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Triumph
From JAM! Music
Gil Moore (drums, vocals)
Mike Levine (bass)
Rik Emmett (guitars, vocals)
Rick Santers (guitars, keyboards, vocals) [joined in 1986]
Phil X (guitars, vocals) [replaced Emmett in 1992]
The trio that became famous as Triumph, Gil Moore,
Mike Levine and Rik Emmett, got together as a band in 1975 in a manager's office in Toronto. Right from the start the threesome were determined to handle things themselves, and by the time they got together, Moore had already managed to land a record deal with Attic Records in Canada.
Their first album on Attic
received little attention in Canada, but journalist David Farrell sent a copy to a deejay in San Antonio, Texas, who was so impressed that he helped to get the band a small tour of San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin. The resulting fervor for the band's album caught the attention of RCA Records in the US, and they subsequently signed the band to a world-wide deal excluding Canada. Thus began the nightmare of label entanglements that marks Triumph's history - all the albums that were released on Attic in Canada were also released on RCA in the rest of the world, and then when the Attic deal ended, RCA re-released all the albums in Canada as well. When the RCA deal ended, MCA picked up the band and once again re-released all the albums to date. In 1992, they signed with Virgin Records for one album, and now Triumph has their own record label which has also re-released the entire back catalogue with original artwork and liner notes.
The second album in Canada, Rock And Roll Machine, was actually the first US release on RCA (1978) and was released a year after the Canadian
Attic release (1977). It featured their first hit single, a remake of Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way", and concert favourites "Rock And Roll Machine" and "Blinding Light Show". Triumph hit the road and quickly gained a reputation for being a tight bunch of musicians with a pyrotechnic light show that rivaled anything else on the road in those days.
After the second album, Triumph had a string of successful releases, all of which went at least platinum in
Canada and gold in the US. They continued to tour and sell out everywhere they went, and were one of the featured artists on the US Festival bill in 1983 in the US (from which a commercial video package was released). They've been nominated for four Juno Awards and have been inducted into the Toronto Music Awards Hall of Fame. In 1986, to help beef up the sound both on studio releases and in concert, the trio added a fourth hired hand in veteran Toronto guitarist Rick Santers, who has remained with the band ever since.
In 1988,
however, internal differences of opinion resulted in Emmett opting to leave the band to pursue a solo career. Moore and Levine insisted that it was not the end of the band, but put the group's ventures on hold while they attempted to sort out the business end of things. Around the same time that Emmett chose to depart, the band invested in the building of a state-of-the-art recording facility in Mississauga, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto; called the Metalworks, they recorded all subsequent studio albums there and today it is one of the most widely respected and busiest studios in Canada.
Coming out of the ashes of Emmett's departure, Moore and Levine held auditions for guitarists in an
attempt to go in a different direction with the band. Their first choice, John Sykes, was working with Blue Murder at the time and was not available, so they went with choice #2, Phil X (Frozen Ghost, Aldo Nova). As it turned out, this was a particularly smart move on their part as X fit right in with what they were trying to accomplish. In 1992 they were signed to a new deal with Virgin records, which released their critically acclaimed Edge of Excess album.
A live album was released in 1996, and today the band is getting ready to celebrate their 25th year of being a musical entity.
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