each song, Raymond said. “The non-singers went down on the floor and acted out the song lyrics.”
Weeks later, Raymond helped one of the musicians at her house because she had injured her leg. She asked if he had ever considered modeling. “I said I never had, and she said she thought I would do good. I asked how much money it would cost. She said, ‘A thousand dollars. But,’ she added, ‘I’m a photographer and I will take your pictures for the modeling if you teach me how to play the guitar.’” Which is what happened.
After that Raymond and Suzanne auditioned at Caryn Rosenberg’s Model and Talent agency, where they went through training. “That was pretty intensive, learning how to walk, model, and do acting, for TV commercials.”
Out of 300, they were one set of 21 chosen to go to Los Angeles for the International Model and Talent Competition. “Most were 10-20 years old, and we were 70. I got fourth runner-up for Male Actor of the Year playing ‘Johnny Be Good’ in my custom-made acoustic guitar. They wanted us to move to L.A. as part of the model and acting scene. But I wanted to keep my financial advising work, so we didn‘t move.”
As a result, Raymond has done a few TV commercials, and acting, once as a mafia don for a History Channel show called “The Last Pope.” “I had to wear a double-breasted pinstripe suit with my hand under my lapel looking mean while talking to a young priest. I have also done voice-over work.”
Six years ago at age 77 Raymond got back into music. “Art Dean and I played as a duo for a while, named ourselves the Flashback, and are doing an eclectic mix of songs from the 1960s and 1970s.”
Just like he did more than 60 years ago.
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