By Ryan Sparks
Classic rock fans certainly
have reason to celebrate as Triumph, one of Canada’s most
successful musical exports will be performing together again
for the first time in twenty years, for at least two reunion
shows this summer. The reasons why the long standing
partnership of guitarist Rik Emmett, bassist Mike Levine and
drummer Gil Moore dissolved at the end of the 80’s seems
almost inconsequential now that the three are back on
speaking terms once again.
When Emmett left the band in
1988 to begin what would go on to become a long and fruitful
solo career, both Levine and Moore decided they would
soldier on with a new guitarist. Triumph issued one final
album in 1993; however this record failed to capture the
magic that the original trio enjoyed together and Gil and
Mike closed the book on Triumph not long afterwards.
Both Levine and Moore have
kept themselves busy over the years working primarily behind
the scenes and out of the public eye. Mike has been
successful running various different business interests
while Moore has overseen the day to day operations of the bands
studio in Toronto, Metalworks. In addition to all this
both Mike and Gil have been hard at work over the past few
years by not only re-releasing Trumph’s back catalogue, but
they’ve actively combed the vaults for archive material
which has resulted in them issuing three fantastic DVD
collections of live performances and videos.
In the spring of 2007 the
stage was set for a reconciliation with Emmett when it was
announced that Triumph would be inducted into the Canadian
Music Industry Hall of Fame. As they prepared to accept this
award, the trio sat down in person and began the tentative
steps to mending their friendship and almost immediately the
speculation was that the band would reunite for a full scale
reunion tour. One year and one more induction ceremony
later, this time for the Canadian Music Hall
of Fame, there has been no announcement that Triumph will do
anything beyond the two festival shows scheduled for this
summer and for drummer Gil Moore that suits him just fine.
The band has been taking things one step at a time and for
the moment there is no official plan for any large scale
touring plans, although I’d be willing to venture a guess
that the band has the potential to be a lot busier in 2009.
For now though we should just be content with the fact that
these old friends have spent the past year getting to know
each other once more, to the point that they are willing to
test the waters together again onstage. One of the greatest
hard rock trio’s ever is going to fly again.
Ryan: First of all I want to
congratulate you and the rest of the band on being inducted
into the Canadian Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. It must be a
great honour to be recognized in this manner. I mean it
definitely validates all the blood, sweat and tears that you
Mike and Rik put into it doesn’t it?
Gil: Yeah absolutely. It’s
not something you expect but it’s really nice when it
happens. There are two Hall of Fame’s in Canada, there’s a Canadian Industry Hall of Fame
and a Canadian
Music Hall of Fame. We were
inducted last year into the Canadian Industry Hall of Fame
at Canadian Music Week, but this year we’re being inducted
into the Canadian Hall of Fame at the Juno Awards, which is Canada’s version of the Grammy’s.
Ryan: A lot has been going on
in the Triumph camp the past couple of years, first the
bands company TML re-released the whole back catalogue,
which was completely re-mastered, not to mention you
released a series of three fantastic looking and sounding
DVD’s from the vaults as well.
Gil: Yeah and we’ve got a new
Greatest Hits CD that will come out sometime this year or
early next year. It’s pretty much done and it’s neat because
it has all the hits remixed and will be a two disc set,
which in addition to the audio will also have a DVD disc as
well with lots of video clips from MTV, so it will be a
pretty interesting package.
Ryan: Back to Industry Hall
of Fame induction, can you take me through the past year,
from how all three of you got together to accept the award,
through the reconciliation and now to the point where you’re
at today with the upcoming reunion shows
Gil: When Neil Dixon, who
runs Canadian Music Week invited us to the Hall of Fame it
provoked a get together with the three of us, which was
probably long overdue. After we had gotten together face to
face for awhile a lot of good things started to happen, and
since then we’ve kind of re-established out friendship and
actually started playing a little bit as well. Rik and I
have been practicing together on the weekends and stuff
while Mike has been down in Jamaica where he
lives in the winter, he’s coming up in the next few days.
Ryan: You’ve spoken in the
past of how your musical life has seemed in reality like two
lifetimes, one as a young single musician touring the world
with Triumph and then as a married man with a family running
Metalworks and totally enjoying what you’re doing. That
being said, now that you’re coming full circle in the sense
of being Gil the musician once more, are you apprehensive at
all of revisiting that world again?
