City Winery is proud to introduce our new range of Limited Edition Artist Selections chosen by your favorite musicians to celebrate their performance at City Winery.

Purchase a commemorative bottle of City Winery’s hand crafted wine, specially selected by Rik Emmett and Dave Dunlop to celebrate their sold-out show at City Winery.

At Rik’s request a portion of proceeds to go to cancer research.

This powerful and decadent Syrah from Lake County, CA., has been specially bottled and labeled at the winery for your enjoyment. Fresh black fruit is framed with a hint of briary spice on the nose, supple tannins and balanced acidity give weight to the mid-palate. This is a fine example of what great Syrah can become in the hands of a great artist, and like the boys, every note leaves you asking for more.

Visit City Winery to order today and your Limited Edition Wine will be waiting for you when you attend the concert.

Tune in to RIK RADIO and enjoy the latest playlist, courtesy of Rick “Spud” Wharton! Spud spun a wide selection from Rik’s vast catalog. A wonderful soundtrack to your work day, or night. Give it a spin!

Now available as a Digital Download, Good Faith signals another major evolutionary step in Rik Emmett’s career as the mature songwriting and exquisite stylistic crafting of the material marries to the world-class musicianship and pristine production. The material is a showcase of eclectic versatility and diversity, all the more remarkable for its sense of balance and artistically consistent personal style.

Listeners of Good Faith can rediscover the singer/songwriter dimension of Rik Emmett’s gift. The songs celebrate a spirit of independence, freedom from expectations, preconceptions, and the demographic slicing of the mainstream commercial marketplace. They do so with joy, ease and simplicity, by capturing some damn good singing & playing in some damn good songs.

www.pegasusnews.com
by Ron Dempesmeier

The timing was fortuitous for a great little acoustic concert by rock guitar icon Rik Emmett in the intimate confines of Poor David’s Pub. Emmett came to the Dallas-Fort Worth area to participate in a Concert in the Garden with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra on June 26. Before heading back to Toronto, he was able to work in an afternoon gig with borrowed guitars (his FWSO instruments were electric, too loud for the venue and packed away). The promoter, DW Promotions (aka Don Wishon), managed to find some excellent instruments among some local musicians and has proven to be quite adept at guerilla-style concerts of high quality like this.

“Emmett is a guitarist’s guitarist, and his ability in his acoustic set shined brightly.”

Emmett will always be primarily known as the lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the legendary Canadian power trio Triumph. But as his many years in that band and in his now longer solo career, Emmett has shown his love of blues, classical, jazz, flamenco and swing. He is a guitarist’s guitarist, and his ability with the songs in his acoustic sets shone through.

“Middle Ground” was a soaring medium tempo song that showed Emmett’s fine tenor was still capable of hitting those high notes. “Petite Etude” was the first acoustic showcase of his classical style and one that he jokingly said had been too long since he last played as he started again and played the intricate number beautifully. “Lay it on the Line” was played on the 12-string acoustic to give it a heartier feel since it was one of Triumph’s hard rock anthems.

Emmett introduced the next two swing-based songs as his tribute to Lonnie Johnson (a 1920/’30s jazz guitarist) who had an instrumental called “Woke Up This Morning with Blues in My Fingers.” Emmett thought was a great title and one for which he thought he could create lyrics. Another classically influenced showpiece was “Midsummer’s Daydream” from the Thunder Seven album by Triumph.

Emmett had a lot of stories and jokes to tell between songs. He shared that he wrote “Way Back Home” for his two daughters as they headed off to college, one was written about a street musician he had seen busking for “Spare Change,” and that he was inspired by the thought of the thousands of prayers that went to the ceiling of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Cathedral for the song “Secret Wishes.”

Emmett played a lovely rendition of Paul McCartney’s classic “Blackbird.” He referred to how many other classics the Beatle had written and that McCartney was still going strong at 69. Emmett jokingly said, “It just isn’t fair!”

