Game 2 of the 2025 Stanley Cup Finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers is taking place tonight (Friday, June 6th) and Canuck hard rock legends Triumph have been added to the celebration in downtown Edmonton. Kicking off the event, the band will take the stage for their first public performance since 2008, treating fans to a three-song set including their iconic hit “Lay It On The Line”, which has become a rallying anthem for Canadians during the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
BraveWords caught up with Triumph drummer/singer Gil Moore recently to talk about all things hockey and today’s release of the star-studded tribute album, Magic Power: All Star Tribute To Triumph.
BraveWords: Since we are both hockey guys, we have to address the elephant in the room. And were you witnessing that tragic ending? Are you a big fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs to begin with?
Moore: “Yeah, yeah, I really am because when I was a kid that’s exactly what I wanted to do before I played drums. It was the neighbourhood I grew up in, in Riverdale. You could have lined up all us kids and said, ‘Okay, who wants to be a fire chief?’ Nobody. ‘Who wants to play music?’ Nobody. ‘Who wants to be a doctor?’ Nobody. And so on. ‘Who wants to play in NHL?’ (puts his hand up). For everybody. 100%. And, our dads were at the time, taking us to hockey practises at 4:30 in the morning.”
BraveWords: I know, I was there to.
Moore: “The drill, you know? Never forget that. And it was a great time. But you know, when you really look at, we were in the Toronto Township Hockey League and you look at the Greater Toronto region, how many people there are and how many kids were in hockey. When I came back to those days, of all the – we started in Bantam and then we went to Tadpole B, and then we went to Tadpole A, and so on, and as we were getting a little older, there were one or two kids that were outstanding in the whole league. I mean, that somehow managed to make it into the NHL, but it was like that less than 1%. So, you know, I finally realized, well, it’s not going to happen for me. So this whole thing with Rogers Sportsnet and the playoffs this year, I guess them playing ‘Lay It On The Line’ like it was the national anthem, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to the Stanley Cup.”
BraveWords: But I’m a Barrie boy. I’m not the biggest Leafs fan, but I’m also a centennial baby, which means I was born in 1967, which is the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. That’s quite the dry spell!
Moore: “Well, I feel like with hockey, the players – compare this to music. I think athletes in general, but hockey players specifically, like they get a bad rap because they go from being heroes to bombs overnight. And, you know, if it had been that way with music, if I knew that, you know, so we step on the stage in Cincinnati and we’re heroes, and we step on the stage in Chicago and people boo us, I don’t think I ever would have played. I don’t think Triumph would have kept going. We would have quit. I mean, we, and the same thing you could say for any other band that was doing really well, the Journeys and the Rushes, and the Judas Priests, and so on. They were around us, but they never encountered that. But in hockey, Mitch Marner got just kind of murdered by social media after this is over. And I’m like, ‘I don’t get it’, with the fans. I don’t think it’s good for kids to hear this kind of negativity. And it’s just, I get the fact that, okay, so he makes a huge salary, okay there were these big expectations, but he’s playing a game, you know? Like, I guarantee you that none of these guys that ever have a game that doesn’t work out are going into the game saying, ‘I’m going to cruise, I’m going to mail it in.’ They’re out there doing their best. But, you know hockey, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen. And I guess if you’ve played the game, even at the level I did as a kid, you realize, yeah, sometimes the puck bounces left, sometimes it bounces right, sometimes you get the deflection, sometimes you don’t. I just think the fans get too hard on when they’re dissatisfied with their own home team, and I think they should be more supportive. It’s great to be gracious in victory, but it’s even more important, I think, to be gracious in defeat, sometimes.”
BraveWords: Now, tell me about working with the NHL and your anthem “Lay It On The Line” that is being used. It’s the perfect hockey song.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s funny how you figure that out after the fact. I mean, it’s kind of like how we realized after the fact that a lot of the things that fans relate to about Triumph, and what they hold on to, relate to, the lyrics, mostly the positive lyrics in some of our songs, and we started to get this in the latter stages. And I think it’s because people are getting older, they reflect back on their youth and so on. Sometimes they go through some hard times with family issues or whatever, and they – more and more and more we get communications and photos that come across our Facebook or directly, even arrive here at Metalworks Studios on the doorstep that they got through tough times with these songs, or got through tough times with this song. You know, they have a tattoo on this arm with one lyric, I have a tattoo on this arm with another lyric, and you can see that there’s been some of these impacts. So I think with hockey, it was kind of the same thing. It was, there’s those positive lyrics, the ‘Follow Your Heart’ lyrics or, you know, the ‘Fight The Good Fight’ lyrics. They’ve over time, that’s what started to become what Triumph is associated with. So that’s just my take on it. How the NHL maybe or Rogers Sportsnet, you know, looked at it and went, ‘Well, if we get a Canadian band, it has messaging within their lyrics about perseverance, working hard, success, and those kinds of things.’ So we kind of just, we were the round peg in the round hole, I suppose. We were very grateful for it. I mean, you know, we’re all hockey fans. You know, we love the Leafs, but, you know, we love the Oilers too. I mean, we love Canadian hockey. So we’re here to support Canadian hockey. I mean, obviously, we live in Leafs territory here. It would have been lovely to see, you know, the Leafs were always my personal heroes and it would have been lovely to see them. I love being confused with Doug Gilmore, which happens to me for about once a year.” (laughs)
BraveWords: I can see it.
Moore: “And I go right along with it, like ‘Yeah, I was a great hockey player, you know, thanks for noticing!’, you know?”
BraveWords: Now, let’s talk about this tribute album. What an incredible lineup.
Moore: “That was was Mike Clink using his knowledge that he’s built up over the years of working with all the really great hard rock musicians. And, I think being located in Los Angeles, where he is, you know, he’s in the epicentre of where a lot of the recording takes place. And of course, being associated with the Guns N’ Roses camp and all the great work he’s done with Guns, there’s a lot of musicians surrounding that camp. Slash has done a lot of solo projects and the other guys have as well. So there’s kind of a group there. And I think the other thing is in consulting with Phil X because Phil was the first guy Mike called. Obviously, Phil’s a Triumph band member and he was like, ‘Phil, what do you think about this?’, and Phil was gung ho to do it. And you know, without Phil, without Mike, it wouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t something that Mike, Rik, and Gil were going to do. So it’s kind of like they grabbed the ball and they ran with it. And of course, our label were the ones that, you know, put up the idea and put up the funds in order to do it, because those recordings studios are expensive. And it took a long time because it was done during COVID.”
BraveWords: It must pull at the heart strings when you look at this all-star lineup that rallies around my band and my songs that actually touched other people.
Moore: “Yeah, it really is touching and humbling, because obviously, like, we’re certainly not arrogant enough to think anybody should ever do a tribute to us. One of those things you never consider. You start a band, and you’re just trying to play another job at a high school gym or a local bar, and somehow get a little bit ahead. And then the bands that are in that 0.01%, they get actually lucky and actually get to play concerts and then bigger concerts and then get a record contract and get a gold record and all these things that come along. You know, the Hall Of Fame stuff and all this, and it comes along and then suddenly there’s this tribute record. You just kind of pinch yourself and go, ‘What the heck?’ Like these musicians and singers are incredible in their own right, We’re fans of so many of them, already. Maybe we should have been doing the tribute records to them. So yeah, it’s a once in a lifetime experience. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. It certainly is a really nice thing.”
BraveWords: How much actual personal interaction did you have with any of these songs or any of these people? Or was it just all Mike kind of just moving it from computer to computer?
Moore: “Yeah, really, Mike had the wheel on the ship, and he was steering it and navigating it. He would flip rough cuts and stuff to Mike and Rik and I to listen to and comment on. But, you know, most of our comments were, ‘Yeah man, keep going. This is awesome,’ like, ‘Listen to that guitar solo,’ or ‘Holy smokes, what a vocal.’ I mean, the people that he’s got on there, it’s a who’s who of musicians and singers. And there just was nothing for us to really do. And you know, not everyone decided to stick to kind of like I’ll call it ‘Triumphs arrangement’, or whatever, you know? Several times there were some really unique styles that were layered over and really took songs in different directions and so on. Sometimes it was a blend and sometimes it was fairly close to the original.”
BraveWords: I have to ask you this question because I grew up in southern Ontario, listening to Triumph on this thing called AM and FM radio.
Moore: “Well, I’d say that some of our songs are staples of classic rock radio, and I don’t really know if we get more airplay as a result of this or not. I would suspect yes. I mean, the last couple of weeks in Canada on the Shazam chart, ‘Lay It On The Line’ went to number one, and then the next week was number three, then number seven, and then number eight. So, to put one of these songs 40 years later in the top ten shows you there’s a lot of interest, and that interest is coming from people that probably never saw the band, that are younger. Because, you know, our fans that are there, they know the song, they know who the band is, there’s no mystery about that. So that was exciting to see that. And I experience that a lot with young people today that, one way or the other figure out who I am, and start asking me questions about Triumph. I’m like, ‘You never got to see the band, it’s been YouTube or hearing from your parents or whatever the case may be.’ And it’s nice. A lot a lot of young people do like hard rock and they have respect for starting right there at Led Zeppelin like we did, and it’s great to see music pass forward. Of course, in my generation and probably in yours, we were never really into our parents’ music, ever. I know I wasn’t. Although I gained an appreciation for music, from my mother and my father, but not into their music they were listening to. Now that’s not the case. A lot of the kids here in Toronto like Q107 and Boom and they play classic rock. And lots of kids listen to Boom and Q and stuff. They’re listening to songs that were recorded many years ago. And maybe there’s just not enough hard rock out there right now.”
BraveWords: Well, I can feed the world with hard rock. Do you miss that golden era of hearing music on the radio and MuchMusic?