Gil: Not really. To me the
difference is this is just something I’m doing for fun, it’s
like a hobby now. I couldn’t be happier than I am now doing
what I’m doing, and I’m not going to complain for a minute
about what’s been going on. It’s been a great run with
Metalworks and our new school is very exciting, but it’s
been fun playing with Rik again. It’s like getting a hockey
team back together, but we’re just taking it one gig at a
time. It’s not really like diving right back into it in the
sense of the band is back together and we’re going back on
the road. Its more like this is an adventure, we’re going to
play some shows and we’re going to go to some destinations
and hopefully not only have some fun, but to also pay the
fans back a little bit for being so patient. I really don’t
know how it will go. It’s one of those things where we’ll do
it and we’ll see how it works out.
Ryan: All the fans are hoping
it leads to a full scale world tour.
Gil: Yeah it could or it
could not. The real official Triumph plan, and you can print
this, the official Triumph plan is there is no official
Triumph plan. It’s totally an open thing right now and we
just talk about it. The first show or two that we do will be
like “Do you want to go do this show? We’ll just try it and
see how it goes.
Ryan: You haven’t touched
your drums in quite awhile so I can imagine you’ve probably
been doing some serious wood shedding.
Gil: Absolutely, it’s been
fun playing again and its great exercise. I had kind of
forgotten how much fun it was to play drums to be honest
with you.
Ryan: It’s interesting you
mentioned that this time there is no real plan, which is in
contrast to how you originally started. For a new band
starting out you made a rather bold decision right off by
deciding the band would be self managed. You had certain
principles you wanted to adhere to, can you explain to me a
bit of what that philosophy was?
Gil: We definitely had plans
and it was a total commitment with no ‘If’s’ ‘And’ or
‘Buts’. It’s like what you do when you’ve got that
inspiration to really drive something home. The real
philosophy was to not take no for an answer, especially up
here in Canada where
initially we liked to eat our young you know? We weren’t
really getting the “Hey you guys can do it” from our peer
group. It was more like “Who do you guys think you are?”
When we went to America most bands couldn’t get
across the border, we just looked at them and said “The
Guess Who made it in the States, Rush made it in the States,
we’re going to make it in the States”. That was the big
difference from a lot of other bands who just stayed up here
in the safe zone and never had the determination or took the
risks. I guess a lot of them listened to the naysayers and
of course we didn’t, we just thought “Oh yeah? We’ll show
you”. When I look back on it now we were just typical
testosterone riddled males doing what we thought we needed
to do. I don’t know that we necessarily believed everything,
but we thought that if we didn’t come off like we believed
it then nobody else was going to believe it. Then the
strange thing was, what we had fantasized about started to
become reality, so we thought this is great, it’s working.
Ryan: You did things on your
own terms and unlike a lot of bands starting out that are
thrust out on the road as an opening act, you guys had other
ideas.
Gil: Everything we did was
kind of original and we didn’t really do things the way
other bands did them. If we did anything like other bands
did them, I would say we looked at bands like The Guess Who,
Rush or even going further back and what Neil Young had
accomplished in the early days, those who had tried to cross
the border, that was the big thing. We always had our eye on America. That
was the difference between us and a lot of Canadian bands,
and having this absolute fearlessness that you associate
with youth. We had absolutely zero fear of failure. Sure we
could have failed, there was a million ways we could have
fallen flat on our faces [laughing], but we were so
pigheaded and determined that I think it worked to our
advantage.
Ryan: Prior to forming
Triumph you were working as a booking agent and Mike was
working with a record company.
Gil: We had kind of reached
the stage where we were I guess, a little disenchanted with
some of the…obstacles that we faced in having a successful
group. I was curious as to how the business worked so I
started to book my own band out of the frustration of not
being able to get jobs. I mean that’s the first key to
success is actually being employed [laughing]. How do you be
successful? Be employed. Mike wanted to learn how records
were made, so when we started Triumph we had bit of an
advantage, not a big one because we were still kids in our
early twenties, but we were ahead of the teenagers lets put
it that way.
Ryan: I’m
assuming that the fact that both of you were involved in the
industry prior, helped prepare you somewhat for the things
you would encounter later on as the band started to get
bigger.
