We are 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 we were determined to handle things ourselves, and by the time we got together, Moore had already managed to land a record deal with Attic Records in Canada.
Our first album on Attic received little attention in Canada, but journalist David Farrell sent a copy to deejay Joe ("The Godfather Of Rock And Roll") Anthony in San Antonio, Texas, who was so impressed that he helped to get us a small tour of San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin. The resulting fervor for our album caught the attention of RCA Records in the US, and we subsequently signed the band to a world-wide deal excluding Canada. Thus began the nightmare of label entanglements that marks our 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 us up and once again re-released all the albums to date. In 1992, we signed with Virgin Records for one album, and now we have our 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 our first hit single, a remake of Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way", and concert favourites "Rock And Roll Machine" and "Blinding Light Show". We 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, we had a string of successful releases, all of which went at least platinum in Canada and gold in the US. We continued to tour and sell out everywhere we 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). We'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, we added a fourth hired hand in veteran Toronto guitarist Rick Santers, who has remained with us 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 our ventures on hold while they attempted to sort out the business end of things. Around the same time that Emmett chose to depart, we invested in the building of a state-of-the-art recording facility in Mississauga, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto; called the Metalworks, we 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 our band. Our first choice, John Sykes, was working with Blue Murder at the time and was not available, so we went with choice 2, Phil X (Frozen Ghost, Aldo Nova). As it turned out, this was a particularly smart move on our part as X fit right in with what we were trying to accomplish. In 1992 we were signed to a new deal with Virgin records, which released our critically acclaimed Edge of Excess album.