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because after Triumph, after we stopped performing with Rik in 1988 we had a bit of a hiatus for a couple years. It was a pivotal time in my life personally, because it was after my father had passed and I’m an only child, so I wanted to be in town and stayed here to make sure my mother was okay. And I also wanted to be there for my young kids and not be an absentee father. So I had this desire to be here anyway. I wasn’t so much longing after returning to what was, I was kind of looking at what’s the frontier in front of me? And I never wanted to get out of music, because I love music. And so, I was getting behind the scenes in Metalworks Studios and growing that. And then subsequently starting our sound and light division, and starting our school. They were all things that were great, fun projects. And now I’ve extended that into a music charity that I just started over the last few years in Canada that we’re launching (visit https://metalworksinstitute.com/about/). And yeah, I have a lot of things that are related to music that keep me really pumped up. So, as opposed to missing those or wanting to go back, to answer your question specifically, I’m more like hey, I like to look back at it. It’s fun. A great experience. And I think the three of us were super lucky because we met each other. And most bands fail. And a lot of it, where the luck comes in is, you know, who do you meet? How would we have The Beatles if John and Paul hadn’t met in art school and they had gone to different schools in different towns, then maybe we would have had no Beatles. So it’s kind of how I look at it. Mike had his bands, Rik had his bands, I had my bands, and none of those bands did anything. And suddenly with Triumph, it was like all of a sudden there’s rocket fuel in the tank and away it goes. Almost, like, has its own momentum. But the luck is getting the three individuals together, agreeing on a direction musically, and I think in our case too, like agreeing on the theatrical nature of what our presentation was going to be. We were trying to fill the stage, if you will, with three guys – but still be able to fill the stage, and hopefully when we got to the big stage, which we did, of course, be able to fill the big stage.”
BraveWords: Triumph were able to figure their songwriting craft really early on with two big hits in 1979 (from Just A Game), “Lay It On The Line” and “Hold On”, especially in the United States. But how did CanCon affect all of this at the same time?
Moore: “CanCon was good for Canadian bands. There’s been a lot of arguments about it. I don’t really understand the argument. I think it’s a really simple concept. The government legislated that 30% of Canadian airplay had to be Canadian content, or something along those lines. I’m not an expert in this area. So it just meant Canadian bands got a second glance from the program directors that they might not have otherwise. The argument against it, of course, is a lot of bands couldn’t translate across the border into America. They were just homegrown talent and they did well in their hometown or in Canada, but couldn’t make the success go elsewhere in the world, so therefore they shouldn’t have had subsidized airplay. I don’t buy that. I think that bands succeed or fail in different jurisdictions or different regions, just sometimes again, through the luck of the draw, happenstance, and how much time they spend in the region, things of that nature. Triumph, in our case, CanCon helped us to get more airplay in Canada. But when we sailed across the border, America greeted us with open arms, and we spent most of our touring days through all 50 states, and you know, CanCon wasn’t helping us there. We got, you know, tons of airplay all over the United States. I don’t know what conclusions you draw from that.”
BraveWords: Well, you were also releasing a string of incredible some great rock records.
Moore: “Well, it’s nice of you to say that. I mean, I just think we were paying attention. We weren’t out there partying and, you know, being crazy on the road. I mean we did have a bit of fun, but most of our fun was related to humour. So that was one of the reasons when we went on the stage, like, everything was approached more like a sports game. It’s almost like – back to hockey – one of the things that I remember about the Leafs actually. The first time we played Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, and at the time I realized I’m sitting in the Toronto Maple Leaf dressing room as I’m, you know, putting on my gear, if you will. And, you know, loosening up, and taping up my sticks, and doing the eucalyptus oil so I can try to sing – and I’m in the Leafs’ dressing room. And it’s just this kind of thing where you go, ‘Hey, I’m in the Leafs’ dressing room. This is really cool.’ So anyway, those were good, man. I got to be there.”
BraveWords: Do you remember at that Triumph show seeing Harold Ballard in his little booth watching you guys?
Moore: “It’s funny, I remember some things about Harold Ballard. And yeah, I think he really liked Triumph. I remember yesterday, I saw somebody sent a ticket stub – it went across my radar – and it was Triumph with Foghat opening for us at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. So that would have been during a New York swing because we would do Meadowlands Arena in Jersey and then we would do Nassau Coliseum. And I remember we got the call from Harold. There was a young lady that wanted to see our show, and would the good boys in Triumph be kind enough to leave some tickets at the box office? So our manager did that. When we came back to Toronto, I think, you know, he was asked for some kind of return favour, I don’t know exactly what, but yeah, those were for the days when Harold was the king at MLG. Yeah. And his son, Billy Ballard, became very friendly with Triumph.”
BraveWords: Very nice, very nice.
Moore: “And Michael Cole, of course.”
BraveWords: Right. Let’s stick with the U.S., because obviously I wasn’t at the show, I was able to see it as a simulcast – the US Festival is still like a tattoo on my brain. Did you guys feel that you fit into Heavy Metal Day? You guys kicked ass, but how did you feel with this whole event? It was just insane. Woodstock.
Moore: “Yeah, I felt like we fit in. You know, people have different definitions. I mean, some people thought Triumph was more progressive rock. Some people thought we were more hard rock, but not heavy metal. I mean, these genres, the nuances between these genres were just starting to be understood. But, if you look at, say, Scorpions, who were on there, what’s the difference between Scorpions and a Triumph or a Van Halen for that matter? You know, you’ve got guitar solos, you’ve got somewhat melodic vocals. You know, when you get Judas Priest in there, they were obviously, they played right before us. And I love Judas Priest, and they’re a little more what I’d call metal in their approach. Same thing with Ozzy, who was on there. But then again, Ozzy had a lot of different shades to his music. You know, Van Halen, they had some poppy stuff, and they had some stuff that was harder-edged and different sort of contexts. Between the era that they were in, or the album I should say, that they were working on at the time, and I thought it was a great bill, to be honest. I thought all the bands, there was a natural progression between the bands as they played, and I thought the audience got what they were looking for. Like that day was a massive success from the standpoint of crowd size.”
BraveWords: Yeah, maybe not financially, unfortunately, right?
Moore: “Well I got to know Steve very well, and Steve was not out to make money on the show. And I think he set it up in such a way that it was impossible to make money. He pretty much constructed the venue. He brought in the biggest sound system, it was a XXL sound system and a XXL stage and XXL lighting. And then the accoutrements for the venue, he just spared no expense, and then he overpaid all the bands. Just to keep everybody happier, or something. Because he was a new promoter, a lot of artists, their managers and the agents would be like, ‘Well, we’re not going to play for somebody new, but a known promoter.’ So Bill Graham, being the kind of the godfather of California promoters, was brought in. And then Barry Fey was involved as well, and Barry Fey was the big massive promoter in the Denver region. So you had these really, really, the best in class promoters that were involved. And so it wasn’t just Steve, who was the guy or the computer industry, who wanted to do concerts. He brought in the best people. Right from the concert industry. And that’s why there were no screw ups. That’s why other than losing a pile of money, which is – it wouldn’t be the first big festival to lose a pile of money – but I think in this case, his intentions, because I got to know Steve very well, his intentions were not to make money. Where I’m going with that is that he had this idea of the satellite connection to Russia and some people confused the ‘US’ and thought it was the U.S – it wasn’t the U.S. at all, it was ‘US’, and the reason that he chose that word is he saw music as a form of bonding people to each other, which to this day, that’s very important to me, and paradoxically, in my charity that’s what I’m trying to do is build up music learning and the therapeutic benefits of music to help kids, cognitively and socially and in every other way, because I really think music’s a medicine. Well, he thought that way at that time, and that’s why he looked at Russia and he said, ‘Well, if the Cold War is there, if that’s where our perceived problems are in the world, perhaps music can create a thread that will pull us closer to each other.’ So, that’s kind of where Steve was coming from. He’d made so much money on Apple. He didn’t care about making any money on this concert.”
BraveWords: Silly question. Do you remember what was on your rider?
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. Like, all bands have riders, and the quintessential joke was the Van Halen and no brown M&Ms thing, and other jokes about that. And what we did is we had a rider that was built as if we were holding a reception at the end of the show, because occasionally you had to do that, like in LA where your record company was located, or New York where your record company was located, and all of a sudden it was like the cavalry would come to the gig, and you’d have to figure out a way to have a meet and greet and stuff. But what our tour manager would do is essentially just go cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Triumph are very simple. Like they just want ham and cheese sandwiches in the dressing room and, you know, some Diet Coke or whatever. And you could cut all the booze rider and all this fancy stuff because really it was there only if we needed it for other people. And you know a lot of the gigs, this is the thing, our motivation was not just to play the Chicagos and the Clevelands and Detroits and the big, big cities, you know, New York. That wasn’t the motivation. We wanted to play. We went to Chicago and we wanted to go to the areas surrounding it. We wanted to go to Rockford. We wanted to go to Champagne. We wanted to go to Peoria. We wanted to go, you know, it wasn’t just Indianapolis. It was like moving over into Terra Haute and things like that. And we had that approach of playing for the people, getting to right in front of the people, which is why I think our fans have been so monumentally loyal, because we would go to where they were and didn’t just play the major markets and have that you know, if you couldn’t get there and you couldn’t afford the ticket, then too bad. We went into the smaller markets where the tickets were less and the venues were closer to the fans.”
BraveWords: But let’s go back where it all began. Drummer’s that also sing are a rare breed. And you have mastered both mastered both, making Triumph a truly unique entity in the rock world with some memorable moments as a vocalist including “Rock & Roll Machine”, “I Live For The Weekend”, “Allied Forces”, “When The Lights Go Down” and “Spellbound”. There’s a lot of people that have issues walking and chewing gum, for example (joking). How does a drummer sing and sing in tune? And where was the influence for you to do that? Tell me about that history.