Gil: Yeah it was a big
advantage that Mike knew how to produce records. I think the
booking experience helped me a little bit in dealing with
promoters and agents and understanding how that worked.
Ryan: The first album
definitely laid the groundwork and was even successful in
select U.S. markets, and you made your American live debut
headlining down in San Antonio Texas, where the reaction was
also very positive. That show came about pretty much by a
perfect stroke of luck didn’t it?
Gil: Sammy Hagar was
scheduled to play the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium and
there were two other acts on the show. It was The Runaways,
which was Joan Jett’s band along with Yesterday and Today
(Y&T), this was I believe in February of 1977. Sammy got an
opportunity to open for Kiss at Madison Square Gardens, which I think was the first time
Kiss played the gardens, so he bailed out on the promoter.
We got the call because we were this new band that was
getting all this airplay, and it was kind of funny because
this would never happen today, and it shows how primitive
the business was back then. It was like “Do you want to take
over for Sammy and do this gig?” The promoter put ads out
offering people refunds if they wanted it but we just
gambled on it and said “Ok we’ll do it”. We literally threw
together what gear we could take, it was mostly rental gear,
really ramshackle fly by night kind of stuff, and we went
down. The Texas fans were really off the charts and so
enthusiastic, it was incredible. It was the first time we’d
ever really heard that kind of response and we weren’t used
to it. At that point I was used to people walking out of the
room or going out for a cigarette break when I was playing.
To actually have people cheering and going crazy wasn’t
something we were familiar with. That one gig changed
everything because after we played there the word spread
really fast. The promoter had booked us in Austin and Corpus Christi at the same
time originally. When we went down there it was for three
shows and the long and short of it was that it was just a
fantastic experience. We played well considering we were
using crummy equipment and the rush for the band was
incredible, and that ignited the whole spark in Texas and then we spread out from there. Up in
Canada it was amazing because by the
time we got back up here we were on the front page of RPM
magazine, which was the big magazine at the time. All of a
sudden every gig in Canada that we
potentially qualified for, they all wanted us
simultaneously. The agent was telling us that he had so many
offers for us, so it was a pretty exciting time.
Ryan: Triumph became
legendary for not only the music but for the epic staging
and light shows as well. I understand though that in the
very early days not everyone was as, shall we say
enthusiastic about your use of pyrotechnics.
Gil: Oh yeah we burned a few
things. We put Geronimo’s nightclub in Richmond Hill under water
one night. We set off the sprinkler system and soaked
everybody in the whole club, and they couldn’t shut it off
so pretty quickly the whole club turned into a bathtub with
about four of five inches of water [laughing]. In the early
days in 1975 when we were still in the high schools, The
Toronto District School Board eventually banned us because
we had scorched so many stages and burned curtains and stuff
like that [laughing]. However that all worked to our
advantage because at one point we were supposed to play
Massey Hall but the fire marshal had gotten wind of us being
pyromaniacs or whatever, the legend had apparently preceded
us. So the next thing we knew we had the promoter Michael
Cohl on the phone telling us that he’d have to pull the plug
on the show, because the fire marshal wasn’t going to let us
play Massey Hall, because it was an old building and he’d
heard all these rumours. When we had originally put the
tickets on sale about half the tickets were sold on the
first day, so we thought the show was going to sell out and
that we could probably do a bigger venue and wouldn’t it be
great if we could capitalize on the publicity and move it
into
Maple
Leaf Gardens. Michael thought we were crazy
because we hadn’t even played Massey Hall and here we were
telling him to put it into Maple Leaf Gardens, he thought he
was going to lose his shirt. We told him to think about it
and that Harold Ballard (owner of Maple Leaf Gardens) would like it too because he
loved press. The next day there was a story on the front
page of the Toronto Star with one of those boxes, which was
about 4 inches by 3 inches that said “The Show that was too
hot for Massey Hall”. It had a little synopsis which pointed
to another page in the paper where there was the story about
the whole thing. So through the ticket service Michael
offered the fans a chance to either upgrade their tickets to
the Garden or he would refund them. Nobody took a refund, it
was like 99% of the people exchanged their tickets, and we
ended up having a really successful show at the Gardens.
