Pip's Invitation
Footballguy
Triumph's story is unlike most others in rock history. They built up a following big enough to play hockey arenas (by the late '70s in Canada and by the '80s in the US) while managing themselves and getting very little support from the music industry in the traditional way. Kind of like the Grateful Dead and Phish, though they worked in a completely different genre. Their most obvious sonic comparison is Rush, but they were always more AOR and less prog than Geddy and the boys.
They first came to my attention via their videos, almost all of them performance-based, in the early years of MTV. These were a mix of songs from their second US album, Just a Game, shot on a soundstage, and songs from their fourth US album, Allied Forces, shot at a concert in Baltimore. I loved them all, but Fight the Good Fight, from Allied Forces, was and still is my favorite. It's got plenty of guitar heroics, but also a ton of rich sonic textures and a great melody. My first concert without my parents was Triumph (with Yngvie Malmsteen opening) in 1986, and they closed their set with this.
The recent documentary on them, Rock and Roll Machine, does a great job of capturing the impact they had on people despite getting little attention from the larger music industry or the mainstream media. Among the things I learned from that:
They very much followed the "If you build it, they will come" model in their early years. They set out to have the biggest, brashest live spectacle they could think of, with the music to match. This garnered a ton of favorable word-of-mouth and gained them a following to a much greater extent than their early records did. When they were ready to move up to theater level, they booked a gig at Massey Hall in Toronto, a creaky old venue. Once the venue folks realized what kind of show Triumph put on, they said the stage show with all of its lights and pyrotechnics was too much of a fire hazard. So Triumph, a band with barely any radio presence yet, even in Canada, moved the show to MAPLE LEAF GARDENS. And sold enough tickets for it to make a profit. Relentless touring got them to a similar status in other North American cities by the early '80s.
They opened their own studio in the early '80s and recorded Allied Forces and all subsequent albums there. It still exists and is the setting of much of the documentary.
In previous threads I have mentioned that many of their lyrics sound like a hockey coach's between-periods speech. The documentary showed that this was by design. As with a lot of acts, their target audience was teens who felt out of place, but instead of writing angry or depressing songs, they wrote uplifting ones, to convey to confused teens that life had a lot of positives and with the right outlook, everything was going to be OK.
They became friends with Apple's Steve Wozniak, who was a big fan, and helped him organize the hard rock/metal day of US Festival '83 (link to their set from it above).
The machinations of the music industry did catch up to them eventually. Their first five US albums were on RCA records, but the band decided that RCA was no longer committed to hard rock and asked to be freed from their contract. A lawsuit ensued, which they lost, but they were "rescued" by Irving Azoff, the head of MCA records, who decided to pay off RCA and sign them. Their first record for MCA, Thunder Seven, was their most successful yet in terms of getting airplay on FM radio. But MCA decided that they needed even more of a return on their investment than that, and pushed for them to change to a more "modern" sound that could produce top 40 hits. The sessions for the next album, The Sport of Kings, were exceedingly difficult because of these pressures, and put strains on the band that they never really recovered from (despite getting their top 40 hit in Somebody's Out There). A few years later, singer/guitarist Rik Emmett left the band and that was that.
A lot of fans felt very intensely about them not only because of their songs and performances, but because they weren't on magazine covers and such, so they could be "my band" or "my secret". This is demonstrated very well in the documentary with fan interviews, and with the ending
where the band plays a surprise reunion set at a fan event at the band's studio.
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most popular song about being forcibly groped by NYC bikers.
These are a select few of my favorites, you gotta go check it out, you'll love it!
This song is so easy and breezy.