Moore: “That’s a funny story. So, I started singing because I was playing in this band when I was a teenager and the singer quit and we had a job at Honey Harbour, which is just in cottage country.”
BraveWords: I know where Honey Harbour is. I used to have family there. It’s a beautiful destination in cottage country (about two hours and 15 minutes north of Toronto).
Moore: “Yeah! And it was in one of these old fashioned wooden dance pavilions that has no windows, so it’s just like, loaded with mosquitoes in the summer. So we were going to get 100 bucks and we were not losing that 100 bucks anytime soon because we had to pay the rental on our PA and stuff like that. And so, you know, these are the days of you all piling into the back of one van. You had no crew, no roadies. You just did it all yourself. And, so I phoned a buddy of mine in another band who was a lead singer, and I said, ‘Joe, can you help me out?.’ He said, ‘What?’, and I said, ‘Well, I got to teach everybody in our band to sing all at once because our singer quit.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll come over.’ So he came to a rehearsal and he lined us all up and said, ‘Ok, let me hear you. Ok. Let me hear you. Okay. Let me hear you. Okay, you’re all terrible. Let’s see. Okay, I’m going give you this, I’m going to give you this, I’m going to you this.’ And then he did individual coaching. So with me, it was deemed that I could maybe sound somewhat remotely like John Kay from Steppenwolf, right? And so the first song he gave me was ‘Sookie Sookie,’ and he said, ‘Okay, so you can play the song, you’re fine on drums.’ And I had the microphone here. He said, ‘I’m going to get next to you. I’m going to sing the song as you’re playing drums, and on one mic together you are going to sing along with me.’ And so, you know, that’s exactly what we did. So we played ‘Sookie Sookie.’ Eventually, I could actually do it. And then he says, ‘Okay, now we’re going to do ‘Magic Carpet Ride’,’ or whatever the next song was, or, ‘We’re going to do ‘Born To Be Wild’,’ right? So, I started like that, and then I got moved over into some Hendrix songs and stuff, and he did it with each guy in the band. So, the rest is history. We went, we played, we got bitten by mosquitoes, and we got 100 bucks. So it was a great outcome. And, you know, those are the final Spinal Tap stories that, you know, bands are all familiar with. So when Triumph started, I thought, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t have to sing because Rik Emmett, he’s great.’ And so we went to the first rehearsal and after we jammed we decided he was in the band. And they looked at me and said, ‘Well, like Rik’s really high, and plus he’s really energetic on stage, and Mike’s really energetic on stage.’ So there’s a lot of, not choreography, but sort of like unbridled enthusiasm going on, on the front stage. And so to really engage the audience and do some of the things we wanted to do, we were starting to dream up lighting effects of what would happen here and what would happen there.”
“And Rik can’t just be stuck in front of his mic stand,” Moore continues. “So, Gil, over to you, you’re going to have to sing, and I’m like going, ‘No, no, I can’t.’ I thought I was done with that. And that’s exactly what happened. So we had no original songs because we were just starting. So it was like, ‘You used to sing Jimi Hendrix songs, right?,’ I went, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ So, ok, here we go, Hendrix again. And then I got some Deep Purple and so on, and Rik did all the Led Zeppelin stuff and you know, that was that was it. It was through necessity. But the benefit, I think, I didn’t figure it out until decades later – so here at Metalworks, I did a fundraiser for Baycrest, which is a dementia hospital here in Toronto, and what they had asked was, could they play our documentary for a bunch of their donors and then bring the donors to one of our auditoriums here at our school, and would I do a Q&A related to the documentary, and so on? I said, ‘Sure, let’s do it, let’s raise the money.’ And through that, I met their chief neuroscientist, a wonderful woman named Allison Sekuler. She was on the podium after my interview, and she was pointing at the video screen, and it was her playing drums on the screen. And when I asked her afterwards – she asked me, first, ‘Well, I’d like to use sounds with dementia patients,’ and I went, ‘Sure, that would be great. I’m not sure how it would work.’ We had to figure that out, but I said, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘Well, I think it’d be great for them. And I’ve got some ideas about how it might work.’ And I said, ‘Well, why did you take up drums? I’m curious.’ And she said because drums fire more neurones, and there’s more activity in the brain than with other instruments. The first joke I made was, ‘Well, why weren’t you singing at the same time?’ So we had a good laugh, and then I told her another four or five of my drummer jokes. Some are good, some are not so good, and we became very friendly. Talking about drums and drum jokes, and so on. And so she’s involved with the LIVELab (Large Interactive Virtual Environment Lab) at McMaster University where they’re doing amazing brain research on music in the brain, and, you know, they can put two dozen skull caps on people and test them while they’re dancing to music or listening to music or playing, performing music, or engineering music any number of these things. And she introduced me to that world and I started to realize, yeah, actually, I was lucky that I was singing because it is, as you say, like it’s another thing – your activity, your brain is doing all this stuff with your arms and hands, but you’re also remembering the words. You’re also engaged in this physical activity of trying to maintain the pitch and so on, which is really difficult to do when you’re playing drums and your guitars are blaring, your pitch kind of goes out the window a lot. Unless you’re some of these guys on the tribute album that are unbelievable world-class singers, like Deen Castronovo, for example. I mean, golly. Or Joey Belladonna – wow, there’s a singing drummer that can really sing. But, I don’t know, if you get Mike Levine with his massive bass guitar blaring in the back of your head on one side, and then Rik Emmett’s Marshall stacks over here, and you’re trying to hear what the heck you’re doing. It’s not simple. It’s a lot of fun trying.”
BraveWords: I just finished Brothers from Alex Van Halen, and I remember one of the brothers of one of my playmates in Barrie Minor Hockey said, ‘You have to hear this Van Halen record.’ So, we listened to the Van Halen record and I heard ‘Eruption,’ and I’m like, ‘There can’t be anything better than ‘Eruption’ out there,’ and he said, ‘No, you need to listen to this.’ And he put on “Rock And Roll Machine”.
Moore: “Yeah, that’s quite the solo. And, you know, the thing that was kind of cool is, I mean, Rik changed it up a little bit over the years, but he stayed true to a lot of the original aspects. And I never get tired of it. I don’t think the audience did either. Obviously I looked at it like, ‘Hey, this is great. I get a break.’ And in music that’s called a test set. So I’d always look at Mike Levine and go, ‘Test set’ and he’d knock that solo and then we would start up again after it was over. And I think a lot of people really identify with that song. And on the tribute album, you know, Mike picked Sebastian Bach to sing it because Sebastian had sung that song on stage with Triumph more than once. Just in the house, in the audience, like hey, Sebastian, come on up here and jam with us. And he would sing ‘Rock And Roll Machine’. So we knew he could smoke the vocal, big time. And yeah, that’s how that song ended up getting fitted.”
BraveWords: I was speaking with Mike Fraser from Little Mountain Studios, and he one of the reasons that studio attracted so many bands – I mean, AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake – was the loading bay and the drum set up. AC/DC drummer Chris Slade told me the loading bay had this thunderous sound. Tell me about what attracted bands to Metalworks?
Moore: “I think part of it is the sound of the studio, for sure, because in the very early days, there was just studio one, whereas now we’ve got nearly ten studios here, including the ones in our schools and stuff. But that first studio was modelled after the studios from England, like all the early studios were, with the tongue and groove pine, and a lot of live reflections on the live floor. So the live floor was the wild west. It wasn’t engineered the way studios are now with acoustical prediction software and things like that. This was not designed in AutoCAD, this was designed by, ‘Hey, let’s put this over there.’ That’s how it was designed. Now, by people who knew what they were doing, I’m not talking about someone that wasn’t an engineer, but nonetheless, kind of like if you thought about cooking before, you know, before the cookbook was written and a chef was like, ‘I know how to make this recipe, and I’m just going to put a bit of this and a bit of that. Trust me.’ So that’s how those rooms were designed. And I think we had a loading bay as well. And actually before we built Studio 2, no, before we built Studio 6, we always had not only a loading bay, but a warehouse as well. So we had different acoustic environments. We also had a ton of what I’ll call the real old fashioned reverbs, which would simulate, you know, a larger room, let’s say, or those sorts of things. But in an ideal situation recording studio, you have smaller studios and larger studios, and the smaller studios provide more – they provide a room compression that you don’t have in a big room. And they also sometimes can produce different impacts in terms of the elimination of standing waves, and so on, if they’re engineered properly. Whereas in our big Studio 1, like, no, you had to figure out as an engineer how to control all of that, which led to some different nuances to the shading of things that could be quite interesting, depending on the mic placement and the performance and the skill of the recording engineer. To this day, I mean, I think that’s preferred. It’s almost one of those things the way, you know, audiophiles prefer vinyl to anything else. You know, engineers, if they have their druthers when they’re recording, they still prefer those great Neumann microphones that were made 60 years ago. They still prefer Neve consoles that were made 50 or 60 years ago. They still prefer the style of room that was developed in the UK many, many years ago, and brought over to North America. Yeah, that hasn’t changed much. Musicians dig it, too. They just, the vibe. Even though now most of the recordings are out of Pro Tools you know, they’re digital recordings, but there’s still a lot of analog gear in those rooms. And the consoles themselves, primarily are analog consoles, like all the Neves are. The live consoles have really made it big time into live performing, like pretty much all the live performing consoles now are digital, but back into the studio, like the real deal is the analog stuff.”
BraveWords: As you were growing up as a band, were you paying attention to other three-piece legendary bands that were making beautiful noise? Like with that in question marks, and no disrespect. Like Cream, ZZ Top, Rush, Motörhead. And I love Exciter, who also has a drummer that sings. But were you looking at these bands saying, ‘Okay, you only got three people. So how are you creating?’