Emmett ended the show with a pair of Triumph classics. “Magic Power” was another uplifting song concerning the amazing properties of music and how it makes one feel young, wild and free. Finally, he played “Suitcase Blues,” which was his first foray into a jazzier vein that his somewhat flabbergasted band mates let him put on the Just a Game album in 1979. He thanked the guys for letting him discover a side that let him keep playing long after the spandex, pyrotechnics and blinding light shows of youth faded away. It was a great ending to an intimate afternoon show.

Original Post: www.pegasusnews.com
Download PDF version

Check out the wonderful write-up from Sean Dooley, Editor of Social Media for Gibson Guitar (and self-admitted “MONSTER Rik fan since 1981″) in response to “What Were They Thinking?! (An Angry Reader’s Guide to the Gibson.com Top 50 Guitarists of All Time)”

Thanks for the props, Sean!

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/what-were-they-thinking-0528/

The Kingston Whig Standard
By JIM BARBER, QMI AGENCY

From 1978 until around 1985, there were few bigger bands in Canada than Triumph.

Known for their musicianship, hard rocking, uplifting and intelligent songs and an over-the-top stage show that was bombastic, intense and thrilling to witness, Triumph dominated rock radio in their home and native land and also became a successful and in-demand touring act south of the border, as well as in Europe and Japan.

Although the band, composed of vocalist/drummer Gil Moore, bassist/keyboardist Mike Levine (he of the ubiquitous hockey sweaters and Lanny McDonald mustache) and the gifted guitarist/ vocalist Rik Emmett, formed in 1975, it took until their third studio album — 1978’s Just A Game– to make them an international sensation.

The album featured the now-classic tunes, Hold On andLay It On the Line, both staples of the band’s shows forever thereafter, and songs that still get tons of airplay on the radio, thanks to the classic rock format.

Throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Triumph churned out a steady stream of hit albums and iconic songs, including I Live For The Weekend, Fight the Good Fight, Magic Power, Never Surrender, Spellbound and Follow Your Heart.

By 1985, the band was beginning to implode, lasting two more records with Emmett before breaking up after a daytime show at the Kingswood Music Theatre at Canada’s Wonderland in the summer of 1988.

It was a painful and rancorous departure, the wounds from which have only recently healed.

The band got back together to be inducted first into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame in 2007, and then into the Juno Hall of Fame in 2008.

Emmett, Moore and Levine also played two “reunion shows” in 2008 at big festivals in Sweden and Oklahoma, igniting speculation that a full-scale tour would follow.

It hasn’t — yet.

What has followed is the new Triumph Greatest Hits Remixed CD/DVD package, released a couple of weeks ago in stores.

The release of the album has reignited the speculation of a possible tour, and also thrust Emmett back into the limelight as a full-fledged member of the band.

Although he had nothing to do with the new CD/DVD project (much of the work was done a number of years ago by recording engineer Rick Chycki), and enjoyed a successful, varied and critically acclaimed recording and performing career in the 20 years between Triumph gigs, Emmett has jumped on board the promotional bandwagon.

“I am a good team guy, and I stepped up to the plate, and am doing what I said I would do when we had the big reconciliation. And those are my songs after all. It is a chance for me to sort of reclaim that large chunk of my history that I denied for a couple of decades,” Emmett told QMI Agency, adding that he was bombarded with comments from fans on his own website talking about some of the changes and tweaks that happened to some of the songs on the new album.

“There are some people who just figured that the original mixes were religious experiences for them, so now some sort of sacrilege has occurred. I though it was pretty interesting and I just try to say, ‘listen folks, calm down. If you want to listen to the old mix, they are still around. It’s still there.’ ”

In fact, Moore had all of Triumphs albums (excluding 1993’s Edge of Excess, which featured Phil X on guitar) remastered on the band’s own new label, TML Music, a few years back.

The new package features 14 songs, including a cover of Nazareth’s Love Hurts, which was recorded with Phil X back in the early 1990s. There are also 12 music videos, and some bonus material.

All of the press and promoting has a common theme — discussion as to the future of Triumph as a performing entity.