That show actually got us our
US record deal with RCA, because the
guys from RCA flew up from
New York to see us, and they just
went “Wow this is great”. So again it was a real lucky
break. What looked like a terrible break, getting kicked out
of Massey Hall, turned into a great break because we talked
our way into it. We just believed in ourselves, and if we
had just listened to Michael, we would have cancelled the
date and that would have been the end of it. We would have
had no US record deal and we would have had
to refund all the tickets. People would have thought Triumph
were a bunch of losers who couldn’t even play a concert.
Ryan: Did either yourself,
Rik or Mike ever have any close calls onstage with the pyro?
Gil: Oh tons of times! I
almost burned my hand off once, another time I got some
really bad burns. Rik got hit in the face once in
Eastern Canada and burned his eyebrows off. Mike
got hit in Hamilton, we’ve all been
hit. However as time progressed, because you’re talking
about a time when pyro wasn’t regulated, it was very
primitive and we were using a lot of stuff that wasn’t
really smart to use. We had things that you could never use
today. When we were on tour in America doing arenas everywhere we
had a licensed pyrotechnician who would phone the fire
department or the promoter would contact the local fire
department before we would come to town. We never did
anything stupid except in the very beginning when we didn’t
really know what we were doing. As things matured our pyro
got very, very safe and we never had any further accidents.
The only accidents were when we were first starting out,
when it was kind of this ramshackle, do it on our own kind
of thing.
Ryan: When did you have an
idea that things were going to take off south of the border?
Gil: 1978. I would almost
even say 1977 because once we had played that show in San Antonio we just
figured that if this works in
San Antonio, then it’s going to work
everywhere. What ended up happening is that we had other
cities like Louisville KY for whatever reason latched onto
to Triumph, so did Indianapolis and Chicago was there very
early on as well. There were other cities where we did
really well later on like
Detroit, who
originally wanted nothing to do with us. Then all of a
sudden it was like someone had thrown a light switch,
because Detroit went on to become one of our best
cities to play year after year. Other cities for some reason
or another got in really early on the ground floor. It
really usually came down to one group of fans and one radio
station.
Ryan: You really were cut out
to be a musician at a very early age weren’t you? I mean on
your report card in Kindergarten your teacher commented that
not only could you sing in tune but also that you were
developing a nice sense of rhythm as well.
Gil: That’s amazing that you
even know that. It’s a true story [laughing]. I always
thought the opposite and I never thought that I was cut out
to be a musician because I’m pretty shy. I’m not one of
these people that really want to be onstage. When I go and
play I’ve always felt it was an act, it felt like I’m in a
play or some sort of theatre show and that I’m playing
somebody else.
Ryan: You still feel that way
today?
Gil: Oh yeah. I read Alice
Cooper’s new book and he talks about Alice in the third person, and playing
Alice and all
that stuff. In my world as a drummer, I never really told
that to anybody, but that’s how I always felt. My friends
would always tell me that I was so much different when I was
onstage, but to me it was just another world, like stepping
through the looking glass. I have to force it out because by
nature I’m not an extroverted personality. I like watching
other people onstage more than I like being there myself.
That’s why I like Metalworks, because we supply lights,
sound, we teach people how to do it, and that’s why I love
it so much because we’re behind the scenes, but it’s all
stuff that I love.
Ryan: The bands appearance at
the US Festival in 1983 before over 350,000 people certainly
has to be a high water mark in the your career.
Gil: I think it was. That
festival and at that moment in time, we were playing at our
peak and that was the biggest festival in the United States
that year, and it’s still the biggest festival in history in California to this day.
It was just an amazing bill, an amazing crowd and an amazing
set of circumstances.
Ryan: Over the course of the
bands career you’ve had some unique situations arise with
regards to opening acts, the ones that come to mind are The
Baby’s with John Waite and Yngwie Malmsteen, can you tell me
specifically about those two?
Gil: I don’t remember
anything with Yngwie. I’m actually a fan of his and I know
he has some detractors, but I always just thought he was a
great guitar player. I don’t recall any incidents with him,
but I’m sure there might have been because he opened for us
a bunch of times.
Ryan: I think you had to pull
the power on him one night after he had been repeatedly
warned about going overtime in his opening slot.
Gil: That sounds like him.