Moore: “Yeah, we definitely, before we found Rik, Mike and I, Mike’s band before, he’d always been in big bands with horns and stuff. So he’d have like 10 people in his bands. And I was like in the four or five range. But I always thought, there’s always one guy getting kicked out, or somebody joining, so it’s always that one, the fifth guy, that comes and goes. And so when we were chatting about the idea of maybe – we were almost ready to quit, to be honest with you. It’s like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what we should do. Let’s take two weeks off and then quit.’ Because it’s hard. And we just decided, no, we’ll take one shot, one serious shot now, because if this doesn’t work, nothing’s going to work. Okay. So we sat down to ourselves and we said, three guys, let’s start there, because we love the idea of a power trio and you kind of look at what, you know, Cream, you know, with Clapton, you know, ZZ Top you mentioned, which is pretty much my favourite band to this day. ZZ was starting up, just before that, and big sound for a three piece band. Jimi Hendrix, I mean, what can you say about how Hendrix impacted everybody? And also took the performing thing to another level with, you know, lighting his guitar on fire, all this stuff that he did on stage. You could just see so many of his lyrics tied into what he was doing and the energy level. And in the bands I played in before Triumph, where we would play Hendrix material, I just loved every single song, and the ferocity that Mitch Mitchell had on the kit, there was an inspiration, although I was a blues drummer beforehand, so this was kind of like a new place, this three piece band power trio thing. It was quite a leap, I’ll say, from, you know, playing R&B and blues, Chicago Blues and so on, into that area. But it was, it was by design. Motörhead hadn’t come along yet, so Motörhead weren’t part of it. I would say really I think Hendrix, Cream, and maybe to a lesser degree ZZ Top were the groups that really got us thinking that way, that maybe, hey, maybe we could do this with three guys. But we have to have the right three guys, because you have to cover a lot of ground with three musicians.”
BraveWords: Just a couple more quickies for you. Some left-field fun questions. I call it the BraveWords Rapid Fire. What was the moment when you decided music was your life and did you have family support?
Moore: “Yeah, I know I broke my dad’s heart and probably my mom’s too, when I quit school, because I quit school very, very early to be a drummer. And that’s why I started so young, is because I didn’t even finish high school. And I was very fortunate to have the parents that I’d had. They were, I miss them so much, right to this day, both of them. And my dad was, I could tell he was kind of holding back tears when I told him, you know, like I’m out, I quit. I signed myself out of school. And he said, ‘Well, if you’re going to be a drummer, Gil, be the best drummer that you could possibly be.’ And that was his advice. And I was really lucky that I had parental support, which now, you know, having a school and seeing kids that don’t have it in some cases. And I feel like, gee, I was the luckiest guy. And you take your parents for granted when you’re a kid for the most part, you don’t appreciate them and like Joni said, you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone. Fully. So I just try to – I asked my dad when he was 75, I said, ‘You know, I can never pay you back for what you did in my life.’ Like he not only stood behind me, going into drums, but he helped because we didn’t know how to manage money or anything, and he managed all the money for us and made sure that our agents got paid and that everybody in the band got a cheque every week so we could keep going and pay our bills. He taught me business inside out, which, without, I never would have been able to, you know, do the things I’ve been able to do through Metalworks. Yeah, I wish everybody could have great parents, but it’s not like that. You don’t choose. You don’t choose your parents. It’s just something that happens to you.”
BraveWords: Who’s your rock star?
Moore: “Billy Gibbons would be one, for sure. Just somehow what he turns out of that neck of his guitar, I don’t know where it comes from. Some place special. Another guitar player that is not with us anymore, Leslie West. The first day I ever heard ‘Mississippi Queen,’ I thought, that’s just some of the most sweet guitar I’ve ever heard. And, you know, I liked blues guitars, so I liked Albert King, for example. But when I heard Leslie, you know, kind of taking what I would call that blues style and making it something, I don’t know, even more than – you know, I’m not a guitar player, obviously, so I’m not the judge of guitar players, but from my position as either an audience member or a drummer or whichever I was, yeah, he just had that feel on the guitar that was beyond belief. And so those two guys, I guess when I look back, Billy Gibbons and Leslie West have been my two guys, but I got to tell you, Tim, like I was blessed to have played with Rik Emmett. And then after, you know, the main run with Triumph, because Rik is, as you know, is a phenomenal guitar player, and then to play with Phil X, who is a completely different style, but also just a phenomenal virtuoso guitarist. So I feel really blessed. Any time in a three-piece band that the guitar player isn’t top drawer, well, you’re not even getting past first base. The guitar player is ultimately the most important instrument in a power trio.”
BraveWords: Have you ever asked for an autograph?
Moore: “No, but my wife did once. I was at a golf tournament and Jack Nicholas was very nearby. And I was, ‘I’d love to have Jack’s autograph.’ And my wife said, ‘Go get it, go get it.’ And I said, ‘No! I’m not going to ask for his autograph. I don’t do that.’ And so she said, ‘I’ll get it for you.’ Pretty blonde lady walks up, and before you know it, the sea parted and Jack was like, ‘Oh, yes, young lady. Here you go.’ So. That’s how I got Jack Nicholas’s autograph. The only other autograph I wanted was Frank Mahovlich’s, and I got that too, because his son recorded here at Metalworks. And yeah, I’ve got that one.”
BraveWords: What do you think about the vinyl craze? And what was your first vinyl purchase?
Moore: “I was buying singles, and they were R&B singles. So you, a lot of the stuff from Stax Gold, stuff that Atlantic was putting out at the time like Wilson Pickett and, you know, James Brown on King Records, but also some of the British invasion stuff, you know, like The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five, and so on. All the stuff on Capitol, those are all 45, obviously. But I pretty soon migrated into the blues. Like the British invasion really didn’t impact me too much. I was aware of it, but I kind of migrated into the blues and then got past the singles and started, you know, albums. Bobby Blue Bland and Albert King and, you know, learned all about Howling Wolf and some of the greats in that era. And I’ve never, ever gotten past loving the blues or having the blues as my favourite music. In terms of what I’ll call popular music, for listening, I prefer classical music to anything else. But it depends on the time. Classical music is to relax. If you’ve got the family in the SUV and we’re going to the beach, okay, time for Billy Gibbons.”
BraveWords: She’s Got legs, right?
Moore: “Stand back.”
BraveWords: Triumph are well-known for their “Blinding Light Show”! Do you remember your first concert? And what is a band that blew your mind, watching live?
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, I gotta say, Johnny Winter, Ted Nugent, I would say those two. Just the sheer power that Ted had and the athletic nature. He was a young man and the way he just approached the stage and Derek St. Holmes was with him and they just had such a tight, you know, rhythm engine going. And it’s also, there’s also a magic moment. It’s like, well, where did you see him, when did you see him? Who are you with? It’s just like so many fans relate to a band, they relate to a single concert. I know where I was sitting. I know what I was doing. And I just thought, that was when Free For All – I thought, wow, that’s a freight train of a record. And you know, I’d say the other one was Johnny Winter. So, again, similar in that, there was the guitar, in Johnny’s case, again, three piece, I forgot about that when I saw him the night in particular here in Toronto at the Gardens. And you know, when he came out, and we played many shows with him later on in his later years. When he was suffering with his health and so on, it was kind of hard to watch that, but he still wanted to keep playing. But the performances, again, different style of chorus, very, very bluesy, very, very, very much old school blues guitar, but combined with rock. And, you know, the way the rhythms were built around the songs and the way with the three piece format, the way they were delivered. And of course, Johnny’s vocals, I just thought were completely underrated. I thought the way he put his own signature on the songs that he was doing. I remember hearing him do ‘Jumping Jack Flash,’ and I thought nobody could possibly do ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ better than Johnny Winter, not to mention ‘Rock And Roll Hootchie Coo,’ that was another one who was just like – I could go on and on about Johnny Winter and those songs. I think those were probably the concerts for me that were the most. One last one. When I was younger still, by a complete fluke, I got to attend, like, a private concert with Buddy Rich and his band. And I got to stand – Buddy was only on like an eight inch riser and I got to stand right at the front because I was a kid and people said, ‘Oh, let the kids be at the front.’ So I was, you know, maybe three feet from his bass drum. So it was better than a ringside seat. I mean, I was like literally, I could reach out if I’d wanted to stick my hand out – and I didn’t, but I could have reached out and touched his bass drum. And to experience Buddy Rich, if any drummer can relate to this, like all the great drummers that are on our tribute album, I’m sure they’d also say, ‘Holy smokes. That must have been something.’ To be young and be right in front of these things and you’re listening and you’re kind of going, ‘He must have more than two arms. He must have more than two legs.’ It’s just an unmistakeable – it sounds like the cavalry is coming at you from that drum set. But it’s all nuanced, to the flourishes within his band, and the subtle changes in rhythm, and so on and so forth. There’s no one, in my humble opinion, there’s no one that’s ever achieved on drums what Buddy Rich achieved. Never since.”
BraveWords: So I have to ask, did Neil Peart ever hear that story? He released the Burning For Buddy tribute. He was also a big Keith Moon fan.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve heard that Neil mentioned in interviews he was influenced by Keith Moon. You know, I’d spoken to Neil a couple times here at Metalworks when Rush was recording and so on, didn’t bring that particular Buddy Rich story up. But I know that he was also a super Buddy Rich fan, because of course, his recording that was centred around Buddy Rich. And, it’s too bad that we’ve lost Neil. What a great musician, a great Canadian as well, and a wonderful person. And one of the greatest drummers of all time, for sure. Just an amazing, amazing Canadian Neil is.”
BraveWords: Wow, what a sombre note. But I’m a great Rush fan too.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s a sombre note, but I mean the good news is that Geddy and Alex are great, you know, God bless Alex, he played on our tribute record with Envy Of None and our Canadian friends in that band, Alfio (Annibalini) and Andy (Curran) and David, and so on. And of course, you know, Maiah Wynne with those amazing vocals and took ‘Blinding Light Show’ in a whole new direction – made it an Envy Of None song. It doesn’t sound anything like Triumph. We thought it was wonderful.”