In a nutshell, Emmett said he is ready to go, whenever the other two guys are.

“There is doubt about whether or not the band would actually ever go out and tour and play again. And, of course, Live Nation (North America’s largest concert promoter) is interested, and they’re sniffing around and wanting to come to town and sit down and take us out for dinner and have a conversation,” Emmett said.

What it comes down to, in Emmett’s estimation, is a desire on the part of Levine and Moore, the latter in particular, to embark on a Triumph tour of old with big venues, tons of lasers, lights and pyro.

Emmett and others in the industry think that’s unrealistic for an act that hasn’t done something of that magnitude since the days when hair metal ruled the roost.

“And I am saying to him, ‘well, geez Gil, you can’t take a production that costs $60,000 a night to put on and put it in some small club where you can only sell 800 tickets, that kind of thing,’ ” Emmett said.

He believes there would be interest in Triumph as possible an opening act, or on festival bills, or even as a headliner in smaller venues, but it would limit the sort of stage presentation the band could put on.

Emmett would be happy with any of that, because he argues it’s really about the music and connecting with the people who like it.

“I have said to the guys, ‘you think about the legacy of the band, and that U.S. Festival performance in 1983. We were on a stage in daylight, and it was just the three of us and our songs, and our own musicianship as a trio, and it had to stand the light of day, and there were half a million people or whatever there, and we did it. It was just the three of us working on a hot afternoon [that performance was released as a DVD in 2003],” he said.

“But it’s hard to convince Gil that it would work without the cocoon of the big show, and I think there would be some fans who would be disappointed if it didn’t have the big show.

“It always felt to me that the songs stood just fine. Look, here’s three guys, they’re going to get up there and bash out their songs as best they can. And those songs, what they’re about like the magic power of the music, and holding on to your dreams, and laying it on the line and all that kind of stuff, it’s a relatively straightforward, humanist, virtuous, anthemic thing … and I always thought that was the heart of the band.”

Emmett isn’t even sure that Moore wants to get out and tour again, rather that his goal was simply to rebuild the bond with Emmett that had been broken two decades earlier.

“I think, in Gil’s case, to have Rik back, that was all he ever wanted. It became clear to me that, you know, some bad things happened, and we carried this messy, ugly thing around for a couple of decades inside ourselves, and now we can sort of let it go, and be back to where we were when we were on good terms as people,” he said.

“And he was willing to work to get himself back into shape again to play that gig in Sweden, and play that gig down in Oklahoma, as a drummer, which he hadn’t really had much interest in at all.

“After the Triumph version two thing with Phil X, I think he kind of thought, ‘well, I guess I’ll just walk away from drums for the rest of my life, I don’t need to be a performer.’ And I think he kind of went through that whole exercise of having the reunion gigs just because it may be part of the price he felt he had to pay to square things up with me again.”

So, the concept of a Triumph tour hasn’t even entered the starting gate, and it may never happen.

Although Emmett said that Moore has apparently converted the part of his house that used to be an indoor swimming pool into a gym and a rehearsal space, where he may have set up a drum kit.

“So, there may be a plan in the back of his head, but he hasn’t gone all the way to say, ‘look, I am going to do this. I am going to dedicate myself to getting back in shape and I want to go back on the road in a year from now.’ That hasn’t happened. But who knows?”

While waiting for word on what plans, if any, there are afoot for Triumph, Emmett continues to be busy, playing solo gigs, playing with his longtime collaborator Dave Dunlop in an act called The Strung Out Troubadours, as well as his Trifecta project with guitar virtuosos Oscar Lopez and Pavlo.

For updates on Triumph, visit the band’s website at www.triumphmusic.com.
For information on Emmett’s various projects, see www.rikemmett.com.

Jim Barber is a reporter with the Napanee Guide and veteran music writer.

Original Post: www.thewhig.com
Download online PDF version

Gibson recently revealed the Top 50 Guitarists and Readers Poll Results, and yours truly made the cut!