That’s something where the promoter limits the curfew times
because of the unions involved and the costs of going
overtime. So yeah at a certain point the stage manager might
say that you can go five minutes overtime, but if you keep
going pushing the envelope, at a certain point they might
just shut you down. So if he was playing the ass to the
production manager then he would have shut you down. The two
guys that we had Ron Anderson and Charlie Hernandez were
very, very fair guys, but they had done all the big tours
like Kiss and Aerosmith and they didn’t fuck around with
people. If you thought you were going to get away with
something, they were the wrong guys to pull it on.
The Baby’s was funny, it was
the weirdest thing because John Waite just started kicking
our lights and breaking them for no reason and our lighting
director at the time was watching this from the side of the
stage. He was a very, very tough nut, Al was a little guy
but he was not someone to be trifled with so to speak. He
went over to the Production Manager for The Baby’s and he
said “Tell your singer if he touches my lights one more time
I’m gonna take his lights out”. So when there was a guitar
solo their guy waved him over, and you could see them
talking, and at that point Waite went and picked up the mic
stand, and we had these things called chaser lights at the
time, which was a row of light bulbs across the front of the
stage. This wasn’t what he’d been kicking, before this he
had been kicking fixtures. So he took the mic stand and went
around like a kid going down a picket fence and he smashed
about a dozen bulbs. Al took off just like a football player
and tackled him right at center stage in full view of the
audience. He punched his lights out in front of the whole
building, and the stage hands flipped out and didn’t know
what to do, so they dropped the curtain. As the curtain
started to drop, the Baby’s crew went to defend Waite and
all the Triumph crew started punching out the Baby’s crew,
so now there was a full scale brawl going on. The curtain
was coming down, but the stage hands somehow managed to get
the pulleys jammed, so the curtain wouldn’t go below about
forty eight inches. As the fight continued, from the
audiences’ perspective all they could see was everybody from
the waist down, with John Waite on the bottom of the pile
getting his head kicked in. It was the funniest thing of all
time, you couldn’t write a funnier script. It’s not
something we provoked or intended to happen and I don’t know
maybe even John Waite would be laughing if he thought about
it now. I mean he basically asked for it. There were stories
all over
America the next day of how Triumph
had spanked The Baby’s and that kind of thing. I think
because it was so funny that it got us a ton of publicity.
Ryan: Triumph’s first
appearance in England was in 1980 and while the
shows were commercially successful, the critics at the time
had a rather different opinion of the band didn’t they?
Gil: I don’t know they were
mixed. Certain guys like Malcom Dome liked us and there was
a few, but in general the British critics tended to dislike
all the bands that to them were American sounding. They were
not only hard on bands like Van Halen and Triumph, but
anybody they perceived to be American. I know they had
embraced bands from Canada before but I just don’t think
we were one of them, and I don’t think they particularly
liked us. I think the other reason is that most of the times
that we played over there we stunk; we just had this uncanny
ability to not play well when we went over there. I don’t
know if it was something in the water or whatever but it
seemed like every time we played we had a bad gig. The only
time it seemed to me that we ever played well was when we
played The Hammersmith Odeon, which at that time was sort of
the key place to play to win over the English audiences, and
we did. We sold it out, played and went over great, but it
seemed like there were too many things that went wrong. We
played on this big festival gig called the Heavy Metal
Holocaust with Ozzy Osbourne and Motorhead and I thought we
were horrible at that one. We got away with it and got
decent reviews, but first of all I was really sick, Rik was
as well, only Mike was healthy. When we went on half of the
PA went out, I don’t remember if it was stage left or stage
right, but it was this festival sized PA with a million
watts and a million speakers, and half of it went out during
our show. You could just see that one half of the audience
didn’t know what was going on, so we looked at each other
and thought “Here we go, this is what happens to us when we
come to England”. Rik
and I both had the flu; the PA goes off, what else could go
wrong? The guys in Motorhead were fun to be with though,
they were great guys.
Ryan: Would you say The
Sport of Kings album was the beginning of the
differences in musical direction?