Watch the entire chat on Streaming For Vengeance below:
The post TRIUMPH’s Gil Moore Talks Hockey, All Star Tributes – “‘Lay It On The Line’ Is The Closest I’m Ever Going To Get To The Stanley Cup” appeared first on BraveWords - Where Music Lives.
Continue reading...
BraveWords: Since we are both hockey guys, we have to address the elephant in the room. And were you witnessing that tragic ending? Are you a big fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs to begin with?
Moore: “Yeah, yeah, I really am because when I was a kid that’s exactly what I wanted to do before I played drums. It was the neighbourhood I grew up in, in Riverdale. You could have lined up all us kids and said, ‘Okay, who wants to be a fire chief?’ Nobody. ‘Who wants to play music?’ Nobody. ‘Who wants to be a doctor?’ Nobody. And so on. ‘Who wants to play in NHL?’ (puts his hand up). For everybody. 100%. And, our dads were at the time, taking us to hockey practises at 4:30 in the morning.”
BraveWords: I know, I was there to.
Moore: “The drill, you know? Never forget that. And it was a great time. But you know, when you really look at, we were in the Toronto Township Hockey League and you look at the Greater Toronto region, how many people there are and how many kids were in hockey. When I came back to those days, of all the – we started in Bantam and then we went to Tadpole B, and then we went to Tadpole A, and so on, and as we were getting a little older, there were one or two kids that were outstanding in the whole league. I mean, that somehow managed to make it into the NHL, but it was like that less than 1%. So, you know, I finally realized, well, it’s not going to happen for me. So this whole thing with Rogers Sportsnet and the playoffs this year, I guess them playing ‘Lay It On The Line’ like it was the national anthem, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to the Stanley Cup.”
BraveWords: But I’m a Barrie boy. I’m not the biggest Leafs fan, but I’m also a centennial baby, which means I was born in 1967, which is the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. That’s quite the dry spell!
Moore: “Well, I feel like with hockey, the players – compare this to music. I think athletes in general, but hockey players specifically, like they get a bad rap because they go from being heroes to bombs overnight. And, you know, if it had been that way with music, if I knew that, you know, so we step on the stage in Cincinnati and we’re heroes, and we step on the stage in Chicago and people boo us, I don’t think I ever would have played. I don’t think Triumph would have kept going. We would have quit. I mean, we, and the same thing you could say for any other band that was doing really well, the Journeys and the Rushes, and the Judas Priests, and so on. They were around us, but they never encountered that. But in hockey, Mitch Marner got just kind of murdered by social media after this is over. And I’m like, ‘I don’t get it’, with the fans. I don’t think it’s good for kids to hear this kind of negativity. And it’s just, I get the fact that, okay, so he makes a huge salary, okay there were these big expectations, but he’s playing a game, you know? Like, I guarantee you that none of these guys that ever have a game that doesn’t work out are going into the game saying, ‘I’m going to cruise, I’m going to mail it in.’ They’re out there doing their best. But, you know hockey, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen. And I guess if you’ve played the game, even at the level I did as a kid, you realize, yeah, sometimes the puck bounces left, sometimes it bounces right, sometimes you get the deflection, sometimes you don’t. I just think the fans get too hard on when they’re dissatisfied with their own home team, and I think they should be more supportive. It’s great to be gracious in victory, but it’s even more important, I think, to be gracious in defeat, sometimes.”
BraveWords: Now, tell me about working with the NHL and your anthem “Lay It On The Line” that is being used. It’s the perfect hockey song.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s funny how you figure that out after the fact. I mean, it’s kind of like how we realized after the fact that a lot of the things that fans relate to about Triumph, and what they hold on to, relate to, the lyrics, mostly the positive lyrics in some of our songs, and we started to get this in the latter stages. And I think it’s because people are getting older, they reflect back on their youth and so on. Sometimes they go through some hard times with family issues or whatever, and they – more and more and more we get communications and photos that come across our Facebook or directly, even arrive here at Metalworks Studios on the doorstep that they got through tough times with these songs, or got through tough times with this song. You know, they have a tattoo on this arm with one lyric, I have a tattoo on this arm with another lyric, and you can see that there’s been some of these impacts. So I think with hockey, it was kind of the same thing. It was, there’s those positive lyrics, the ‘Follow Your Heart’ lyrics or, you know, the ‘Fight The Good Fight’ lyrics. They’ve over time, that’s what started to become what Triumph is associated with. So that’s just my take on it. How the NHL maybe or Rogers Sportsnet, you know, looked at it and went, ‘Well, if we get a Canadian band, it has messaging within their lyrics about perseverance, working hard, success, and those kinds of things.’ So we kind of just, we were the round peg in the round hole, I suppose. We were very grateful for it. I mean, you know, we’re all hockey fans. You know, we love the Leafs, but, you know, we love the Oilers too. I mean, we love Canadian hockey. So we’re here to support Canadian hockey. I mean, obviously, we live in Leafs territory here. It would have been lovely to see, you know, the Leafs were always my personal heroes and it would have been lovely to see them. I love being confused with Doug Gilmore, which happens to me for about once a year.” (laughs)
BraveWords: I can see it.
Moore: “And I go right along with it, like ‘Yeah, I was a great hockey player, you know, thanks for noticing!’, you know?”
BraveWords: Now, let’s talk about this tribute album. What an incredible lineup.
Moore: “That was was Mike Clink using his knowledge that he’s built up over the years of working with all the really great hard rock musicians. And, I think being located in Los Angeles, where he is, you know, he’s in the epicentre of where a lot of the recording takes place. And of course, being associated with the Guns N’ Roses camp and all the great work he’s done with Guns, there’s a lot of musicians surrounding that camp. Slash has done a lot of solo projects and the other guys have as well. So there’s kind of a group there. And I think the other thing is in consulting with Phil X because Phil was the first guy Mike called. Obviously, Phil’s a Triumph band member and he was like, ‘Phil, what do you think about this?’, and Phil was gung ho to do it. And you know, without Phil, without Mike, it wouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t something that Mike, Rik, and Gil were going to do. So it’s kind of like they grabbed the ball and they ran with it. And of course, our label were the ones that, you know, put up the idea and put up the funds in order to do it, because those recordings studios are expensive. And it took a long time because it was done during COVID.”
Moore: “Yeah, it really is touching and humbling, because obviously, like, we’re certainly not arrogant enough to think anybody should ever do a tribute to us. One of those things you never consider. You start a band, and you’re just trying to play another job at a high school gym or a local bar, and somehow get a little bit ahead. And then the bands that are in that 0.01%, they get actually lucky and actually get to play concerts and then bigger concerts and then get a record contract and get a gold record and all these things that come along. You know, the Hall Of Fame stuff and all this, and it comes along and then suddenly there’s this tribute record. You just kind of pinch yourself and go, ‘What the heck?’ Like these musicians and singers are incredible in their own right, We’re fans of so many of them, already. Maybe we should have been doing the tribute records to them. So yeah, it’s a once in a lifetime experience. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. It certainly is a really nice thing.”
BraveWords: How much actual personal interaction did you have with any of these songs or any of these people? Or was it just all Mike kind of just moving it from computer to computer?
Moore: “Yeah, really, Mike had the wheel on the ship, and he was steering it and navigating it. He would flip rough cuts and stuff to Mike and Rik and I to listen to and comment on. But, you know, most of our comments were, ‘Yeah man, keep going. This is awesome,’ like, ‘Listen to that guitar solo,’ or ‘Holy smokes, what a vocal.’ I mean, the people that he’s got on there, it’s a who’s who of musicians and singers. And there just was nothing for us to really do. And you know, not everyone decided to stick to kind of like I’ll call it ‘Triumphs arrangement’, or whatever, you know? Several times there were some really unique styles that were layered over and really took songs in different directions and so on. Sometimes it was a blend and sometimes it was fairly close to the original.”
BraveWords: I have to ask you this question because I grew up in southern Ontario, listening to Triumph on this thing called AM and FM radio.
Moore: “Well, I’d say that some of our songs are staples of classic rock radio, and I don’t really know if we get more airplay as a result of this or not. I would suspect yes. I mean, the last couple of weeks in Canada on the Shazam chart, ‘Lay It On The Line’ went to number one, and then the next week was number three, then number seven, and then number eight. So, to put one of these songs 40 years later in the top ten shows you there’s a lot of interest, and that interest is coming from people that probably never saw the band, that are younger. Because, you know, our fans that are there, they know the song, they know who the band is, there’s no mystery about that. So that was exciting to see that. And I experience that a lot with young people today that, one way or the other figure out who I am, and start asking me questions about Triumph. I’m like, ‘You never got to see the band, it’s been YouTube or hearing from your parents or whatever the case may be.’ And it’s nice. A lot a lot of young people do like hard rock and they have respect for starting right there at Led Zeppelin like we did, and it’s great to see music pass forward. Of course, in my generation and probably in yours, we were never really into our parents’ music, ever. I know I wasn’t. Although I gained an appreciation for music, from my mother and my father, but not into their music they were listening to. Now that’s not the case. A lot of the kids here in Toronto like Q107 and Boom and they play classic rock. And lots of kids listen to Boom and Q and stuff. They’re listening to songs that were recorded many years ago. And maybe there’s just not enough hard rock out there right now.”
BraveWords: Well, I can feed the world with hard rock. Do you miss that golden era of hearing music on the radio and MuchMusic?