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/gibson-reveals-0528/

Russell Baxter Emmett told his brother Rik that if he wanted to help make his final dream come true, if he wanted to do one last thing for him as a gift before he passed away, it was that he wanted Rik to reform Toronto’s thunderous trio, Triumph. It was an adult version of Make-A-Wish and on behalf of thousands of fans bless you Russ, may you rest in peace with the knowledge that you made many others dreams come true as well.

While undoubtedly a tremendously popular, successful and critically well received band from the mid-70’s to the late 80’s with three gold and one platinum album in the USA and three platinum and five gold albums in Canada , many would agree that Triumph could have and should have been even bigger and more successful than they were. This certainly isn’t meant as a negative, far from it, but there’s a short list of very successful bands that were on the cusp of even more acclaim. Artists like UFO, Procol Harum, Blue Oyster Cult, Triumph and others were tremendously successful, yet somehow they deserved even more acclaim and accolades than the many they received.

But, so be it. Triumph, no doubt, doesn’t think in these terms, nor should they. What they accomplished was nothing short of remarkable and the gift of music they have given us will be treasured for decades still to come. The most recent goings-on with the band are posted at TriumphMusic.com.

If you really want to immerse yourself in the current proceedings make your plans to join us for the next edition of ROCKLINE. When we announced this show, now several months ago, we told you Mike Levine and Gil Moore would be joining us for the show to tell us about their brand new release “Greatest Hits: Remixed”, which features fourteen songs given new life by not only re-mastering these classic songs, but by actually re-mixing them. There’s a huge difference. Accompanying the new CD is an excellent DVD comprising eleven all-time favorites augmented by three Bonus Videos and extra footage based upon the band’s well deserved induction into the Canadian Hall of Fame.

After posting the information regarding Gil and Mike’s impending appearance, someone in a well known chat room shared an interesting observation that with only two of the three band members it would actually be “Bi-Umph”, not “Tri-Umph”. While we got a chuckle out of that we also decided to make one last request for the entire band to return to ROCKLINE just like the days of yore when it was commonplace for all three to be on the show. Viola! Another wish fulfilled as now Rik Emmett will participate along with Mike and Gil truly making it “Tri-umph”. More and more wishes continue to come true.

We hope that our personal wish comes to fruition as well, namely that one of our all-time favorite bands receive even more highly deserved recognition, that through this appearance even more fans get turned on to the band and that their level of success continue to grow, that the legend unabashedly expands and includes more and more fans learning how many truly great songs these three gentlemen have created for our enjoyment.

If you’re already a fan of the band you’re quite aware how rare it is for all three members to gather for an event. If you’re not already a fan we feel certain you will be after this show. Join us for all three members of Triumph exclusively on the next ROCKLINE!

http://rocklineradio.com/replay/replay.php
TriumphMusic.com

Triumph – Greatest Hits: Remixed

Few acts could whip an arena full of rockers into a frenzy as Triumph did throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, when the group’s best known line-up – guitarist/vocalist Rik Emmett, bassist/keyboardist Mike Levine, and drummer/vocalist Gil Moore – were at the peak of their powers. And it’s this exact time period that is
focused on throughout Triumph’s new “best of” set – ‘Greatest Hits: Remixed’ – released May 18, 2010.

Whether you’re a long-time Triumph fanatic or a new convert, you have never heard the group as crystal clear and loud n’ proud as you will throughout ‘Greatest Hits: Remixed.’

All of the classic tunes that were – and continue to be – in heavy rotation on rock radio (and the early days of MTV) are included here, namely, “Lay it on the Line,” “Hold On,” “Fight the Good Fight,” “Magic Power,” etc. These fourteen tracks of anthemic metal have never sounded so good, as they were all recently remixed by Rich Chycki (who has previously worked with Aerosmith and Rush). The set also includes a previously unreleased recording – “Love Hurts” – which will be the leadoff single.

Purchase your copy here.

Click ‘Rik Radio’ at the top of the page, or click here to launch!