Gil: The record company was
just interfering in what we were doing; it really came down
to record company interference. Every record company
interferes, and they were doing what they thought needed to
be done, but it’s one of those things where they tend to
kill the golden goose a lot of the time when they get
involved. We’d always had a policy of keeping the record
company away from us, and I mean in the studio. We’d tell
them “Don’t tell us how to write songs, you guys sell the
records and we’ll write the songs”. As we got a little older
we started to become more reasonable, that’s what you do
when you get older, you become more mature and more
reasonable and less hard headed, so that worked to our
detriment, because we thought “They’re nice guys, we should
let them have a say” which was wrong.
Ryan: Yeah because you had
already established a proven formula that worked by that
point.
Gil: Yeah I mean so we
weren’t the Rolling Stones, but we weren’t flipping the
blips either, so they should have left us well alone, let us
write our songs and stopped trying to shove producers and
other peoples songs down our throats. You can’t live your
life twice, it happened but that sort of messed things up.
Ryan: Something that really
suffered I thought was on an album like Surveillance
was your drums got really compressed sounding. Not to
mention that whole album just didn’t have the spark of the
earlier records.
Gil: I know exactly what you
mean. What happened to my drums was called samples. That was
the production technique and it wasn’t just on our record
because if you listen to a lot of bands at the same time,
there was this thing going on with the drums. There was this
three or four year window where record producers discovered
what samples were and they went crazy with them. It’s like
you said, you get this over compressed or homogenized sound
and I hate listening to those drums.
Ryan: A song like “Rock You
Down” was about as far away from Triumph as you could have
gotten.
Gil: I hate that song. In my
list of most hated songs that one’s definitely in the top
10.
Ryan: The second album
Rock ‘n Roll Machine was a big step forward in that the
bands sound got significantly heavier, and Just A Game
was even more diversified musically, and included such fan
favourites as “Lay It On The Line” and “Hold On”. I
understand though that not everybody was happy with the end
result is that true?
Gil: I would say only in the
sense that we were always second guessing ourselves. With a
song like “Hold On” we were disappointed because we were
never really that good at playing that one live. The way it
worked in the studio, didn’t work that great live. Is that
what you’re referring to?
Ryan: Not really. I had read
that the band wasn’t entirely happy with the end result and
the feeling was that maybe a bit more time to work on the
material would have helped. I was surprised to read that
because it’s very solid album.
Gil: That’s because we were
always second guessing ourselves like every other band.
Whatever you do, you’re not happy with it once it’s done.
What happens is you make an album and you go out and lie to
the press and tell everybody that it’s the best record
you’ve ever done and it’s a step forward etc… What the band
is really thinking is “I’m not sure this is any good” or “We
could have done this better”. That’s just what rock bands
do, they all say it’s a progression and stuff but none of
them really believe it, because they’re usually second
guessing themselves, and we were no different. We went in
and did Progressions of Power and used totally
different recording techniques and went in a sort of
different direction musically, but hey you’re kids, its fun
and you’re doing what you do. There’s no right or wrong way
to do it.
Ryan: Do you
think looking back that because you were second guessing
yourself and self producing the albums as well, would it
have changed anything bringing in an outside opinion?
Gil: Oh yeah totally. I’ll
give you the ultimate example and its funny because I told
you that I’d just read Alice Cooper’s new book, but he was
talking about when the band met Bob Ezrin, and what happened
as a result of that. He had a huge effect on
Alice and had we been produced by
someone like Bob Ezrin, Triumph would have been a completely
different story, because he’s a very hands on guy who gets
involved in the song writing. The producers that we worked
with and we had some great producers, we had David Thoener
and Eddie Kramer who were great but they tended to let us do
our own thing because of the way they were hired. By the
time they were brought in we already had the songs ready,
and they were really brought in just to work with us in the
studio and to make it sound good. They weren’t working with
us in the standpoint of helping us write or pick the songs,
so by the time we got to Surveillance that’s where we
had the full on meddling going on.
Ryan: Last question I’ve
heard of one of past Rik’s pre-show rituals referred to as
‘Exotic Headgear’, would you care to elaborate on what this
consists of and do you think he’ll bring this one out of
retirement?
Gil: [laughing] Oh man that’s
funny! I can’t speak for Rik but lets hope he does is all I
can say. It was pretty funny and I still think he’s got a
pretty good sense of humour.
Ryan: You’re not going to
elaborate on what this is?
Gil: [laughing] I think you know what it is!
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