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because after Triumph, after we stopped performing with Rik in 1988 we had a bit of a hiatus for a couple years. It was a pivotal time in my life personally, because it was after my father had passed and I’m an only child, so I wanted to be in town and stayed here to make sure my mother was okay. And I also wanted to be there for my young kids and not be an absentee father. So I had this desire to be here anyway. I wasn’t so much longing after returning to what was, I was kind of looking at what’s the frontier in front of me? And I never wanted to get out of music, because I love music. And so, I was getting behind the scenes in Metalworks Studios and growing that. And then subsequently starting our sound and light division, and starting our school. They were all things that were great, fun projects. And now I’ve extended that into a music charity that I just started over the last few years in Canada that we’re launching (visit https://metalworksinstitute.com/about/). And yeah, I have a lot of things that are related to music that keep me really pumped up. So, as opposed to missing those or wanting to go back, to answer your question specifically, I’m more like hey, I like to look back at it. It’s fun. A great experience. And I think the three of us were super lucky because we met each other. And most bands fail. And a lot of it, where the luck comes in is, you know, who do you meet? How would we have The Beatles if John and Paul hadn’t met in art school and they had gone to different schools in different towns, then maybe we would have had no Beatles. So it’s kind of how I look at it. Mike had his bands, Rik had his bands, I had my bands, and none of those bands did anything. And suddenly with Triumph, it was like all of a sudden there’s rocket fuel in the tank and away it goes. Almost, like, has its own momentum. But the luck is getting the three individuals together, agreeing on a direction musically, and I think in our case too, like agreeing on the theatrical nature of what our presentation was going to be. We were trying to fill the stage, if you will, with three guys – but still be able to fill the stage, and hopefully when we got to the big stage, which we did, of course, be able to fill the big stage.”
BraveWords: Triumph were able to figure their songwriting craft really early on with two big hits in 1979 (from Just A Game), “Lay It On The Line” and “Hold On”, especially in the United States. But how did CanCon affect all of this at the same time?
Moore: “CanCon was good for Canadian bands. There’s been a lot of arguments about it. I don’t really understand the argument. I think it’s a really simple concept. The government legislated that 30% of Canadian airplay had to be Canadian content, or something along those lines. I’m not an expert in this area. So it just meant Canadian bands got a second glance from the program directors that they might not have otherwise. The argument against it, of course, is a lot of bands couldn’t translate across the border into America. They were just homegrown talent and they did well in their hometown or in Canada, but couldn’t make the success go elsewhere in the world, so therefore they shouldn’t have had subsidized airplay. I don’t buy that. I think that bands succeed or fail in different jurisdictions or different regions, just sometimes again, through the luck of the draw, happenstance, and how much time they spend in the region, things of that nature. Triumph, in our case, CanCon helped us to get more airplay in Canada. But when we sailed across the border, America greeted us with open arms, and we spent most of our touring days through all 50 states, and you know, CanCon wasn’t helping us there. We got, you know, tons of airplay all over the United States. I don’t know what conclusions you draw from that.”
BraveWords: Well, you were also releasing a string of incredible some great rock records.
Moore: “Well, it’s nice of you to say that. I mean, I just think we were paying attention. We weren’t out there partying and, you know, being crazy on the road. I mean we did have a bit of fun, but most of our fun was related to humour. So that was one of the reasons when we went on the stage, like, everything was approached more like a sports game. It’s almost like – back to hockey – one of the things that I remember about the Leafs actually. The first time we played Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, and at the time I realized I’m sitting in the Toronto Maple Leaf dressing room as I’m, you know, putting on my gear, if you will. And, you know, loosening up, and taping up my sticks, and doing the eucalyptus oil so I can try to sing – and I’m in the Leafs’ dressing room. And it’s just this kind of thing where you go, ‘Hey, I’m in the Leafs’ dressing room. This is really cool.’ So anyway, those were good, man. I got to be there.”
BraveWords: Do you remember at that Triumph show seeing Harold Ballard in his little booth watching you guys?
Moore: “It’s funny, I remember some things about Harold Ballard. And yeah, I think he really liked Triumph. I remember yesterday, I saw somebody sent a ticket stub – it went across my radar – and it was Triumph with Foghat opening for us at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. So that would have been during a New York swing because we would do Meadowlands Arena in Jersey and then we would do Nassau Coliseum. And I remember we got the call from Harold. There was a young lady that wanted to see our show, and would the good boys in Triumph be kind enough to leave some tickets at the box office? So our manager did that. When we came back to Toronto, I think, you know, he was asked for some kind of return favour, I don’t know exactly what, but yeah, those were for the days when Harold was the king at MLG. Yeah. And his son, Billy Ballard, became very friendly with Triumph.”
BraveWords: Very nice, very nice.
Moore: “And Michael Cole, of course.”
BraveWords: Right. Let’s stick with the U.S., because obviously I wasn’t at the show, I was able to see it as a simulcast – the US Festival is still like a tattoo on my brain. Did you guys feel that you fit into Heavy Metal Day? You guys kicked ass, but how did you feel with this whole event? It was just insane. Woodstock.
Moore: “Yeah, I felt like we fit in. You know, people have different definitions. I mean, some people thought Triumph was more progressive rock. Some people thought we were more hard rock, but not heavy metal. I mean, these genres, the nuances between these genres were just starting to be understood. But, if you look at, say, Scorpions, who were on there, what’s the difference between Scorpions and a Triumph or a Van Halen for that matter? You know, you’ve got guitar solos, you’ve got somewhat melodic vocals. You know, when you get Judas Priest in there, they were obviously, they played right before us. And I love Judas Priest, and they’re a little more what I’d call metal in their approach. Same thing with Ozzy, who was on there. But then again, Ozzy had a lot of different shades to his music. You know, Van Halen, they had some poppy stuff, and they had some stuff that was harder-edged and different sort of contexts. Between the era that they were in, or the album I should say, that they were working on at the time, and I thought it was a great bill, to be honest. I thought all the bands, there was a natural progression between the bands as they played, and I thought the audience got what they were looking for. Like that day was a massive success from the standpoint of crowd size.”
BraveWords: Yeah, maybe not financially, unfortunately, right?
Moore: “Well I got to know Steve very well, and Steve was not out to make money on the show. And I think he set it up in such a way that it was impossible to make money. He pretty much constructed the venue. He brought in the biggest sound system, it was a XXL sound system and a XXL stage and XXL lighting. And then the accoutrements for the venue, he just spared no expense, and then he overpaid all the bands. Just to keep everybody happier, or something. Because he was a new promoter, a lot of artists, their managers and the agents would be like, ‘Well, we’re not going to play for somebody new, but a known promoter.’ So Bill Graham, being the kind of the godfather of California promoters, was brought in. And then Barry Fey was involved as well, and Barry Fey was the big massive promoter in the Denver region. So you had these really, really, the best in class promoters that were involved. And so it wasn’t just Steve, who was the guy or the computer industry, who wanted to do concerts. He brought in the best people. Right from the concert industry. And that’s why there were no screw ups. That’s why other than losing a pile of money, which is – it wouldn’t be the first big festival to lose a pile of money – but I think in this case, his intentions, because I got to know Steve very well, his intentions were not to make money. Where I’m going with that is that he had this idea of the satellite connection to Russia and some people confused the ‘US’ and thought it was the U.S – it wasn’t the U.S. at all, it was ‘US’, and the reason that he chose that word is he saw music as a form of bonding people to each other, which to this day, that’s very important to me, and paradoxically, in my charity that’s what I’m trying to do is build up music learning and the therapeutic benefits of music to help kids, cognitively and socially and in every other way, because I really think music’s a medicine. Well, he thought that way at that time, and that’s why he looked at Russia and he said, ‘Well, if the Cold War is there, if that’s where our perceived problems are in the world, perhaps music can create a thread that will pull us closer to each other.’ So, that’s kind of where Steve was coming from. He’d made so much money on Apple. He didn’t care about making any money on this concert.”
BraveWords: Silly question. Do you remember what was on your rider?
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. Like, all bands have riders, and the quintessential joke was the Van Halen and no brown M&Ms thing, and other jokes about that. And what we did is we had a rider that was built as if we were holding a reception at the end of the show, because occasionally you had to do that, like in LA where your record company was located, or New York where your record company was located, and all of a sudden it was like the cavalry would come to the gig, and you’d have to figure out a way to have a meet and greet and stuff. But what our tour manager would do is essentially just go cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Triumph are very simple. Like they just want ham and cheese sandwiches in the dressing room and, you know, some Diet Coke or whatever. And you could cut all the booze rider and all this fancy stuff because really it was there only if we needed it for other people. And you know a lot of the gigs, this is the thing, our motivation was not just to play the Chicagos and the Clevelands and Detroits and the big, big cities, you know, New York. That wasn’t the motivation. We wanted to play. We went to Chicago and we wanted to go to the areas surrounding it. We wanted to go to Rockford. We wanted to go to Champagne. We wanted to go to Peoria. We wanted to go, you know, it wasn’t just Indianapolis. It was like moving over into Terra Haute and things like that. And we had that approach of playing for the people, getting to right in front of the people, which is why I think our fans have been so monumentally loyal, because we would go to where they were and didn’t just play the major markets and have that you know, if you couldn’t get there and you couldn’t afford the ticket, then too bad. We went into the smaller markets where the tickets were less and the venues were closer to the fans.”
BraveWords: But let’s go back where it all began. Drummer’s that also sing are a rare breed. And you have mastered both mastered both, making Triumph a truly unique entity in the rock world with some memorable moments as a vocalist including “Rock & Roll Machine”, “I Live For The Weekend”, “Allied Forces”, “When The Lights Go Down” and “Spellbound”. There’s a lot of people that have issues walking and chewing gum, for example (joking). How does a drummer sing and sing in tune? And where was the influence for you to do that? Tell me about that history.
Moore: “That’s a funny story. So, I started singing because I was playing in this band when I was a teenager and the singer quit and we had a job at Honey Harbour, which is just in cottage country.”
BraveWords: I know where Honey Harbour is. I used to have family there. It’s a beautiful destination in cottage country (about two hours and 15 minutes north of Toronto).
