13. Say Goodbye
Album: Allied Forces (1981)
Writers: Rik Emmett, Mike Levine and Gil Moore
Lead vocals: Rik Emmett
Chart History: Did not chart
Video?: Yes
Lyrical category: Love/lust/breakup
With "Say Goodbye," we say hello to Allied Forces, Triumph's fifth album and its only one to go platinum in the U.S. It was Ultimate Classic Rock's pick for best Triumph album and would likely win a poll of Triumph die-hards as well. When Never Surrender, the follow-up to Allied Forces, came out, Rik Emmett said in an interview that Progressions of Power was too heavy for AM radio, Just a Game was "too harmonic," whatever that means, but Allied Forces and Never Surrender combined the best of both. In the Rock & Roll Machine documentary, the band said that Allied Forces, the first album recorded at Gil Moore's Metalworks Studios, was the result of serious thought about how to tailor their sound to grow their audience; they leaned more on the Just a Game approach than the Progressions of Power sound, but they didn't just copy Just a Game. Allied Forces has four songs in my top 13 but none elsewhere on my list, so it's tempting to call it a "stars and scrubs album," but that's not really true. Its top four tracks are among the very best any hard rock/metal band had to offer in the early '80s, and its second- and third-tier tracks are still good but don't do as much for me as their counterparts on some of the other albums.
"Say Goodbye," Allied Forces' closer and third single, had the album's only video that wasn't taken from the band's live performance in Baltimore, and it was this video that was my first exposure to Triumph just after my family got cable in mid-1982 and I became addicted to MTV. Tween me was definitely impressed by the band playing on a platform shaped like a flying V guitar, and Emmett playing a double-necked guitar. I was immediately hooked, because the song rocked the hell out but also had a strong melody. In retrospect, this track is probably the closest Triumph ever got to power pop. It jumps from one incredible hook to another, exploding into a Big Chorus. We go through that cycle again before we arrive at a keening bridge that builds up tension with constant refrains of "don't say you love me, don't say you need me" before releasing into the Big Chorus again. This is a ridiculously well-constructed song that should have made more impact than it did.
Another notable thing about this track is that it is one of the few Triumph songs that does not have an Emmett guitar solo in the middle of it. But we still get to appreciate his talent via his soaring notes in the intro and the trills he provides before the chorus.
Lyrically, this is a run-of-the-mill breakup song, and what's most notable is how well the words fit with the melodies.
Despite its status as a single which had a video and got airplay on FM radio, "Say Goodbye" was not a regular part of Triumph's live sets. There are only a handful of documented live performances, all between 1981 and 1983. Emmett has occasionally performed it at solo shows, however.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu0J2nQG5N4
At #12, the song that closed the regular set of the one Triumph show I saw.