Triumph's Rik Emmett recently spoke with Jeff Gaudiosi of MisplacedStraws.com about his recently released collection, Diamonds: The Best Of The Hard Rock Years 1990 - 1995. During the interview, Rik was asked if he feels Triumph will ever be considered for the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame?
Says Rik, "Well, again, I’m going to say thank you for saying what you’re saying and I’m happy to hear it. I think you’re dreaming in technicolor. Your reason is because 1st of all, in Canada, I mean, here’s a truth about Triumph in Canada. We never won a Juno award. We did get to go in the Juno Hall of Fame. But it was really because the Juno, the CARAS people kind of went, 'Well, they’ve stuck around, they lasted so long, and they got back together again. They did that. The Industry Hall of Fame took them. The Rock Hall, so, okay, we should give them a Hall of Fame award.' So, you know, we got that. I think it was literally just for persistence, for living long enough. The reason for that was because in the Canadian pool, in the early days, it was like, 'Well, you’re not going to win. Rush is going to win.' Of course, Rush is going to win. And then it was more like the Canadian music business had shifted. It was like, 'Well, you’re not going to win. Glass Tiger is going to win. You’re not going to win. Platinum Blonde is going to win.' It was like, yeah, okay, things shifted..
"Year’s later, I did a thing where I did a tour and I did an album with Pavlo and Oscar Lopez. It was like a guitar trio kind of project. We toured the country, and we were up for an instrumental Juno of the year. I said to those guys, I looked at the thing and I said, 'We’re never going to win.' They went, 'Oh, Rick, you’re so pessimistic.' I go, 'no, I’m not. I’m actually not professionally, I’m known as an optimist.' The reason that I’m pessimistic about this is, I go, 'There’s a couple of people from Arcade Fire. That did a little offshoot thing. And they have a voting block of a much larger label than the distributor for ours. We’re never going to even get close. We won’t get within sniffing distance politically.' In the United States, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame politically, we were on RCA Records. Which was one of the seven major labels, they were number 6 and then we sued them and we lost. Then we moved to MCA and they were the 7th. They were the smallest and they had the least impact of all the labels. Now, once they combined their publishing division with their record division then they went on this spree where they bought Motown and they just kept acquiring catalogs and they became now the only game in town is Universal, most of the other labels don’t even exist. At the time we were with these small labels and not small, but you know the weakest ones.
"So voting-wise, we were never that big. We didn’t sell enough records. We didn’t have enough of a commercial industrial kind of impact to have it be that the people go, 'Oh, yeah, well, I remember when they went quadruple platinum.' We never did go quadruple platinum. We struggled to get platinum, to get gold up to platinum, and it would eventually happen with some of the records, but not very many of them. Then you’re in a world where there’s Journey. Well, they went like seven times platinum, 10 times platinum. Oh, there’s Foreigner. There’s some noise this year about Foreigner. I don’t think there’s probably nothing in their catalog that was under five or six times platinum. They deserve to be in there. They really do. There’s a good reason why McCartney is swearing. It’s like they should have been in a long time ago, but there was a huge prejudice that Jann Wenner had. It bled throughout the entire board of that thing, which was, 'No, we’re only going to recognize the truly great and the thing that defines truly great is what I say is truly great.' He thought Foreigner and Rush and Styx and Triumph, he thought all that stuff was crap. He would hire writers to write stuff in Rolling Stone that would say, 'Yeah, these bands are shit. They’re terrible. They’re crap.' So that became the sort of the standard thing of, 'Yeah, well, no, we’re not going to put them in the Hall of Fame. They’re shitty.'”
Canadian label, Music In Motion Ent, recently released Diamonds: The Best Of The Hard Rock Years 1990 - 1995, the new compilation featuring Rik Emmett's hand picked rock tracks from his three Duke Street releases, Absolutely, Ipso Facto and The Spiral Notebook, plus two previously unheard songs.
Remastered with the most up to date technology at Iguana Studios in Toronto ON, Diamonds provides Rik Emmett fans with a new listening experience. The Diamonds cover art features the work of renowned photographer Andrew MacNaughtan.