Moore: “Yeah! And it was in one of these old fashioned wooden dance pavilions that has no windows, so it’s just like, loaded with mosquitoes in the summer. So we were going to get 100 bucks and we were not losing that 100 bucks anytime soon because we had to pay the rental on our PA and stuff like that. And so, you know, these are the days of you all piling into the back of one van. You had no crew, no roadies. You just did it all yourself. And, so I phoned a buddy of mine in another band who was a lead singer, and I said, ‘Joe, can you help me out?.’ He said, ‘What?’, and I said, ‘Well, I got to teach everybody in our band to sing all at once because our singer quit.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll come over.’ So he came to a rehearsal and he lined us all up and said, ‘Ok, let me hear you. Ok. Let me hear you. Okay. Let me hear you. Okay, you’re all terrible. Let’s see. Okay, I’m going give you this, I’m going to give you this, I’m going to you this.’ And then he did individual coaching. So with me, it was deemed that I could maybe sound somewhat remotely like John Kay from Steppenwolf, right? And so the first song he gave me was ‘Sookie Sookie,’ and he said, ‘Okay, so you can play the song, you’re fine on drums.’ And I had the microphone here. He said, ‘I’m going to get next to you. I’m going to sing the song as you’re playing drums, and on one mic together you are going to sing along with me.’ And so, you know, that’s exactly what we did. So we played ‘Sookie Sookie.’ Eventually, I could actually do it. And then he says, ‘Okay, now we’re going to do ‘Magic Carpet Ride’,’ or whatever the next song was, or, ‘We’re going to do ‘Born To Be Wild’,’ right? So, I started like that, and then I got moved over into some Hendrix songs and stuff, and he did it with each guy in the band. So, the rest is history. We went, we played, we got bitten by mosquitoes, and we got 100 bucks. So it was a great outcome. And, you know, those are the final Spinal Tap stories that, you know, bands are all familiar with. So when Triumph started, I thought, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t have to sing because Rik Emmett, he’s great.’ And so we went to the first rehearsal and after we jammed we decided he was in the band. And they looked at me and said, ‘Well, like Rik’s really high, and plus he’s really energetic on stage, and Mike’s really energetic on stage.’ So there’s a lot of, not choreography, but sort of like unbridled enthusiasm going on, on the front stage. And so to really engage the audience and do some of the things we wanted to do, we were starting to dream up lighting effects of what would happen here and what would happen there.”
“And Rik can’t just be stuck in front of his mic stand,” Moore continues. “So, Gil, over to you, you’re going to have to sing, and I’m like going, ‘No, no, I can’t.’ I thought I was done with that. And that’s exactly what happened. So we had no original songs because we were just starting. So it was like, ‘You used to sing Jimi Hendrix songs, right?,’ I went, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ So, ok, here we go, Hendrix again. And then I got some Deep Purple and so on, and Rik did all the Led Zeppelin stuff and you know, that was that was it. It was through necessity. But the benefit, I think, I didn’t figure it out until decades later – so here at Metalworks, I did a fundraiser for Baycrest, which is a dementia hospital here in Toronto, and what they had asked was, could they play our documentary for a bunch of their donors and then bring the donors to one of our auditoriums here at our school, and would I do a Q&A related to the documentary, and so on? I said, ‘Sure, let’s do it, let’s raise the money.’ And through that, I met their chief neuroscientist, a wonderful woman named Allison Sekuler. She was on the podium after my interview, and she was pointing at the video screen, and it was her playing drums on the screen. And when I asked her afterwards – she asked me, first, ‘Well, I’d like to use sounds with dementia patients,’ and I went, ‘Sure, that would be great. I’m not sure how it would work.’ We had to figure that out, but I said, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘Well, I think it’d be great for them. And I’ve got some ideas about how it might work.’ And I said, ‘Well, why did you take up drums? I’m curious.’ And she said because drums fire more neurones, and there’s more activity in the brain than with other instruments. The first joke I made was, ‘Well, why weren’t you singing at the same time?’ So we had a good laugh, and then I told her another four or five of my drummer jokes. Some are good, some are not so good, and we became very friendly. Talking about drums and drum jokes, and so on. And so she’s involved with the LIVELab (Large Interactive Virtual Environment Lab) at McMaster University where they’re doing amazing brain research on music in the brain, and, you know, they can put two dozen skull caps on people and test them while they’re dancing to music or listening to music or playing, performing music, or engineering music any number of these things. And she introduced me to that world and I started to realize, yeah, actually, I was lucky that I was singing because it is, as you say, like it’s another thing – your activity, your brain is doing all this stuff with your arms and hands, but you’re also remembering the words. You’re also engaged in this physical activity of trying to maintain the pitch and so on, which is really difficult to do when you’re playing drums and your guitars are blaring, your pitch kind of goes out the window a lot. Unless you’re some of these guys on the tribute album that are unbelievable world-class singers, like Deen Castronovo, for example. I mean, golly. Or Joey Belladonna – wow, there’s a singing drummer that can really sing. But, I don’t know, if you get Mike Levine with his massive bass guitar blaring in the back of your head on one side, and then Rik Emmett’s Marshall stacks over here, and you’re trying to hear what the heck you’re doing. It’s not simple. It’s a lot of fun trying.”
BraveWords: I just finished Brothers from Alex Van Halen, and I remember one of the brothers of one of my playmates in Barrie Minor Hockey said, ‘You have to hear this Van Halen record.’ So, we listened to the Van Halen record and I heard ‘Eruption,’ and I’m like, ‘There can’t be anything better than ‘Eruption’ out there,’ and he said, ‘No, you need to listen to this.’ And he put on “Rock And Roll Machine”.
Moore: “Yeah, that’s quite the solo. And, you know, the thing that was kind of cool is, I mean, Rik changed it up a little bit over the years, but he stayed true to a lot of the original aspects. And I never get tired of it. I don’t think the audience did either. Obviously I looked at it like, ‘Hey, this is great. I get a break.’ And in music that’s called a test set. So I’d always look at Mike Levine and go, ‘Test set’ and he’d knock that solo and then we would start up again after it was over. And I think a lot of people really identify with that song. And on the tribute album, you know, Mike picked Sebastian Bach to sing it because Sebastian had sung that song on stage with Triumph more than once. Just in the house, in the audience, like hey, Sebastian, come on up here and jam with us. And he would sing ‘Rock And Roll Machine’. So we knew he could smoke the vocal, big time. And yeah, that’s how that song ended up getting fitted.”
BraveWords: I was speaking with Mike Fraser from Little Mountain Studios, and he one of the reasons that studio attracted so many bands – I mean, AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake – was the loading bay and the drum set up. AC/DC drummer Chris Slade told me the loading bay had this thunderous sound. Tell me about what attracted bands to Metalworks?
Moore: “I think part of it is the sound of the studio, for sure, because in the very early days, there was just studio one, whereas now we’ve got nearly ten studios here, including the ones in our schools and stuff. But that first studio was modelled after the studios from England, like all the early studios were, with the tongue and groove pine, and a lot of live reflections on the live floor. So the live floor was the wild west. It wasn’t engineered the way studios are now with acoustical prediction software and things like that. This was not designed in AutoCAD, this was designed by, ‘Hey, let’s put this over there.’ That’s how it was designed. Now, by people who knew what they were doing, I’m not talking about someone that wasn’t an engineer, but nonetheless, kind of like if you thought about cooking before, you know, before the cookbook was written and a chef was like, ‘I know how to make this recipe, and I’m just going to put a bit of this and a bit of that. Trust me.’ So that’s how those rooms were designed. And I think we had a loading bay as well. And actually before we built Studio 2, no, before we built Studio 6, we always had not only a loading bay, but a warehouse as well. So we had different acoustic environments. We also had a ton of what I’ll call the real old fashioned reverbs, which would simulate, you know, a larger room, let’s say, or those sorts of things. But in an ideal situation recording studio, you have smaller studios and larger studios, and the smaller studios provide more – they provide a room compression that you don’t have in a big room. And they also sometimes can produce different impacts in terms of the elimination of standing waves, and so on, if they’re engineered properly. Whereas in our big Studio 1, like, no, you had to figure out as an engineer how to control all of that, which led to some different nuances to the shading of things that could be quite interesting, depending on the mic placement and the performance and the skill of the recording engineer. To this day, I mean, I think that’s preferred. It’s almost one of those things the way, you know, audiophiles prefer vinyl to anything else. You know, engineers, if they have their druthers when they’re recording, they still prefer those great Neumann microphones that were made 60 years ago. They still prefer Neve consoles that were made 50 or 60 years ago. They still prefer the style of room that was developed in the UK many, many years ago, and brought over to North America. Yeah, that hasn’t changed much. Musicians dig it, too. They just, the vibe. Even though now most of the recordings are out of Pro Tools you know, they’re digital recordings, but there’s still a lot of analog gear in those rooms. And the consoles themselves, primarily are analog consoles, like all the Neves are. The live consoles have really made it big time into live performing, like pretty much all the live performing consoles now are digital, but back into the studio, like the real deal is the analog stuff.”
BraveWords: As you were growing up as a band, were you paying attention to other three-piece legendary bands that were making beautiful noise? Like with that in question marks, and no disrespect. Like Cream, ZZ Top, Rush, Motörhead. And I love Exciter, who also has a drummer that sings. But were you looking at these bands saying, ‘Okay, you only got three people. So how are you creating?’
Moore: “Yeah, we definitely, before we found Rik, Mike and I, Mike’s band before, he’d always been in big bands with horns and stuff. So he’d have like 10 people in his bands. And I was like in the four or five range. But I always thought, there’s always one guy getting kicked out, or somebody joining, so it’s always that one, the fifth guy, that comes and goes. And so when we were chatting about the idea of maybe – we were almost ready to quit, to be honest with you. It’s like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what we should do. Let’s take two weeks off and then quit.’ Because it’s hard. And we just decided, no, we’ll take one shot, one serious shot now, because if this doesn’t work, nothing’s going to work. Okay. So we sat down to ourselves and we said, three guys, let’s start there, because we love the idea of a power trio and you kind of look at what, you know, Cream, you know, with Clapton, you know, ZZ Top you mentioned, which is pretty much my favourite band to this day. ZZ was starting up, just before that, and big sound for a three piece band. Jimi Hendrix, I mean, what can you say about how Hendrix impacted everybody? And also took the performing thing to another level with, you know, lighting his guitar on fire, all this stuff that he did on stage. You could just see so many of his lyrics tied into what he was doing and the energy level. And in the bands I played in before Triumph, where we would play Hendrix material, I just loved every single song, and the ferocity that Mitch Mitchell had on the kit, there was an inspiration, although I was a blues drummer beforehand, so this was kind of like a new place, this three piece band power trio thing. It was quite a leap, I’ll say, from, you know, playing R&B and blues, Chicago Blues and so on, into that area. But it was, it was by design. Motörhead hadn’t come along yet, so Motörhead weren’t part of it. I would say really I think Hendrix, Cream, and maybe to a lesser degree ZZ Top were the groups that really got us thinking that way, that maybe, hey, maybe we could do this with three guys. But we have to have the right three guys, because you have to cover a lot of ground with three musicians.”
BraveWords: Just a couple more quickies for you. Some left-field fun questions. I call it the BraveWords Rapid Fire. What was the moment when you decided music was your life and did you have family support?
Moore: “Yeah, I know I broke my dad’s heart and probably my mom’s too, when I quit school, because I quit school very, very early to be a drummer. And that’s why I started so young, is because I didn’t even finish high school. And I was very fortunate to have the parents that I’d had. They were, I miss them so much, right to this day, both of them. And my dad was, I could tell he was kind of holding back tears when I told him, you know, like I’m out, I quit. I signed myself out of school. And he said, ‘Well, if you’re going to be a drummer, Gil, be the best drummer that you could possibly be.’ And that was his advice. And I was really lucky that I had parental support, which now, you know, having a school and seeing kids that don’t have it in some cases. And I feel like, gee, I was the luckiest guy. And you take your parents for granted when you’re a kid for the most part, you don’t appreciate them and like Joni said, you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone. Fully. So I just try to – I asked my dad when he was 75, I said, ‘You know, I can never pay you back for what you did in my life.’ Like he not only stood behind me, going into drums, but he helped because we didn’t know how to manage money or anything, and he managed all the money for us and made sure that our agents got paid and that everybody in the band got a cheque every week so we could keep going and pay our bills. He taught me business inside out, which, without, I never would have been able to, you know, do the things I’ve been able to do through Metalworks. Yeah, I wish everybody could have great parents, but it’s not like that. You don’t choose. You don’t choose your parents. It’s just something that happens to you.”
BraveWords: Who’s your rock star?
Moore: “Billy Gibbons would be one, for sure. Just somehow what he turns out of that neck of his guitar, I don’t know where it comes from. Some place special. Another guitar player that is not with us anymore, Leslie West. The first day I ever heard ‘Mississippi Queen,’ I thought, that’s just some of the most sweet guitar I’ve ever heard. And, you know, I liked blues guitars, so I liked Albert King, for example. But when I heard Leslie, you know, kind of taking what I would call that blues style and making it something, I don’t know, even more than – you know, I’m not a guitar player, obviously, so I’m not the judge of guitar players, but from my position as either an audience member or a drummer or whichever I was, yeah, he just had that feel on the guitar that was beyond belief. And so those two guys, I guess when I look back, Billy Gibbons and Leslie West have been my two guys, but I got to tell you, Tim, like I was blessed to have played with Rik Emmett. And then after, you know, the main run with Triumph, because Rik is, as you know, is a phenomenal guitar player, and then to play with Phil X, who is a completely different style, but also just a phenomenal virtuoso guitarist. So I feel really blessed. Any time in a three-piece band that the guitar player isn’t top drawer, well, you’re not even getting past first base. The guitar player is ultimately the most important instrument in a power trio.”
BraveWords: Have you ever asked for an autograph?
Moore: “No, but my wife did once. I was at a golf tournament and Jack Nicholas was very nearby. And I was, ‘I’d love to have Jack’s autograph.’ And my wife said, ‘Go get it, go get it.’ And I said, ‘No! I’m not going to ask for his autograph. I don’t do that.’ And so she said, ‘I’ll get it for you.’ Pretty blonde lady walks up, and before you know it, the sea parted and Jack was like, ‘Oh, yes, young lady. Here you go.’ So. That’s how I got Jack Nicholas’s autograph. The only other autograph I wanted was Frank Mahovlich’s, and I got that too, because his son recorded here at Metalworks. And yeah, I’ve got that one.”
BraveWords: What do you think about the vinyl craze? And what was your first vinyl purchase?
Moore: “I was buying singles, and they were R&B singles. So you, a lot of the stuff from Stax Gold, stuff that Atlantic was putting out at the time like Wilson Pickett and, you know, James Brown on King Records, but also some of the British invasion stuff, you know, like The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five, and so on. All the stuff on Capitol, those are all 45, obviously. But I pretty soon migrated into the blues. Like the British invasion really didn’t impact me too much. I was aware of it, but I kind of migrated into the blues and then got past the singles and started, you know, albums. Bobby Blue Bland and Albert King and, you know, learned all about Howling Wolf and some of the greats in that era. And I’ve never, ever gotten past loving the blues or having the blues as my favourite music. In terms of what I’ll call popular music, for listening, I prefer classical music to anything else. But it depends on the time. Classical music is to relax. If you’ve got the family in the SUV and we’re going to the beach, okay, time for Billy Gibbons.”
BraveWords: She’s Got legs, right?
Moore: “Stand back.”
Moore: “Yeah, I mean, I gotta say, Johnny Winter, Ted Nugent, I would say those two. Just the sheer power that Ted had and the athletic nature. He was a young man and the way he just approached the stage and Derek St. Holmes was with him and they just had such a tight, you know, rhythm engine going. And it’s also, there’s also a magic moment. It’s like, well, where did you see him, when did you see him? Who are you with? It’s just like so many fans relate to a band, they relate to a single concert. I know where I was sitting. I know what I was doing. And I just thought, that was when Free For All – I thought, wow, that’s a freight train of a record. And you know, I’d say the other one was Johnny Winter. So, again, similar in that, there was the guitar, in Johnny’s case, again, three piece, I forgot about that when I saw him the night in particular here in Toronto at the Gardens. And you know, when he came out, and we played many shows with him later on in his later years. When he was suffering with his health and so on, it was kind of hard to watch that, but he still wanted to keep playing. But the performances, again, different style of chorus, very, very bluesy, very, very, very much old school blues guitar, but combined with rock. And, you know, the way the rhythms were built around the songs and the way with the three piece format, the way they were delivered. And of course, Johnny’s vocals, I just thought were completely underrated. I thought the way he put his own signature on the songs that he was doing. I remember hearing him do ‘Jumping Jack Flash,’ and I thought nobody could possibly do ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ better than Johnny Winter, not to mention ‘Rock And Roll Hootchie Coo,’ that was another one who was just like – I could go on and on about Johnny Winter and those songs. I think those were probably the concerts for me that were the most. One last one. When I was younger still, by a complete fluke, I got to attend, like, a private concert with Buddy Rich and his band. And I got to stand – Buddy was only on like an eight inch riser and I got to stand right at the front because I was a kid and people said, ‘Oh, let the kids be at the front.’ So I was, you know, maybe three feet from his bass drum. So it was better than a ringside seat. I mean, I was like literally, I could reach out if I’d wanted to stick my hand out – and I didn’t, but I could have reached out and touched his bass drum. And to experience Buddy Rich, if any drummer can relate to this, like all the great drummers that are on our tribute album, I’m sure they’d also say, ‘Holy smokes. That must have been something.’ To be young and be right in front of these things and you’re listening and you’re kind of going, ‘He must have more than two arms. He must have more than two legs.’ It’s just an unmistakeable – it sounds like the cavalry is coming at you from that drum set. But it’s all nuanced, to the flourishes within his band, and the subtle changes in rhythm, and so on and so forth. There’s no one, in my humble opinion, there’s no one that’s ever achieved on drums what Buddy Rich achieved. Never since.”
BraveWords: So I have to ask, did Neil Peart ever hear that story? He released the Burning For Buddy tribute. He was also a big Keith Moon fan.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve heard that Neil mentioned in interviews he was influenced by Keith Moon. You know, I’d spoken to Neil a couple times here at Metalworks when Rush was recording and so on, didn’t bring that particular Buddy Rich story up. But I know that he was also a super Buddy Rich fan, because of course, his recording that was centred around Buddy Rich. And, it’s too bad that we’ve lost Neil. What a great musician, a great Canadian as well, and a wonderful person. And one of the greatest drummers of all time, for sure. Just an amazing, amazing Canadian Neil is.”
BraveWords: Wow, what a sombre note. But I’m a great Rush fan too.
Moore: “Yeah, it’s a sombre note, but I mean the good news is that Geddy and Alex are great, you know, God bless Alex, he played on our tribute record with Envy Of None and our Canadian friends in that band, Alfio (Annibalini) and Andy (Curran) and David, and so on. And of course, you know, Maiah Wynne with those amazing vocals and took ‘Blinding Light Show’ in a whole new direction – made it an Envy Of None song. It doesn’t sound anything like Triumph. We thought it was wonderful.”
Watch the entire chat on Streaming For Vengeance below:
The post TRIUMPH’s Gil Moore Talks Hockey, All Star Tributes – “‘Lay It On The Line’ Is The Closest I’m Ever Going To Get To The Stanley Cup” appeared first on BraveWords - Where Music Lives.
Continue reading...